About 200 people attended a press conference on Friday where stakeholders from Moncton’s business community sent out an urgent call for help regarding the city’s growing homeless population.
John Wishart of the Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce said the growing homeless population is presenting a security concern for downtown business owners.
“We’ve heard from some downtown business owners who say they’ve lost customers because they’re not comfortable coming downtown, especially after dark. Their staff is increasingly worried about walking to their car after dark,” he said in an interview on Friday.
Patrick Richard, the executive director of Downtown Moncton Centreville Inc., said a survey of 21 companies in Moncton revealed that they have “spent more than $2.4 million in extra security to protect their businesses, staffs and customers” over the past 18 months.
Trevor Goodwin of YMCA’s ReConnect program told Moncton city council there are upwards of 500 homeless people in the city currently.
The Chamber of Commerce, DMCI, economic development agency 3+ and Destination Moncton-Dieppe, an agency promoting the Moncton region as a tourism hub, outlined five changes they want to see during Friday’s press conference.
They included increased shelter capacity, more provincial spending on mental health and substance use disorder recovery services, the establishment of a mental health court in the city, an increase in affordable housing supply and increased police presence downtown.
Many of these demands have been presented before, such as in a report issued by the Community Task Force on Homelessness and Downtown Security in 2021.
A provincial task force that Social Development Minister Dorothy Shephard calls a “tiger team” was in Moncton this week to assess the needs regarding homelessness.
“It’s obvious that where we have a gap is lack of mental health and addictions services on the ground and so we’re going to be looking at resourcing for more positions to ensure that we’re able to work with our shelter system to get people the help they need,” Shephard told reporters at a press conference on Friday afternoon.
She said that beginning on Monday, there will be a “point person” from the Health and Social Development Departments in Moncton, along with some involvement from Public Safety.
She wouldn’t say whether the province would fund the requests from Moncton’s business community.
“A lot of really good work is being done today, we have YMCA Reconnect, we have House of Nazareth, we have Harvest House. All kinds of good work, but they are all doing different work, so what we need now is to understand how those differences come together to give us the outcomes we want,” she said.
“It’s going to mean some more resources, it’s going to mean more people, it might mean higher salaries. We have to find a way to bring this all together to get the outcomes we’re looking for, which in the end, is going to be housing.”
When asked whether the province has been able to reconcile the discrepancy between the province’s number of 224 homeless people in Moncton with YMCA Reconnect’s number of more than 500, Shephard said: “The tiger team told me today they can’t reconcile the number.”
“That’s part of the disconnect, that’s part of the agencies that are working differently,” she said. “While we don’t have an exact number, that’s part of the work we’re going to delve into even more so next week.”
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