Three days before Christmas, John Grant Yusak was evicted from the closest thing he’d had to a home in months.

It was a storage locker.

At six feet tall, he could barely squeeze into the space. He piled up his bins, laid an air mattress on top and wrapped himself up in a sleeping bag. He called it “reasonably comfortable.”

“I was at the storage locker for about a month before I got discovered,” he said. “Somewhere I slipped up, but I tried very hard to be inconspicuous … it was just get in there, crash, get up.”

It was the end of a six-month journey that took Yusak from his truck to an airport waiting room to an all-night bus circuit, as he tried every option he could find to avoid ending up at a homeless shelter after a previous bad experience.

City staff estimate about 218 people are living unsheltered in Ottawa.

That number includes people staying in informal arrangements like cars when staff come across them, but the city doesn’t keep a specific count of how many fall into that category.

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CBC News
January 4, 2024