Montreal shopping mall playing 'Baby Shark' song to prevent unhoused from loitering
CTV
A shopping mall and office complex in downtown Montreal is being criticized for using the popular children's song 'Baby Shark' to discourage unhoused people from loitering in its emergency exit stairwells.
A shopping mall and office complex in downtown Montreal is being criticized for using the popular children's song "Baby Shark" to discourage unhoused people from loitering in its emergency exit stairwells.
At the mall Thursday morning, the catchy children's song — versions of which have been viewed and streamed hundreds of millions of times online — was being broadcast from speakers in at least one of the stairwells, on loop and at various speeds.
Complexe Desjardins, named after financial services company Desjardins, which owns the mall and the towers that sit above it, has been playing the music for one year in the stairwells to respond to "security issues" involving people experiencing homelessness, spokesperson Jean-Benoît Turcotti said Thursday.
Since that time, the company has "noticed an improvement," he said in an email.
But one advocate for the homeless says it is "cruel and unusual" to play a song on repeat, purposefully to irritate people.
Far from helping address the root causes of the problem, the mall is shifting the issue to a different location, Sam Watts, CEO of Welcome Hall Mission, which offers services to homeless people, said in an interview.
"It isn't possible to resolve the complexities of homelessness by using juvenile tactics that are conceived to exclude people," he said. "You don't solve a problem by displacing a problem."
