Calgary renews programs, awareness as homeless face dire challenges of winter

The City of Calgary and 20 other partners have started the annual extreme weather response, providing seasonal day spaces and other services for Calgarians who are homeless.

Chaz Smith remembers being homeless and the awful sense of foreboding that arrived with the snow. As temperature temperatures plunged, the very drugs holding him in thrall became the rescue line keeping him alive.

“Your immediate concern was obviously that it’s cold. You’re going to freeze and die outside when temperatures drop,” Smith, now an outreach worker, said in an interview.

“In your mind, you’re trying to figure out where all the warming spaces are that you can get in to… When it’s that cold, it hits -20 C, -30 C, I did use substances in order to stay awake, wrapped myself in blankets, try and find heated parkades.”

Smith, now 35, was a teen when he lived on Calgary’s streets. He said when the ice came, he and his friends became heat seekers — parkades, shopping malls, transit buses, train stations.

In these circumstance, drug use – especially the stimulants – rises, “so people can stay awake and keep walking and keep moving because as soon as you stop, that’s when things get dire.”

Smith is the founder of BeTheChangeYYC outreach group, providing food, water, blankets, hygiene supplies, tents and tarps three nights a week in the city’s downtown.

For the 60,000 Canadians who are homeless, this is the start of the deadliest time of year.

A point-in-time enumeration in 74 communities across Canada in 2024 found the number of the unhoused has nearly doubled over the past six years. More and more are living in unsheltered locations, such as encampments.