PRINCE ALBERT - Henry Dorion — ‘Moody,’ to his friends — has lived in La Ronge for over three decades.
But when his wife Wanda passed away four years ago, he struggled to cope.
“I’ve lived on the streets ever since then,” he said.
He spends days at the Scattered Site Outreach Program in downtown La Ronge.
“To tell you the truth, it’s like family here,” said Dorion. “Everybody gets together. There’s ups and there’s downs, but everybody keeps coming back together.
“That’s the good part about this place.”
Tucked just around the corner from the town's business district, Scattered Site is a busy basement hub — and, as temperatures drop, it’s getting busier by the day. At the end of the lunch rush, dozens of people crowd into the common area to get a bowl of chili, pick up their mail, check their phone messages and watch Pirates of the Caribbean on the TV.
There are advocates working here who can help make connections to social services, detox care and mental health programs.
"These employees, they're good people," Dorion said. "They do the best they can to help everyone out."
These days, as Dorion sees so many new people coming into Scattered Site, he worries. It never used to be like this. Even a few years ago, there weren’t nearly so many people in the community who needed emergency help. Now, services aren’t growing fast enough to meet the need.
“There’s so many of us now, all of a sudden,” he says. “Everybody tries to help each other as much as we can. Whenever we see each other, we make sure we connect and make sure we talk about what’s going on.
“But we need more help for the people that are here.”
Tina Johnson, the extended hours program manager at Scattered Site, is seeing the same alarming trend.
“I’ve been here just about four years now, and in that short period of time, I’ve noticed a huge increase — especially since COVID,” she said.
As she closes down the kitchen after the lunch rush, Johnson reflects on how much more precarious life in La Ronge has become for so many people.
Handing the last couple bowls of chili through the kitchen window, connecting phone calls and passing on messages as clients come into Scattered Site for the afternoon, Johnson knows that many of these people could afford their own homes and groceries a short time ago.
“The way that our economy is going, there’s a lot of us that are one pay-cheque away from being exactly where a lot of these folks are right now,” she said. “If I were to lose my job tomorrow, there’s a good chance I would be on the other side of this wall, staying with these guys. It’s very easy to go from having a good life to having nothing in the blink of an eye.”
'We don't have room for everyone'
Over the winter, Scattered Site also runs an overnight shelter, so people can have a safe place to sleep out of the cold from November to March. This year, they’ve secured funding for two extra months — the overnight shelter opened in October and won’t close until the end of April.
Johnson says when she first started working at the shelter it served roughly 100 individual clients every season.
This year, in October alone, the shelter served 121 registered clients.
For each of the past two winters, more than 200 people have taken shelter here.
“In our common area, we take down all the dining tables and bring the cots out at night, and folks sleep on the cots,” said Johnson. “When the cots run out, they sleep on the couches.
“When we run out of couches, folks will just pile up blankets and sleep on the floor.”
In total, Johnson says the overnight shelter only has room for 20 people.
“We are full every night,” she said. “We are at capacity. And unfortunately, we don’t have room for everyone.”
On the coldest nights, Johnson says they have to turn away nearly as many people as they can bring in.
“Sometimes folks will sleep in apartment hallways,” she said. “They’ll sleep in business lobbies. Some folks are camping outside, under tarps and sleeping bags.
“Sometimes all we can do, when we can’t accommodate someone, is call the RCMP and ask them to keep an eye open to make sure that they’re safe.”
Shelter workers do their best to outfit clients with coats, boots and blankets — but they rely on donations to keep those supplies stocked up, since winter gear is expensive, and there aren’t always enough to go around.
Some women try to find a place out of the cold at the local women’s shelter, which tries to help when there’s room. Karen Sanderson, director of the Piwapan Women’s Centre in La Ronge, said women and children fleeing family violence will always find a safe place to stay through Piwapan. The options include their shelter, a shelter down south, a hotel in the community, or making a safety plan to stay somewhere else until a shelter bed opens up.
But their mandate is focused on helping women fleeing intimate partner violence — not the cold. In 2021, the women’s shelter had to turn away women seeking refuge from the winter weather nearly 100 times.
Isaiah Halkett, who has spent many days and nights at Scattered Site over the years, says he and his friends try to care for one another when times get hard.
“Our life on the street is pretty rough,” he said. “So we live it the best we can, and we look out for each other as best we can.”
'Living day by day'
La Ronge gets dangerously cold, especially on winter nights. At the start of December, the Northern Inter-Tribal Health Authority (NITHA) released an extreme cold warning, as temperatures were expected to drop near minus 40 degrees at night.
In that bulletin, NITHA warned that anybody spending extended periods of time outdoors is at risk of windburn, frostbite and hypothermia.
Periods of extremely low temperatures like this happen in La Ronge every winter.
“Try being out at minus 52 degrees in the weather out there, with just one blanket and a couple of you guys,” said Dorion. “Even in a little bit of shelter, it’s still really cold.”
But when the shelter is full, there’s nothing else to do.
“Sometimes, when the space is taken, we don’t argue about it,” he said. “We just go outside and do what we can out there.”
For Johnson and the other shelter workers, having to turn away even one person in need on a cold night is devastating.
Closing the door on ten or twenty people with nowhere else to go, night after night, is almost unbearable.
“I am terrified that I’m going to come to work and find out that one of my friends has died,” Johnson said. “I am terrified that I am going to find out they had nowhere to go, and they froze. It’s a constant fear.”
Even as she works long shifts at the shelter — sometimes up to 36 hours at a time, when they’re understaffed — she struggles with guilt.
“Knowing that I have to turn people away when it’s minus 30 or minus 40, while I go home to my nice warm house, is very difficult,” she said. “There’s a lot of times where I’ll go home and I’ll be thinking about my friends, and I’ll just turn right back around and come back to work. Not because I’m needed here. Just because I’m worried.”
So far, since Scattered Site opened its overnight shelter program, Johnson says no one in the community has frozen to death sleeping rough in the winter. But with more people out on the streets, and no more beds available — and sometimes, even fewer services than there used to be — she doesn’t know how long that can last.
“There have been a lot of cutbacks to social programs over the years,” she said. “If they keep closing our doors, people are going to die.”
As more people in La Ronge find themselves in need of help, Johnson says everybody, from community neighbours to government officials, needs to be treating this situation like a critical emergency.
With services like Scattered Site stretched to the breaking point and turning away more people every year, this is death by a thousand cuts; a thousand frigid nights sleeping rough in a small northern town.
“There is so much stigma around homelessness,” Johnson said. “A lot of folks will see our street people, and … say ‘why don’t you just get a job? Quit drinking, get a job, do this, you know it’s your fault. You made these choices.’
“But each and every one of the people that accesses this program has a heartbreaking story. They didn’t wake up one morning and decide that they want to live under a bridge, or become an addict, or die in a snowbank.
“If people could just realize that each one of these folks out here is a person — they’re good people — it would help a lot.”
In the meantime, with months of winter left to go, Halkett says he and his friends among the street people in La Ronge are focused on survival, "living day by day."
