Sergakis launches crusade against the homeless
Bar czar Peter Sergakis has launched a crusade against the homeless, saying they pose a risk to safety downtown. But it’s not great timing for a law and order offensive, considering recent numbers demonstrate how safe this town is. Given that the man owns bars, and is chiefly concerned that people be allowed to drink without the sobering reminder of what alcohol does to some people, I think we can absolve him of being unbiased in this matter.
Ian 12:55 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
“itinérants pancanadiens, de clochards abandonnés par le système, de squeejees tolérés par les autorités, de membres de groupes anarchistes ainsi que d’individus victimes de la désinstitutionalisation” Members of anarchist groups? Seriously? Yeah, withall the bums, drunks, free-range crazies and aggressive squeegee kids those anarcho-syndicalists quoting Kropotkin at the diners must really ruffle a lot of feathers. Sergakis is a money-grubbing moron.
Kate 13:27 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
Ooh, “pancanadiens” – can’t get much lower than that, can we?
Help, help! I’m being repressed!
Marc 14:10 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
Is he still crusading against the smoking ban that he claimed would kill every bar in town? He doesn’t just own bars. He also has numerous apartment buildings, hotels, about half of Notre Dame st. in St. Henri and a chunk of the St. Jacques strip in NDG. You can also barely understand what he says as he slurs most of his words together.
montrealfilmguy 18:19 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
Don’t worry good people.Bars are good for Festival Juste pour rire.Gilbert Rozon will have a nice fatherly chat with him too.Just like with the students.
montrealfilmguy 18:20 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
Oh and Kate ? a whole bunch of brownie points for what i believe to be the very first Python quote in a Montreal blog.
Matt 20:27 on 2012/08/04 Permalink
I hate how he’s excusing his hate for the homeless with concern for his patrons’ safety.
Bill Binns 10:03 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
This guy Sergakis may be a tool but you will not find many business owners or managers that have a positive (or even neutral) opinion of the homeless. These people have to deal with the homeless face to face every day and they have to do so with no help from anyone. There is almost nothing that a business owner can do to keep people from sleeping on their property, urinating, defecating on their property, acosting customers etc. The police will not even send someone out unless someone is doing something violent right now.
The companies I work with will eventually close stores and leave an area when this gets out of hand. The Couche Tard location on St Catherine W that was built from a scratch a few years ago as a flagship store with a coffee bar and outside seating folded after less than two years because of this. The McDonalds and Starbucks at Alexis Nihon on Atwater just removed all of their outside seating because they could not keep the homeless out of them. That same McDonalds employs a full time security guard for the same reason.
Kate 10:53 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
What do other cities do?
Bill Binns 11:15 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
To be honest, I have never seen a system that was both compassionate to the homeless and effective for reducing their numbers. It seems like the more a city does for their homeless, the more homeless they have. San Francisco actually pays their homeless a salary. I saw people handing out Christmas presents to the homeless in San Fran last year. There are more public and private isntitutions to serve the homeless in San Fran than any other city I have ever heard of (at least in N America). For all this, San Fran is absolutely swarming with homeless. They are literally everywhere. When I was there at Christmas last year, I counted 18 people who asked me for money in the 3 block walk between my hotel and the coffee shop at 7:00 AM. I am in Portland, Oregon right now and it is much the same situation here. I have done a fair bit of travelling and I have never been to any large city, anywhere in the world where I did not see people begging and sleeping in doorways. This includes some of the great Welfare States of Europe.
I think there is something to be said for the idea that the more comfortable you make it to be homeless, the more you make homelessness a viable option that people can choose.
Kate 11:39 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
I walked around two cities and one town in the Netherlands last Christmastime, and at no point did anyone ever ask me for money.
More to the point, I live in Villeray and have almost never been asked for money around here.
Ant6n 13:49 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
@bill
you may have caused and effect reversed on the homeless and their facilities.
erika 13:51 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
@bill
this is just a side point but I believe the McDonalds on atwater just updated their outdoor seating – not removed it.
Stefan 15:37 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
@bill binns:
surely, people become homeless so that they can be handed presents once a year, at christmas.
how about looking at housing prices for better correlations to number of homeless? or informing yourself that people sleeping outside/begging for money in ‘welfare countries’ are usually from abroad?
aside from that, there does not seem currently to exist an economic system which permits each of its members to function in what it defines as its normality, outside of jail. usually these people are then labelled as having psychological problems. ever thought about that not everybody may want to live in a house, all the time, all of their life? in india, some of these people are revered as saints. or, take jesus christ, the buddha, or the famous mathematician erdoes …
walkerp 16:33 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
The other factor with SF and Portland is simply the climate. It’s much easier to survive on the streets when it doesn’t get cold in winter.
qatzelok 20:08 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
@ Bill Binns: “I have never seen a system that was both compassionate to the homeless and effective for reducing their numbers.”
‘Having your numbers reduced’ has been tried by many gnostic fascists in the past. It leads to mass death and social decay. Perhaps what these people really need is dignity and resources, and not necessarily home ownership or a final solution.
Bill Binns 23:06 on 2012/08/05 Permalink
@Stefan – You make a good point that many homeless people are living the way they choose to live. This “lifestyle” may be abhorrent to you and me but not necesarily the people that are living it. These people are not starving to death, they are not freezing to death and many of them are putting 100% of their energy and time into obtaining and enjoying the drug of their choice. Their choices are sad but they are their choices.
@qatzelok – Did you really think I was advocating the mass murder of the homeless by speaking about “reducing their numbers”?
Kate 01:05 on 2012/08/06 Permalink
Bill Binns, you’re hijacking Stefan’s more subtle point. You want to see homeless people as making a clear, rational choice to goof off you so they can enjoy a freeloading lifestyle which you despise. Stefan is talking about something much, much older, which is the streak of itinerance, the call of the nomad life, which has not entirely left the human race and which different societies have coped with in different ways.
In our time people who still live that way, or partially that way, are often despised and feared by the sedentary folks among whom they move. The Roma, for example – you’d know them as Gypsies – and other travelling peoples in the British Isles and elsewhere – but also a certain number of individuals among any culture, including, as Stefan points out, some of the revered cultural icons of the past several millennia. When they’re rich we call them jet-setters; when they’re poor, we mull over how to “reduce their number.”
The reasons why any given person ends up homeless are complex, but you want to reduce it to a sort of happy holidaying. It’s a lack of imagination on your part.
Bill Binns 08:10 on 2012/08/06 Permalink
@Kate – You too with the “reduce their numbers” comment? Aren’t advocates of the homeless all about making homeless people “not homeless”? Wouldn’t this “reduce the number” of homeless people? Or is it really about further facilitating their noble “urban camping” lifestyle?
qatzelok 08:46 on 2012/08/06 Permalink
@ Bill Binns: “Or is it really about further facilitating their noble “urban camping” lifestyle?”
I’m not sure if it’s wise to mock alternatives to our current social order. Sedentary man grew fat eating carbs, was able to have billions of babies thus bringing the human population up to “infestation” numbers, and has lead to the dumbing down of the domesticated human animal.
For a million years, humans moved around their ecosystems like other mammals. For the last 10,000, we have stood still and contaminated our artificial food supplies as well as the natural ones that we abandoned to pursue home ownership and capitalism.
Kevin 09:52 on 2012/08/06 Permalink
@qatzelok
Romantic twaddle. How many species have nomads rendered extinct in prehistory, and how many deserts have been created by nomadic pastoralists?
Every species affects its environment. We are just simply more aware of it, and rich enough to be able to do something about it.
Philippe 12:10 on 2012/08/06 Permalink
@qatzelok: This is silly. You denigrate modern society and elevate a caste of people that is entirely dependent on it for survival. Homeless people don’t form nomadic societies. They don’t hunt or gather their food, they don’t build shelters except from the refuse of urban decay. If modern society is a collection of diseased livestock as you’re implying, the homeless are its parasites.
@Kate: I’ve never seen a beggar in northern Europe, but quite a few Roma in southern France, although most of them were engaged in some sort of artistic performance, so I’m not sure that counts. However I’ve been accosted all over the place in Montreal, and twice on the South Shore, which took me aback.
@no one in particular: Canada is a place where homelessness is viable only seasonally. Once we’ve accepted that this “lifestyle” needs heavy government involvement most of the year, and civic tolerance most everywhere it occurs, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to regulate the phenomenon any way that suits us. Nomadic objectors are free to test their survival skills in the wild, I guess, though I don’t recommend it in February.
Kate 00:31 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
Bill Binns: “Aren’t advocates of the homeless all about making homeless people “not homeless”? Wouldn’t this “reduce the number” of homeless people?”
I feel like I’ve been arguing this with you for years.
There are some homeless people that need a hand to get off the street and back into a more sedentary lifestyle – people who’ve fallen out of that life due to a run of bad luck, a temporary period of mental illness or the like. But there are others who, because of who they are, how they are constituted, will never become orderly little householders and productive cogs in a capitalist society. You can’t turn everyone into a worker ant. It is not a free choice any more than sexual orientation or various other deeply inbuilt personal tendencies are. We can call this a mental illness or we can see it as something of an atavism but one that is not the fault of the person who has it.
Our policy as a society is to harass these people until they die. Can we do better? I think we can.
qatzelok 08:19 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
@ Philippe: “Homeless people don’t form nomadic societies. They don’t hunt or gather their food, they don’t build shelters except from the refuse of urban decay.”
It’s impossible in our privatized, modernized Earth, to live nomadically off wild game and gathered berries. We are forced to enslave ourselves to sedentary institutions, and the most successful among us pretend to enjoy their domesticated dog lives.
There’s nothing romantic about my attachment to nomadism. It is the natural way for humans to live. Our current lifestyle is a kind of sickness caused by the control of entire societies by power-mad tyrants made overly strong by artificial technologies (that are also killing the planet).
It sometimes seems that the only hope for humans (and other species) for returning to a healthy, natural life, is for our current toxic Stockholm Syndrome-based governance to collapse.
Thing is, when the environment collapses, it will be too late to return to healthy living.
Kevin 09:04 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
@qatzelok
You can pick up and be a nomad right now. Of course, if you think nomads lived off wild game and gathered berries you’d be in for a shock, since most successful nomadic cultures committed mass murder at the drop of a bison.
Your idea of the noble savage would be completely destroyed if you stopped to study historical anthropology.
We are humans. Our normal state, like EVERY species in the history of the planet, is to destroy our environment.
Even the very air you breathe is the caustic waste product of one of the first species to live on Earth!
The only difference is we are aware of our effect on the world around us and in many cases we take steps to minimize it.
Kate 09:11 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
Kevin, nomadic life isn’t some individual chaotic lifestyle, it’s a form of mobile pasturing of animals and well studied. Individuals can and do live in a non-anchored way but it has little or nothing to do with this old, traditional format of life (which is also being squeezed out of existence because of national borders and land ownership laws, even though some of the world’s major religions came out of a basically nomadic background).
We should all chill and read (or reread) Chatwin’s The Songlines – especially the extensive notes at the end. Fascinating stuff about the fundamentally restless nature of the human animal.
Philippe 11:33 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
@qatzelok: Actually, I’m pretty sure no one’s stopping you from going up north and living off the caribou herd.
How about you name one modern society that matches as closely as possible your nomadic ideals, and then we evaluate it for things like life expectancy, child mortality, violent crime, literacy, freedom from sexual violence, etc.? Or are these blights also caused by us sedentary fiends?
Philippe 11:40 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
@Kate: Nah, I’d rather chill and reflect on the irony of urban-oriented people harbouring romantic fantasies about a nomadic pastoral revolution. You guys realize that if we all went nomad, the resulting horde would strip the earth bare before all but dying out of starvation and strife in a few winters, right? And that the surviving remainder would be Taliban-like in its social structure?
Kevin 12:32 on 2012/08/07 Permalink
@Kate
Never said it was individual and chaotic. I’m saying it’s nothing to romanticize and is just as environmentally destructive as anything else we’ve ever done. (Next time I’ll explicitly talk about pastoralism and how it created the Sahara.)
Humanity switched to farming a long time ago because we as a species didn’t have a choice if we wanted enough food. We will soon have to switch to eating only farmed fish because there just won’t be anything left in the sea. — or creating a coast guard that is heavily armed to patrol schools of fish.
Steve Paesani 19:39 on 2012/12/27 Permalink
@Bill
Now now no need to attack urban camping.
It’s great practice for the real thing. Especially, and preferably though not necessarily, when done on private land.
There are also some younger people in Montreal who have an idea for urban camping zones for tourists as an alternative to hotels and the like. For the outdoors person I think it’s a great idea. They’ve gone so far as to locate some areas to use as urban camp sites.
Montreal allows tents in parks for brief periods of time during park hours (though not many do it).
Any Canadian citizen can camp for 21 days on crown land for free (there are rules/regulations that apply, mostly with regards to sanitation, safety and no erecting of constructs). Though perhaps far from urban, if the crown land is close enough to civilisation,
it again makes for great practice for real rustic (non campsite) camping without any major risk.
As for the shameless homeless bums panhandling for drugs, alcohol, gambling, ‘sexual favor’ money and the like they couldn’t keep up a campsite if they tried. They are simply too pre-occupied doing other things. I can say this cause I’ve not only seen them try I’ve actually given some a few pointers and some help here and there. They are simply in no state to do any kind of urban camping, legal or not.
These types prefer the ease and comfort of McDonalds, Tim Hortons, Second Cup etc..
over the hard rules and regulations of the shelters or the old fashioned hard work and discipline of keeping up a campsite.
Personally I believe all the additional (above social assistance) funding should be cut and only the assitance itself be provided through 3rd parties comprised of people who are self sufficient themselves (don’t need a job, salary, etc..) since a large portion of aid money, be it taxes or donations, asides from being blown on drugs, alcohol etc.. is spent on salaries and benefits of ‘benevolants’ that, let’s face it, are all to glad to take whatever they can for themselves.
Steve Paesani 20:16 on 2012/12/27 Permalink
@Bill re: business owners alone in their plight.
This is just too far from the truth.
The police in fact do respond to calls by owners. It’s the owners themselves that look to handle things they’re own way prior to calling them if ever they do. This means private security, bouncers and the like and the ensuing violence these people meet out. People by the way that are far from hired to handle the homeless yet rather to handle a multitude of problems one of which is violence. Violence that comes from the most part not from
homeless people yet from, ironically, nearby bars who can not manage the behaviour of their patrons (something Sergakis has shown himself quite capable of doing btw).
The McDonalds with private security is on Guy street, not Atwater. They were hired for the violence spilling over from the Budha club, not the homeless.
The McDonalds on Atwater has seen it’s fair share of violence from the club across the street also. Two attempted murders in the bar, people running in the street bleeding from stabbings, fights, etc.. (Violence that has been addressed incidently).
The homeless are for the most part simply asked to leave the places they frequent and they do so mostly without incident. Where there is incident it’s usually in relation to drunkeness and not homelessness.
As for violations towards the homeless they all go unaccounted for since they are seen and treated as people who have no rights even though they do. That’s just a fact of life that is the manifestation of the hatred people have towards the evidence of their crimes since, lets face it: the more property a landlord owns the more homes they stole from those who paid for those buildings.
Call it “their choice” or not the fact is that the french feudal mentality enforced by the brutal violence that is the history of Quebec is exploited to this day and the sense of “entitlement” to the work of others, to others paying the mortgage, to others erecting the building etc.. is quite obviously apparent in some if not many landlord’s actions one of which
now pretending to be a champion for dealing with the homless problem that they themselves participated heavily in creating in the first place.
In this light as far as I’m concerned a person who steals homes from people in any way shape or form beit selling the “conveniences of rent” or lying about alternatives simply has to pay one way or another like it or not. Justice will have it’s way in this regard and it is not the annoyance of the homeless that is that justice.
Kate 01:26 on 2012/12/28 Permalink
Hello Mr. Paesani. You’re responding to posts and comments made several months ago. Thanks for taking an interest but I don’t know whether many people will see your comments or respond to them now.