Homeless in Montreal charged thousands of dollars in tickets
From jaywalking to sitting in a park, the way Montreal's police treat their homeless varies widely from how they treat others for similar actions.
However, Montreal is not an anomaly in Canada — the practice of over-ticketing the homeless is a common occurrence in the country, say those that attempt to help with the fees that can reach the thousands.
In Montreal, it's over 65,000 tickets that have been issued to homeless people in 15 years, including 30,000 in the last five years of our studies. In Toronto, the number of tickets ... has gone up from 700 to 15,000 in 2010.- Marie-Eve Sylvestre has been tracking and studying homelessness in Canada for over a decade
Daniel Boucher, 24, racked up $10,000 in tickets when he was living on the streets of Montreal. While Boucher is now living in an apartment, planning to finish school, and looking for a job, the predicament he found himself in is one too well-known by the homeless.
Guests in this segment:
- Emilie Guimond-Belanger, social worker with the Droits Devant clinic in Montreal.
- Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Associate Dean of Research and a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Ottawa.
Let us know how you think homelessness should be tackled. Is writing tickets an effective tool?
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This segment was produced by The Current's John Chipman, Sarah Grant, and Ines Colabrese.