In Quebec’s Abitibi-Témiscamingue region, there is anger in the mining community
Warning: There is bad language in this story.
Most municipal council meetings go unnoticed. Not so for one person in Val d’Or, Que., where fear, anger, and racism came to the surface and a hateful shouting match broke out.
“An Indian is piss-taking outside!” cried out a local man.
“It’s always the Native people,” an angry business owner said.
Residents of this city of about 33,000 are angry about homelessness and small crimes, which seem to be turning leaders against each other and reopening old, painful wounds.
Johanne Lacasse, who works at the Native Friendship Centre in town, said, “I was completely shocked and couldn’t believe that in 2023, people have no more filters when it comes to racism and racial jokes.”
Val d’Or is a small city 530 kilometers north of Montreal. Its name means “valley of gold.” It is there because of the precious metal, and there are mines all over the area.
But First Nations people like the Anishinaabe, Cree, and Algonquin lived in the area long before that.
The mining community and these countries have sometimes worked together and sometimes had trouble getting along.
The executive director of the Native Friendship Centre, Édith Cloutier, said that Val d’Or is a hub for the north and a service network for the Indigenous and Anishinaabe communities around it.
Since Val d’Or has been Val d’Or, Indigenous people have always lived there and interacted with each other.
Cloutier said that when some people get to the city, they find that there is no housing or that it is too expensive for their budget.
Some end up on the street.
Residents have been saying that they feel unsafe in recent weeks. They have protested what they say is an increase in small crimes and asked the police and elected officials to do something about the homeless.
Mayor Céline Brindamour says that crimes like theft, being drunk in public, and harassment have gone up. When asked for statistics, the provincial police did not respond.
Brindamour has asked for help with resources from the provincial government.
But some people say that talking about crime has made it easier to treat Indigenous people badly. Indigenous people make up about half of the homeless people in the city.
Victor Thursky says he has seen racism for himself.
“I don’t want to be someone who is prejudiced based on race. I treat everyone the same way. But as a homeless person, I’ve seen how bad that is,” he said while sitting in a living room at La Piaule, one of Val d’Or’s homeless shelters.
“People misjudge me. I know how it feels to be wrongly judged, and I feel like I was put down, you know?”
Thursky comes from the Rapid Lake Algonquin Reserve. For luck, he says, he wears a medicine pouch on a necklace around his neck.
For decades, he’s been battling alcoholism, and, as a result, he found himself without a roof over his head living in Val d’Or.
He went to the downtown pharmacy to get some medicine, but he was kicked out instead.
“He tells me, ‘Get out of here. “I couldn’t care less about you, native.” “He told me that,” Thursky said.
“I can’t even go to 3rd Avenue from there.”
The business-filled street Thursky is talking about has become the center of the storm.
Opening old wound
The people who live there say they want the police to do more to stop crime.
“On top of being homeless, there was crime,” said Brindamour, who has been mayor for the past year and a half. “This kind of caught people off guard.”
People started saying things like, “Hey, I don’t feel safe walking around in my downtown area.”
It’s what made Brindamour contact the government of Quebec. But then something strange happened. The local MNA, who was at the council meeting, didn’t offer to help. Instead, she snapped that it was time for the city to do something about the troublemakers.
Pierre Dufour said to the mayor, “Serious steps need to be taken.”
“The problem doesn’t need to be fixed by the government.”
Then, for many, he made things worse by saying that some of the division and unease was caused by how the city government responded to a 2015 Radio-Canada investigation that put Val d’Or in a harsh light.
The investigation by EnquêteDetailed claims that provincial police officers in Val d’Or abused and sexually assaulted Indigenous women.
Eight officers were taken off the job right away. Two were cleared quickly. The other six couldn’t work for a year, but they were also cleared in the end. There were no charges, and 41 police officers sued Radio-Canada for a little more than $2 million. The court will hear the case next year.
Dufour said at the meeting, “It was a show full of lies that attacked very honest police.”
Even so, it was a wake-up call, and the province started the Viens Commission to look into how Indigenous people are treated in Quebec.
The commission found that they face widespread systemic discrimination, such as when the provincial police who patrol Val d’Or make assumptions about their race.
Dufour says that the city should have fought back and stood up for its police officers. He says that police officers who don’t feel supported will only do the “strict minimum” when it comes to following the law.
Many people liked what Dufour said at city hall, but others were disgusted.
The CAQ MNA’s comments were “unacceptable and shameful,” according to Cloutier of the Native Friendship Center.
“We feel like we’ve been cheated. “I say ‘we’ because the people in this friendship center are Indigenous,” she said.
“We walk with people who are on the outside of society, whether they are homeless or Indigenous women.”
Dufour apologized after people asked him to step down, but many people still feel hurt by what he said.
Working toward solution
Even though it might not seem like it, Cloutier says that things have gotten better in Val d’Or since the Viens Commission.
“It’s small steps, but a lot of small steps taken by a lot of people,” she said.
“It made a direct, two-way connection with the government of Quebec.”
Cloutier says that the problems in the city are a problem for society as a whole and that the Native Friendship Center is at the center of making things better.
Soon, work will start on a building that will help Indigenous people get off the streets by giving them temporary housing.
It will have 20 units and give people access to public services, cultural events, and lessons.
The center, which will be 50 years old next year, will also be bigger.
Cloutier said, “We feel like we’re making a difference in the way people live in Val d’Or, and we are.”
But for some people in the middle, this latest dispute is a step backward.
“There’s a lot of healing that will need to happen,” Johanne Lacasse said.