As Quebec’s population ages and housing costs soar, a growing number of the elderly are finding themselves in the streets of Montreal and at emergency shelters.
Guy-Émile Beauparlant was born in Montreal but the family moved early and often throughout Quebec to wherever his father found construction work.
Beauparlant left school when he was of working age, embarking on a lifetime of menial jobs. Some he enjoyed, such as climbing trees to hand pick unblemished apples, or working outdoors on a dairy farm. Others he liked less, like roofing the expansive airplane hangars at the St-Hubert airport, or making insulation derived from shredded newspapers — hot, dusty work that clogged his respiratory passages and burnt his eyes.
The work was hard on the body, but it supplied a roof for him and his mother, until osteoarthritis and crippling headaches forced a halt in his late 50s. Then his mother died suddenly and he was told he had to leave the apartment he’d lived in for years. With no savings, Beauparlant found himself out on the street. Since there were no resources in his hometown of St-Hilaire, police brought him to a shelter in Longueuil. Because he’d worked under the table most of his life, he found out he wasn’t eligible for the Quebec pension plan. Homeless and on welfare, he couldn’t find anyone who would rent him an apartment. He shuttled from shelters to rooming houses to the street for more than a year.
During the ice storm of April 2023, the only accommodation he could find was the sheltered overhang of an IGA grocery store. Hypothermic and injured after a bad fall on the ice, he was found by a security guard who called emergency services and “saved my life.” He spent two weeks in hospital before being transferred to the Maison du Père shelter via its Accès Santé program that helps homeless people with health issues. After a year of health and physiotherapy sessions and a bed every night, he can walk again, and feels renewed.
“It’s super here, better than other places where we were packed in like sardines, or forced to sleep sitting up, not allowed to put your feet up on chairs or you could get kicked out,” said Beauparlant, a kindly 61-year-old with a gift for the gab. “It’s better than sleeping out in the cold.”
When James Hughes worked at the Old Brewery Mission from 2004 to 2008, the average age of their clientele was 38. Today the average age is 50, and more than one in four people using their services is over 60.
While age in itself is not necessarily a complicating factor, if it comes with physical or neurological challenges like cognitive decline or Parkinson’s “it makes our work more complex,” said Hughes, now president of the Old Brewery. Those challenges can make it more difficult to acquire the identification papers needed for social income or health care, file for taxes or rent supplements, or find housing that supplies services that meet their needs.
Many seniors are on fixed incomes as low as $1,600 a month and are incapable of earning additional revenue. Many also have no family or social support networks, or the know-how to combat an illegal eviction.
“Poverty transmits,” notes Jaëlle Bégarin, the CEO of Maison du Père that has served the unhoused in Montreal for over 50 years. “When you come from a family of modest means, that poverty can mean that a crisis can rapidly lead to destabilizing an entire life.”
The problems are exacerbated by a marked lack of resources for the older unhoused population in Montreal and Quebec. Maison du Père runs the only seniors residence geared for the unhoused population. Private seniors residences beset by higher operating costs and expensive new safety norms mandated by Quebec have been closing at the rate of two per week for the last three years, eliminating thousands of rooms. Just last year, 3,443 rooms were shut in private seniors residences, noted Hans Brouillette, director of public affairs for the Regroupement québécois des résidences pour aînés (RQRA) that represents the residences.
“The free market only works up to a point in terms of supplying housing,” Brouillette said. “Look at all the luxury condos being built that most elderly seniors can’t afford. At some point the state has to step in to fix things.”
Asked what’s needed most, one social worker responded simply: access ramps. Most emergency services shelters on shoestring budgets are not wheelchair or walker accessible.
At the same time, shelters often have open dormitory sleeping areas with more than 50 people in a room that can be a harrowing place, particularly for aged first-timers.
“More than half of the elderly homeless are people who are experiencing homelessness for the first time in their lives,” said Catherine Giroux, the regional head of services for the unhoused in Montreal with the CIUSSS du Centre-Sud-de-l’Île-de-Montréal, part of the provincial health-care system. “They’re not people with a profile of homelessness. They’re people who worked their whole lives, who were doing well, but then for all sorts of bad luck they ended up in the street.
“If I was someone who was 60 years old and I had to go to a shelter, I would be scared,” she said. “And for a reason.”
The Maison du Père, one of close to 40 shelters in Montreal, takes in 768 men each year on average experiencing homelessness for the first time. And the number continues to grow.
Cecil Rose was 40 when he came to Canada to be with his wife. A handyman back in Jamaica, he worked at Ruby Foo’s restaurant for a couple of years, then as a cleaner in a Côte-St-Luc highrise for nearly 20 years. Speaking in a gentle Jamaican lilt that belies a sly sense of humour, Rose, 80, says he has five kids, or “at least those that are on the record.”
He moved to Connecticut in his 70s to live with one of his children but “it was not a good living situation,” he said, in a tone that suggests understatement. He came back to Montreal in his late 70s and stayed with a friend for a year, until a social worker found him a place at Maison du Père. He’s had a room there for a year.
It’s sparse — a bed, a night table, a desk purloined from a high school class, along with a shared bathroom and meals in the cafeteria.
“Compared to where I moved from it’s pretty good,” he said. “I was nearly on the streets.” But he’s scared of some of the others who sleep at Maison du Père, some who have mental health or substance abuse issues. Since he doesn’t speak French, it’s hard to socialize. His revenues are split with his ex-wife who’s back in Jamaica, so he receives only $900 a month.
“I came to Montreal to get somewhere to live by myself. I couldn’t find anything. No one wanted to rent to me. I don’t know why.”
The dream is to find a social housing unit where he can live on his own. The average wait time to find one in Montreal is 5.8 years. Till then, he praises his good fortune.
“I thank God because I see a lot of guys out on the street, and when I look at them, I say ‘I could be there.’
“I just miss it by that.”
For Julien Simard, a social gerontologist and the author of Aging and the Housing Crisis: Gentrification, Precarity and Resistance which was based on his research of older tenants forced out of Montreal’s central neighbourhoods, the generational shift in the age of the unhoused population has been evident for more than 10 years.
“The main vulnerability factor is a long occupation of the apartment, because this deepens the distance between the market price and the price paid by the tenant,” Simard says. When a new investor comes along, often someone who is buying a triplex to support their family, they discover they can’t cope with the mortgage prices and higher interest rates if they have tenants paying $750 a month.
“So everyone’s stuck together in this.”
But just because a law exists doesn’t mean it won’t be broken, Simard cautions. Landlords will still take advantage of isolated seniors who don’t know their rights, or harass them until they leave. He and his researchers have only found 60 cases in the last six years of senior tenants who have successfully used the anti-eviction law to avoid expulsion at Quebec’s rental board. The government needs to do far more, he said. That includes rental subsidies to help keep seniors in their homes while also meeting the needs of owners.
Most of all, Quebec needs tens of thousands more social housing units, he said. In some jurisdictions that have successfully tackled their elder housing issues, like Vienna and parts of France and Germany, social housing hovers around 30 per cent of the total housing available. In Canada, the social housing stock is around 3 per cent, he said, largely because the federal governments stopped funding social housing in the 1990s. But neither Canada nor Quebec is moving in that direction yet.
“The government really needs to step up,” he said. “Because we’re going to see a humanitarian crisis with homelessness if nothing is done.”
Asked for comment on what it’s doing to help stem the rise in elderly homelessness and whether it planned to increase rent subsidies or social housing units, the press attaché for Quebec’s Minster responsible for seniors, Sonia Bélanger, told The Gazette the jurisdiction for those matters lies with the ministers responsible for homelessness and for social housing.
The aide to Social Services Minister Lionel Carmant, responsible for homelessness, transferred the question to the aide to Housing Minister France-Élaine Duranceau.
Éric Savoie was a successful insurance broker with an office, a new car every two years, and a penchant for partying. Then the addictions started to take over and the party turned sour. He lost his job, his apartment, “the works.” He contemplated suicide. He was in and out of four separate rehab centres, relapsing most times, until he decided he wanted a chance at life again.
Maison du Père gave him a room for six months and organized health and addiction aid and the administrative support to clear up his legal issues. In a few months the gregarious, barrel-chested 54-year-old will be going back to school to study finance. He sees himself making a hefty salary, and a difference in the lives of people like him.
“I’m not a street guy. I had a life before coming here,” he said. “Here (at Maison du Père) they understand that and respect it. … Now I have a roof over my head, I have food, I managed to save some money. This place has been good to me.”
With the support comes expectations. Clients are expected to put in the work.
“That’s the reasons why this place exists. People don’t understand that — they think it’s a hotel — which it’s not. They have rules and regulations. Man up, suit up, start getting your life back. That’s what they’ve given me.”
They’re helping him get his driver’s licence, and to find a subsidized apartment till he’s back on his feet.
“I don’t want to lose what I’ve gained up to this point,” Savoie said. “I know I’m going to be doing some good.”
The high level of stigmatization and shame associated with homelessness, coupled with an ignorance of the resources available, prevents many from seeking aid until it’s too late. It’s often a gradual, insidious destabilization that happens in silence, Bégarin said. Community organizations are increasingly moving toward prevention services to ward off a stay in an emergency shelter.
“As soon as that happens, the homelessness stamp has arrived and rootedness can set in very quickly if they’re not taken in by the right team,” Bégarin said. “The system creates homelessness by not being able to act more quickly, and because of the lack of a plan to keep people in their homes.”
“We live with the idea that a bed in an emergency service is never the best service,” said Duane Mansveld, co-ordinator of the homeless prevention network at the Maison du Père. “We should always be the last resort.”
Their team interviews prospective clients to see if they need other services, like a crisis or therapy centre, or if there’s a way to keep them in their home. The Maison recently helped an 80-year-old woman who was on the verge of being evicted after 30 years in her apartment because the owner mistakenly thought all residences had to be vacated before he could sell the building.
More recently, the shelter has teamed with the provincial regional health centre to offer interest-free loans to people at risk of losing their apartments to help them pay the rent for a few months.
“Sometimes landlords are demonized,” Mansveld said. “But often, when they have a good tenant, they want to keep them.”
At the same time, the security of Quebec’s older citizens who helped build today’s society can’t be left to community organizations that lack the funding or resources to deal with the enormity of the issue, Begarin said. (Roughly 65 per cent of the funding to cover Maison du Père’s $10.7 million in operating costs came through private donations in 2023; government subsidies covered 26 per cent, down from 36 per cent in 2021). The provincial government needs to do more, she said.
“For me, an older person who saw Quebec grow, who participated in the development of Quebec, is part of our foundation, just as a house has a foundation,” she said.
“And you can’t think of developing on that base, without taking care of that foundation.”