Incumbent Montreal mayor Denis Coderre is promising new measures to help fight homelessness including a pilot project for a "wet shelter" - a safe space for homeless people with alcohol abuse problems to consume alcohol and to sleep.
Coderre also wants to open temporary warming shelters every night during winter - between December and April - instead of waiting for deep freezes.
Other measures his party Team Coderre is promising:
-day and evening drop-in centres in all boroughs;
-adapting services to specific clientele such as indigenous peoples, youth, seniors, the disabled, and members of the LGBTQ community;
-creating 400 new spaces in rooming houses;
-devoting a part of city tenders for coops and social economy groups.
They'd also conduct another homeless census which was already announced by the city. They'd continue measures to fight racial and social profiling and to get people back into the workforce, though they weren't specific.
There was no estimate for the cost of this plan which would continue the administration's action plan that began in 2014 and cost $37-million.
That plan aimed at getting 2000 homeless off the street by 2020 but Coderre said they're still crunching the numbers for that.
Projet Montreal's 11-point plan to fight homelessness includes reserving 3000 new social housing units over ten years for the homeless, increasing the number of contracts for workers to help get the homeless off the streets and into job retraining programs, and creating a pilot project to offer more city jobs to the homeless who finish these job retraining programs.