Woman found unresponsive in bus shelter raises concerns for more supports to tackle homelessness

Outreach workers in Winnipeg found a woman unresponsive on the floor of a bus shelter like on Monday, as temperatures dipped into the low -30s.

Around 1:45 p.m. Monday, Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service members responded to a bus shelter near Tache Avenue and Goulet Street for reports of an unresponsive woman. Paramedics transported the woman to hospital in critical condition.

A spokesperson with the City of Winnipeg says due to privacy issues, no further details about the condition of the woman are being provided. Outreach workers with St. Boniface Street Links were first on the scene.

Ryan Lampertz, Registered Social Worker at St. Boniface Street Links says the woman was administered with three shots of Narcan, a medicine that rapidly reverses an opioid overdose. The outreach team called 911 and did chest compressions until emergency crews showed up.

“This is an important call for us to take this tragic event and learn from it as a city,” said Lampertz. “I think it is just a call for more questions to be asked and having a broader discussion about shifting the paradigm away from just addressing the homeless issues to addressing the issues that make people homeless.”

Lampertz says the issue of homelessness will only continue with the current, as he states it, band-aid solutions for tackling homelessness exist. He says it’s imperative to look at not only homelessness as a whole but why people are homeless.

“We’re talking about issues about mental health addictions, various barriers that limit people from accessing the social occurrences of health and the list goes on.”

The temperature on Monday afternoon was around -21 degrees Celsius and continued dropping throughout the day. On Tuesday night, into early Wednesday morning, temperatures in Winnipeg dipped to over -30, with the wind chill reaching well over -40.

Arthur Weldon who is an occupational therapist with St. Boniface Street Links says the organization is largely underfunded and does not have access to proper resources to prevent incidents like this from happening. Weldon says they were able to open up a pop-up shelter last night but are not disclosing the location of the shelter at this time.

“It’s not the first case that we have seen like this in our years doing outreach work and it likely won’t be the last this winter unless some changes are made,” he explained. “We have the shelter just to serve the immediate need of some of the individuals in our attachment because otherwise, they would be living outside in the extreme weather we are seeing, but I think this speaks to the lack of resources over here on the east side of the river.”

Lampertz says there is an urgent need for more shelter space and warming centres in neighbourhoods outside of the inner-city area. St. Boniface Street Links is the only organization that provides outreach services to the communities east of the Red River.

“It’s very easy to provide services when we see the people who are homeless and unhoused in the downtown areas because there is a larger population there but then when it comes to providing services to the less visible areas in the city, like the communities we provide services to, then it is easier for those people to go unnoticed. Then situations like this come up and it becomes a tragedy.”