My name is Frédérique Favreau, and I am the clinical director at La Halte du coin. I have a bachelor's degree in criminology. I worked for two years at the ministère de la Sécurité intérieure, in the detention facilities in Montreal. I have also been working on homelessness for nearly 11 years now.
La Halte du coin is a shelter for people experiencing homelessness. It's a shelter with a high accessibility threshold, which means that we respond to emergencies and try to stand out from the crowd by setting ourselves apart.
The things we do differently include a number of programs, such as the ECHO project, a program for peer support workers, who train to help others. Afterward, these people are the ones who welcome people experiencing homelessness to our shelter.
There's also extended emergency, which acts as a small bridge for people who have something confirmed, but for whom we can't make the connection with our partners. Thanks to this program, we can support them until they secure their housing or their therapy, wherever the setting.
We also have the emergency treatment fund, or ETF, which is a very valuable federal program for people with mental health and addiction issues. We take them in for a number of months to help them then integrate into housing.
We also have the local medical clinic. That means we have nurses and doctors who come to La Halte du coin to meet with people experiencing homelessness and address their various needs.
Lastly, we have a day centre to meet the need in our territory, since there's a shortage of day centres, especially on weekends. We open our doors to all people in vulnerable situations so that they can come and get support services, hygiene services and food services.
In terms of statistics, applications have significantly increased since 2020. I'm putting a lot of emphasis on the aspect of new faces. We really do have a lot of new faces at La Halte du coin. From April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2025, we welcomed more than 887 separate people, for a total of 16,000 overnight stays and more than 3,000 refusals, an average of nine refusals per day. More recently, from April 1, 2025, to March 31, 2026, we welcomed 964 different people, for a total of more than 20,000 overnight stays and 5,000 refusals. It's important to note that we have increased our welcome capacity by 15 additional spaces, and we have doubled the number of refusals, which shows that the needs have really been growing since 2020.