As most McGill students went to bed on a rainy Sunday night last week, Jennifer Sault, Andreas Mertens, and a handful of other students huddled in sleeping bags under an overhang outside the Bronfman Building.
The students had committed to spending the next five nights sleeping outdoors on campus as part of the Five Days for the Homeless, an annual campaign to raise money and awareness for the homeless. This year is the first time that the event, which began at the University of Alberta in 2004 and is now held at many Canadian universities, has come to McGill.
“It’s so easy to walk by the homeless and not see them or get conditioned to [ignore them],” said Sault, U2 microbiology and international development studies. “We want this to be a reminder that homelessness is real.”
The event, organized by the McGill chapter of End Poverty Now, raised $4,933 last week. The funds will be donated to the Projet Autochtones du Quebec, a homeless shelter near Montreal’s Chinatown.
The campaign’s rules, which are the same at each participating university, are fairly simple: students are allowed no pocket money, can only eat food that is donated to them, aren’t allowed access to showers, and can only venture indoors to attend class or extracurricular activities. Though the students are allowed to come indoors if temperatures reach dangerously low levels, last week’s near-balmy weather made that unnecessary.
“It’s actually not as bad as you would think,” said Mertens, U3 education. “The weather’s been fantastic, and all of our friends are really supportive.”
After spending the first night outside the Bronfman Building, the students moved to the Roddick Gates before finally settling on a patch of concrete near the Milton Gates. Though the area is harshly lit and a bit loud when trucks pass on University Street, it does receive a lot of foot traffic.
“It’s guarded from the wind, so it’s fairly warm at night,” said Sault, who is also the national director of End Poverty Now. “It seems to be a good location. We’re reaching a lot of people here.”
Because they could only eat donated food, the participating students subsisted on Tim Horton’s and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches given to them by friends and passers-by. Enough food was donated, however, that the students had trouble polishing it all off.
“We don’t know what to do with all the food,” Sault said during the event. “We actually went and gave it to homeless people yesterday because we had too much food here.”
In addition to the six students who spent all five nights outside, approximately 25 guest sleepers spent a night or two in the cold to show support for the cause. According to Sault, a homeless man named Jean joined the group one night and even offered to donate some food, which the students refused.
The event’s organizers initially had some trouble obtaining permission to hold the event on campus, as the administration does not normally allow overnight events. The request was forwarded to the office of Deputy Provost (Student Life and Learning) Morton Mendelson, however, who looked into the event and signed off on it.
“There are certain kinds of events – certain kinds of fundraisers, typically – for which we feel, under certain circumstances, we can make exceptions,” Mendelson said. “That’s what we ultimately told the group.”
According to Sault, the university was “very supportive” of the campaign. She and the other organizers hope to expand the event in the future, perhaps by recruiting semi-famous guest sleepers such as Justin Trudeau, who spent a night outside at Concordia’s event this year.
Both Sault and Mertens were careful to emphasize, however, that spending five nights outside on campus is just a small taste of the conditions the homeless face on a daily basis.
“I don’t consider it living like a homeless person,” Mertens said, “because we’re certainly still very privileged.”
