Julien Gignac, Centretown News
Shelters across the city such as the Ottawa Mission face overcrowding this winter. As cold descends and Ottawa is enveloped in snow, the city’s homeless shelters are struggling to make use of every bit of space to ensure no one is left out in the cold.
Two weeks after two homeless men died on the streets of Toronto, representatives of Ottawa’s emergency shelters say they’re already bursting at the seams.
There are 235 beds at the Ottawa Mission, but workers have been laying out mats in the chapel before winter even began.
“Most of the fall, we’ve been in an overflow situation even before the cold weather got here,” says Shirley Roy, the mission’s community relations manager.
The situation is the same at shelters across the city.
“The services are maxed out during cold spells,” says Sean Maddox, public relations director of the Salvation Army’s Ottawa Booth Centre. “Every free bed is taken.”
While Ottawa’s shelters have a strict policy not to turn anybody away, the City of Ottawa estimates there are between 16 and 45 people sleeping outside most nights.
The city works with the shelters to run various outreach programs as part of the Extreme Cold-Weather Initiative.
For example, the Salvation Army Outreach Van patrols the city almost 24 hours a day to find people in need and take them in or give them supplies.
According to Maddox, sometimes the issue for outreach services is that not everyone wants to be helped.
“There are individuals who are afraid of shelters and do not come in due to their own mental illnesses, who choose to live on the streets,” says Maddox. “There’s not many of them, but we work in co-operation with the other shelters in town to make sure those individuals are taken care of during the cold evenings.”
The emergency shelters, such as the Ottawa Mission and the Shepherds of Good Hope, are in frequent contact to streamline services and shuffle people around to manage overflow.
However, there are only so many extra mats they’re able to lay out.
Mike Bulthuis, executive director of the Alliance to End Homelessness, says the only way to solve congestion in the city’s shelters is by giving people ways to escape homelessness.
“Where we have work to do as a community is to come together and create the permanent housing solutions so that these folks don’t have to experience these kinds of conditions,” Bulthuis says.
According to the organization’s 2013 report card assessing homelessness in Ottawa, 500 fewer people were using homeless shelters than in 2012, but the average length of stay had risen from 69 days to 73 days. Bulthuis says the 2014 report card will be released in the spring.
Meanwhile, at the Ottawa Mission, staff keep the lounge area near their front desk open 24/7 so people can come in throughout the night and warm up.
“We try to make sure if somebody is trying to get out of the cold weather that they have a place to go,” says Roy.