The mainstream downtown crowd sees them walking the streets, bent at the waist, their bodies and limbs locked into positions they cannot straighten, and disparagingly refer to them as “druggies” and the “walking dead.”
But to Terra Bruneski, the drug-addicted street people she knows are not "zombies." They are people caught in a vicious cycle of substance abuse, hooked on potent chemical cocktails that render them unconscious and take control of their lives.
Targeted with scorn, treated like vermin, the homeless people Bruneski knows are not bad people. They just need help.
“Remember that they have mothers, fathers and kids - they’re just people so hurt and so alone that they’ve sedated themselves to the point of barely being awake,” said Bruneski. “That’s how lonely they are. People don’t realize that when you don’t have a home it stops you so much from being able to get out of that, and it just gets worse the further down you go.
“They don’t have a home, they don’t have a shower, they don’t have a place to get clean clothes. They’re not choosing that,” she said. “You can judge a society by how they treat their most vulnerable and their poorest people. Jesus would have been living out there at Moccasin Flats because he was around the poor and the lepers, the people who needed it most.”
The 42-year-old Prince George woman knows what the city’s down-and-outers are going through because she’s lived that life and, as a street survivor, continues to struggle with her own addiction demons.
The difference is Bruneski now has a safe place to call home. Her one-bedroom apartment is in the four-storey BC Housing supportive/complex care housing development in downtown Prince George at 150 Ontario St.
It’s her escape from the poverty that forced her onto the street, a buffer from the cold outside and the predators who go after the vulnerable. It’s a place where she still uses drugs and that won’t be grounds for an eviction notice.
“I’m very, very lucky to be in here,” said Bruneski. “There’s safe-supply stuff downstairs. It takes away the worries of disease and being attacked. Everyone I know that’s homeless has filled out a thing for BC Housing, but there’s not enough housing. There’s not enough space for everybody.”
Most shelters and supportive housing complexes have strict rules against drug use and tenants can be evicted if they’re caught using. The Ontario Street facility has no such barriers. Smoking is not allowed in the rooms but the building has a supervised safe-injection room on the main floor monitored 24/7 by staff where tenants are allowed to use illicit and safer-supply drugs.
Bruneski first encountered homelessness a few years ago when she was subletting a room from a friend who was evicted for not paying rent. Family members helped her temporarily until she moved into a travel trailer with her mentally ill boyfriend and his mother. There was no running water. She and her boyfriend ended up in a tent in an encampment next to the Prince George courthouse, a place where violence was never far away.
“It was scary,” she said.
Bruneski tested positive for COVID during the early months of the pandemic and BC Housing placed her in a room in the former Knight’s Inn on Dominion Street, where the couple lived for about a year until they moved into the Ontario Street facility.
She worries about her friends who have to leave at the 11 p.m. visitor’s curfew. She knows that most often they will have no safe place to go and will have to spend the night camped outdoors in an alleyway or under a building alcove, where they’re at their most vulnerable.
A 46-unit City of Prince George/BC Housing project on Third Avenue will open this fall next to Moccasin Flats and she’s hopeful it will alleviate some of the supportive housing bottlenecks that force poor, sick and drug-addicted people to live on the street.
“With the fentanyl now, because they put benzodiazepine into the drugs now, basically you can pass out anywhere,” said Bruneski. “It was dangerous before to do heroin but now it’s awful. People don’t get robbed anymore. They just wait for people to pass out and they take all their stuff, and they don’t know it.”
Bruneski says she’s had to intervene to help unconscious users, straightening their bent arms, legs and bodies so they won’t stay like that until the effects of the drugs wear off.
“Because of the benzos you don’t move and there’s the danger of staying in one awkward position for that long. Then they can’t walk properly when they wake up,” she said. “It’s like you’re tranquilized. Whereas heroin you still knew what was going on around you. Now, the girls out there wake up and it’s a regular occurrence in the shelters too to wake up and not know who you were with, and not know where your phone or your purse is. It wipes your memory of the last 24 hours and some people are on the same repeat cycle."
The risks are clear. “It’s not safe," she said. "Women are getting kidnapped, it’s crazy. It’s so sad to see. We need more housing.”
Before she became addicted to drugs Bruneski was an athlete and college student. She grew up playing rep soccer in Prince George and after graduating high school studied criminology and calculus at the College of New Caledonia.
She started using hard stuff after her father committed suicide and has been using on and off for about 20 years.
“I’ve been functioning but a lot of people aren’t, it’s kind of a mental illness,” she said.
“A lot of people can do a drug once and they’re fine, but it’s just like schizophrenia or an anxiety disorder, something just screws up. So you use to try and self-medicate. It’s hard to get a lot of mentally ill people to take their meds and because there are no insane asylums anymore they just get kicked out onto the street. What makes it more dangerous is un-medicated people who are grouped with people that are also homeless, so they’re more susceptible to doing drugs and that makes the mental illness worse.”
Bruneski didn’t choose to become dependent on drugs. It just happened, and she could see herself slipping away.
“I almost joined the army, because I could feel the addiction coming, but I didn’t quite get there,” she said. “It’s a lifelong fight. You can sober up for even years and it comes back. Most people are treating an emotional issue where something bad happens, which is more likely to happen in this lifestyle. Pain-killing drugs affect the same part of your brain as physical pain and it's like we’re treating emotional pain.
“My dad had cluster migraine headaches and osteoarthritis and he was part of the oxycontin craze where they told him it wasn’t addictive. He took it the way they prescribed it and they were just handing it out like candy and he ended up killing himself 15 years ago. The drugs got out of hand."
Bruneski said he became suicidal after her mom left him and doctors suddenly cut off his pills. Bruneski got him on to a methadone program but it didn’t work. Depression took over after his death and she was hooked on heroin for 15 years.
“Meth got me first, on my 17th birthday,” she said. “I started it on a weekend and it just gets out of hand. I followed a boyfriend down to Nanaimo and he ended up in jail. I sobered up for two years (five years ago) and came to take care of my grandmother while she was in her last days.”
Bruneski tried to stay clean. She went through detox at UHNBC and was part of the Narcotics Anonymous day program that helped her stop for those two years but it didn’t last. She resumed her heroin habit and when she couldn’t get that Bruneski turned to fentanyl. She’s now on prescribed methadone and safer-supply opioid and tries to avoid illicit drugs.
“It’s too dangerous,” she said. “I got addicted to heroin down south and it’s not heroin anymore. It’s fentanyl and it’s got benzos in it and it’s scary. There’s no heroin anymore. Fentanyl’s cheaper and so people can make more money off that. It’s harder to get heroin now. Here, you can get fentanyl anywhere.”
Bruneski’s building is monitored day and night by support staff and visitors have to pass through two locked security doors before they can enter the building. Each apartment has a locked door and visitors have to leave before the curfew.
“They’re very conscious of who’s in the building and I like that they do that,” said Bruneski, who often invites friends in so they can get out of the cold or have a shower.
“The staff get to know the people that are coming, as long as they’re decent people, they give you a bit of slack. But it’s tough kicking them out at 11 when it’s cold because it’s too late at that time to sign into any shelters.”
The tiny apartment on the fourth floor where she’s lived since July 2022 is crowded with everything she owns and to get to her bed she has to walk a narrow corridor to get around her bicycle. She has a small stove and a private bathroom and for Bruneski her apartment is a safe place where she can let down her guard.
Homelessness is spiking across Canada and one of the reasons is the cost of rent. The average two-bedroom suite in Prince George goes for $1,500 per month, double what it was three or four years ago. That far exceeds what Bruneski and her boyfriend can afford with their monthly welfare cheques, which provide $375 each for rent assistance. Even if they were to pool their resources to share a place with someone else, she said most landlords will not rent to them.
“Nobody wants to rent a one-bedroom apartment to three people, especially people who look like us,” said Bruneski.
“The drug-addicted community has become more savage because of the fact you can’t afford a place. You can’t afford to live and have to get harsher just to survive. I think if they take away safe supply there will be exponential growth in crime, just because people will have to turn to crime to get what they need to feel better. Safe supply has softened that so much, there’s a lot less criminal element to drug addiction. There’s not as much property crime and people breaking into other people’s houses, that I’ve seen.”
Having like-minded neighbours going through the same struggles helps Bruneski deal with her own addictions. She’s found a sense of community unlike any she’s had since she fell into her drug-dependent lifestyle, where nobody casts judgment.
“Sympathy can feel like pity but empathy feels like health, and if you haven’t been through it, it’s hard to empathize,” she said. “People think it’s a party but we hate ourselves, too. We tell ourselves we’re not doing well and we understand the full ramification of what we’re doing, it’s just hard to break free of it once you’re in that cycle.”
An estimated 500 people are homeless in Prince George and the problem is highly visible in the downtown streets where people tend to cluster close to the agencies that lend support. The cold and snow each winter complicates their lives.
“Everybody moves farther south (if they can) because at least in the winter it’s not death,” said Bruneski. “I know people here who have lost their legs to frostbite. It’s dangerous.”
As harsh and inhospitable as street life is, she’s also seen the kindness of strangers who go out of their way to make them feel that they do care about what happens to them. They come by to hand out sandwiches or blankets and it restores her faith in people.
She knows Ontario Street won’t be her permanent address. With the help of social workers and staff she trusts who offer life and career counselling, she’s hoping to turn her life around and go back to school. She tried online courses a few years go but couldn’t deal with the lack of stability she now has, living around a network of people who genuinely care about shaping a better future for her.
