Two deaths on the streets of Montreal have advocates calling attention to the ongoing overdose crisis.
Two members of Montreal’s Indigenous community died early Saturday after possible drug overdoses, raising the attention of advocates around the need for more supervised drug consumption sites and emergency resources for the unhoused community.
At around 8:15 a.m., SPVM police said officers were called to assist ambulance crews performing resuscitation on two individuals in cardiopulmonary arrest near the corner of St. Laurent and Ontario Street.
Both individuals were transported by paramedics and pronounced dead at the Centre hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, police said.
Police officials told Global News in an email that they are awaiting results from the coroner’s investigation, but no further details have been provided on the cause of death of the two individuals.
According to Pierre Parent, an outreach worker who knew one of the victims, the woman was well-known in Montreal’s Indigenous community.
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Parent suspects that the deaths were related to potential overdoses. For him, as an Indigenous person, “the news is devastating.”
“We’ve lost far too many people in the last year from our community members itself,” he said, referring to Montreal’s Indigenous unhoused community.
Advocates stress that the opioid crisis is affecting the housed and the unhoused, but those living on the street or part of Indigenous communities are especially vulnerable.
Executive director David Chapman of Resilience Montreal, a non-profit shelter, says there has been an increase in overdose numbers over the past few years. Chapman says just a week ago at the same square, there was another overdose, although non-fatal.
In June, a vigil was held for 36 people from Resilience Montreal, Indigenous and non-indigenous, who had died on the streets since 2022.
“And, in the next week or so, we’ll be doing another group memorial, and this time it’ll be for around six people,” Chapman said.
The high number of overdoses raises questions about the need for supervised consumption sites.
“If you don’t have emergency resources for the unhoused in more or less every neighbourhood, then you will have a significant increase in overdose deaths,” Chapman said.
The deaths over the weekend come in part of a larger fight from advocates emphasizing the urgent need for systemic change.
“A balance must be found,” Chapman said.
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