Last Thursday night [ed: May 27th] at around 10:30, 7 people were evicted from their house built in a vacant lot in centre-sud by at least 10 officers from the 22nd SPVM precinct. Notice of an eviction for Friday morning came Tuesday at 10 am, from Commander Daniel Allard of division 22, spurred by an article on street youth that was released in the Saturday edition of La Presse.

 
Last Thursday night [ed: May 27th] at around 10:30, 7 people were evicted from their house built in a vacant lot in Centre-Sud by at least 10 officers from the 22nd SPVM precinct. Notice of an eviction for Friday morning came Tuesday at 10 am, from Commander Daniel Allard of division 22, spurred by an article on street youth that was released in the Saturday edition of La Presse.

In the article the author, Nicolas Berubé, disclosed the locations of the shanties as well as pictures of the squatters. He stayed with them for three days, buying them beer and cigarettes, writing his piece on "the living conditions of street youth." The squatters say he came in false pretense, saying he was a student journalist and none of the pictures would be published.

5 shanties were destroyed when the police arrived a day early with a bulldozer, a fire truck, and an ambulance. The cops told the squatters present they had thirty minutes to vacate the lot, assuring them the government did have work programs for them, and there is ample shelter space within Montréal, then proceeded to demolish their two story, twelve room shanty 15 minutes later, after the smaller empty shanties surrounding. 15 people had been living in it for 4 weeks prior to eviction and had no problems before the article appeared.

After the initial expulsion, the squatters went down the street to their second shanty built 2 weeks ago, to be met by even more police. The shanty was quickly bulldozed and they were expelled finding places to spend the night in parks and on rooftops.

Despite a lack of complaints from their neigbours, the crew of a construction site who, during the building of the shanty, offered them "unusable" wood from their condo project, bags of nails, and a wheel barrel to aid in the creation of their home, the orders for the eviction went out.

The police stated the reason for eviction was that the shanties were a fire hazard, and if the squatters needed housing, they could use the shelters, almost verbatim what was said by Peter B. Yeomans, the chairman of public security, 5 hours earlier when questioned about the eviction at the annual security consultation.

Robert Laramée, city counselor for Centre-Sud was less diplomatic in his reasons for approving the eviction saying "that if we let them stay 15 will become 30, then 60... until all of them (the entire homeless population of Canada) will sleep (there)"

The scene of the shantytown in the morning was dismal at best. Bags, clothing, sleeping bags, tarps and a whole array of other belongings, were in scattered mounds or half-buried under the debris.

These evictions are only a part of the wave of attacks perpetrated by the SPVM against the street population of Centre-Sud since the city approval of $ 14.5 million for the revitalization (GENTRIFICATION) of Ste-Catherine between St-Laurent and Papineau.

Nicolas Berubé can be contacted at La Presse @ 514-285-7070.
I strongly encourage people to call him and demand at the very least apologies to the squatters or a follow-up article, or to learn some journalistic ethics (perhaps an oxymoron).

For more information of the shanty town or the gentrification of Centre-Sud go to: