People who are living outside or in shelters sit outside the Bridge Street United Church in Belleville, Ont., on Feb 12, on a stretch of sidewalk that has become a gathering spot for the city’s street population.Photography by Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Sunday dawned grey and damp in Belleville, the “friendly city.”
A brisk wind off the Bay of Quinte made the unusually mild February weather feel colder. Congregants hunched their shoulders as they filed into the historic Bridge Street United Church.
It had been a rough week for the Ontario city of 55,000. Authorities reported a rash of drug overdoses, 13 of them within the space of two hours one afternoon. Mayor Neil Ellis made national headlines by declaring a state of emergency over the community’s triple-headed crisis of mental illness, addiction and homelessness. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called him to offer sympathy.
Canada’s overdose epidemic has moved beyond the big cities to hit even small, quiet places like Belleville. With far fewer resources than larger centres, they are struggling to cope. Mr. Ellis is pleading with the provincial government to help fund a new centre for people on the city’s margins.
Belleville Mayor Neil Ellis, right, listens as Sheiula Braidek, executive director of the local community health centre, speaks about supports for people living rough.
Settled in their pews under the vaulted ceilings of the 140-year-old church, the few dozen who have gathered listened to Rev. John Miller deliver a sermon on the Transfiguration, the episode in the New Testament when disciples of Jesus saw him bathed in dazzling light. Outside on Bridge Street, the light was hard to see.
The long sidewalk in front of the church has become a gathering spot for the city’s street population, a place to hang out; chat with friends; warm up with a coffee; have a smoke; or buy, sell and consume drugs. Several of last week’s overdoses, none of them fatal, happened on Bridge Street, which draws a crowd because of the church’s all-day drop-in program. Throughout the day and often into the night, dishevelled, often intoxicated men and women dressed in layers against the cold can be seen along the street. Fights are common. So are visits from police and paramedics. The pavement is stained with spilled drinks, discarded food and vomit.
The emergency declaration that caused such a sensation last week did not seem to impress Bridge Street. Overdoses are an everyday thing in this part of town. Belleville paramedics got 90 overdose calls in one week last November.
The people staying on Bridge Street have seen a heavy toll from drug overdoses in recent weeks.
As the rest of Belleville did their shopping, took walks along the Moira River or prepared snacks for Super Bowl parties, life outside the church went on much as it always does. A young woman with a red coat and platinum blond hair walked up and down talking loudly and angrily to herself. A young man with a blue tuque told a visitor he had a camera in his eyeball that let him see things others couldn’t. Shouting and shoving erupted when a guy threatened to take a baseball bat to some other guys over a claim they hadn’t paid him for drugs.
Max Gower, 35, leaned against the church’s waist-high stone wall to talk. He had a nasty scab on his nose, the result of a burn he got when he passed out while trying to light a drug pipe on a gas stove. He said he ended up on the streets after leaving the military because he was suffering from bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders. He sees his two children just once a month, if he is sober.
Like most Bridge Street regulars, he said he had lost many friends to overdoses and other dangers of street life. One of the latest to die was Channing Emond, a familiar street character with several kids. His body was found in a dumpster outside the church. “I don’t want to be next,” Mr. Gower said.
Just around the corner, Brad Ferguson, 48, was sitting in the beat-up car that often serves as his home. He keeps warm at night by running a propane heater, with the car window open a crack to vent the fumes and a carbon monoxide detector going just in case. He had been homeless for “two years, three months and 12 days,” ever since losing his factory job to illness.
He said that Belleville was swamped with cheap drugs, usually varieties of fentanyl, the potent synthetic opioid that is responsible for most of the roughly 20 overdose deaths in Canada on the average day. Lately, it often comes mixed with other other things, such as GHB, known as the date-rape drug, or benzodiazepines, a family of sedatives. They make it harder for rescuers to revive overdose victims.
Overdose is not the only danger. Mr. Ferguson said that those who nod off on drugs often wake up to find that they have been “rinsed,” relieved of all their stuff by thieves who pounce as soon as they pass out and go through their pockets and bags.
As afternoon drew on, a car pulled up outside Bridge Street United. Debbie Pike got out. A 48-year-old elementary-school teacher, she runs a group that hands out food to needy people in Belleville.
She knows everyone on the street and has lost several of them in recent weeks: Jason, a fresh-faced young man from a solid family who worked as an electrician but fell into drug use and died of an overdose the day after Christmas; Kareena, a 34-year-old mother, recently engaged to be married, who died six days before Christmas; John, known as “Tater” on the street, a 68-year-old with a mop of white hair who died just a couple of weeks ago. Only last Friday, three days after the string of overdoses, paramedics rushed to Bridge Street to tend to a man who had collapsed there. He was declared dead in hospital in the small hours of the morning.
In the late evening, most of the Bridge Street regulars moved on. Some went to bed down in the city’s overnight warming centre; others to crash on someone’s couch, set up a tent in a park or just curl up in the entrance to a building. One street veteran, a 59-year-old woman, carries small tea-light candles to warm herself if she ends up on some sidewalk at night.
By 11 p.m., just half a dozen people remained. They lay huddled together just down the street from the church, surrounded by clothes, water bottles, food wrappers and bikes. Their hoodies pulled up and their caps pulled low, they smoked and talked in low voices.
A damp wind was still blowing in from the bay.