Vanessa Hamel says she has many beloved regulars at the Salvation Army emergency truck, from which she hands out bagged lunches and hot meals twice a week, in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., May 9, 2023.

Image Credit: CANADIAN PRESS/Sarah Smellie

HAPPY VALLEY-GOOSE BAY, N.L. - On a recent spring day in a sandy church parking lot in Labrador, Vanessa Hamel stopped mid-sentence to lean out of a food truck window and wave to an approaching group of people.

“Whaddaya doin’?” she sang out to them, laughing. They waved and laughed back.

She pulled her head back into the truck -- the local Salvation Army’s Emergency Disaster Relief Vehicle -- and began gathering up bags of ham sandwiches, juices and snacks to hand out to them. They’re homeless and they sometimes get extra, said Hamel, who is a community outreach worker with the church.

A church offering food to those who can't afford it is generally unremarkable. But in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, N.L., it's become controversial. Among Hamel's familiar clients are homeless and transient people who live along the wooded trails that snake through the town. Their numbers have spiked from a few dozen to more than 80 in recent years. As governments and organizations race to find a way to house and care for them, the community has become divided over what will work, and whether help should be offered at all.

"We've been accused of enabling them," Byron Kean, the church's corps officer, said in an interview. He said some people yell at them as they're handing out meals. "There are individuals that will flip us the bird," he said. "But if people need a meal, we're going to provide a meal."

Happy Valley-Goose Bay spreads out from the bank of the Churchill River, a wide expanse of churning water that cuts through central Labrador. The town is home to about 8,000 people. On a recent spring Saturday, there were joggers, cyclists and people riding ATVs on the community's vast trail network.

There is evidence of people living in the woods along the trails in some areas: rumpled tarps, empty food and beer boxes and snuffed-out fire pits. There are more and more young men living among them, and they're more aggressive, Kean said. They steal from local stores, they run into the roads and they break into people's houses, he said.

Families have woken up to find strangers in their homes and garages "coming at (them)," Kean said. "And that's scary."

Beginning in 2021, the provincial government assembled response teams made up of representatives from the town, the RCMP and the region's three Indigenous groups. In March, the province set aside $30 million for a new 30-room emergency shelter with 20 transitional housing bedrooms and 20 affordable supportive housing units. It would also provide addiction and mental health supports, as well as cultural programming -- many of the town's homeless people are from Indigenous communities along Labrador's north coast.

But even that plan has become divisive. Happy Valley Goose Bay Mayor George Andrews said in a recent interview that he and other residents worry the facility will just attract more people to live in the trails.

"A majority of who and what we see causing a concern for us from a public safety perspective are not homeless," he said. "They are folks that have come into our community for a brief period, to come to a hospital appointment, whatever, and they've decided to stay."

Officials with the province's housing corporation said Saturday that work on the housing facility was ongoing.

Andrews said the town's concern is public safety. To that end, the town council asked for more policing and removed public benches along the bike trails because people were gathering around them. The RCMP added more patrols and the province allocated nearly $500,000 for the town to hire private security services. The security guards will be deployed in part near a local school, where the mayor said people on the trails have exposed themselves to children.

Jeff Matthews is frustrated by the objections to the new housing facility and by what he says is a lack of empathy and understanding.

Matthews is the coordinator at the town's Housing Hub, a low-barrier shelter managed by the Nunatsiavut government, which is the Inuit government in northern Labrador. The Hub can accommodate around 10 people, Matthews said. If there are more, the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation will put them up at the nearby Labrador Inn.

"If you look at the fundamentals of human development, what we need first and foremost is housing. Housing, food, love," he said in a recent interview. "There's a lot of broken pieces here. And I think the public really needs to see the importance of educating themselves on what addiction is, and what trauma is."

Matthews and Bill Dormody, who runs the Labrador Inn, said people accuse the inn staff of "enabling" the transient population. Dormody said, on the contrary, he and his staff are housing and looking after people with complex mental health and addiction issues. They regularly intervene in suicide attempts, some of which still haunt them, Dormody said in an interview.

Two winters ago, two people died outside in the cold -- a man outside the Hub and a woman outside the inn.

Matthews said many of the people living at the Hub, the inn or in the trails descend from survivors of the province's residential schools, the last of which didn't close until 1980. Matthews is Inuk, and his grandparents on his mother's side are residential school survivors, he said.

Inuit communities along Labrador's north coast -- and across Canada -- are plagued by housing shortages and overcrowding. Some of Happy Valley-Goose Bay's transient and homeless people have left unsafe or nonexistent housing in those communities, he said.

And there are few services in northern Labrador. "We've got some clients who are suffering some mental health issues," Matthews said. "It's more safe for them to be in Goose Bay in a homeless setting than to be in their home community with a house and without the mental health supports."

Back at the Salvation Army, Kean said the new housing facility would be a "right step" to address short-term needs and part of what's required to find long-term solutions.

"But we have to somehow speed up the process a little bit to make sure that no more lives are lost in Happy Valley-Goose Bay," he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 18, 2023.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2023