ST. JOHN, N.B. – The second person to die at a Saint John, N.B., homeless encampment in as many months was funny, generous and very much loved, says a community volunteer who says he knew him well.
Forty-four-year-old Jamie Langille was found dead Tuesday evening at an encampment near the causeway over the Courtenay Bay Channel, police say.
Langille lost his leg to frostbite last winter while living by himself in a tent, but he remained kind and jovial, cracking jokes and sharing whatever he had, said Ivan McCullough, a co-founder of Street Team Saint John.
“Despite everything he had gone through — what would have broken a lesser soul — he was always, for the most part, very pleasant, very upbeat, very gracious,” McCullough said in an interview Wednesday.
“There’s going to be a hole in our community at large.”
Emergency responders found Langille dead in his tent after they arrived at the encampment just before 9 p.m. Tuesday, the Saint John Police Force said in a news release. His body was taken to hospital for an autopsy, but police said they do not believe his death was criminal.
McCullough said he did not yet know how Langille died. The public has a tendency to assume unhoused people typically die of drug overdoses, but that often isn’t true, he added.
Langille’s death comes just weeks after 58-year-old John Surette died in a tent near Paradise Row, in the north end of the city. Surrette was found not far from where three people died last winter in two separate tent fires.
The federal housing advocate, Marie-Josée Houle, has said that in order to respect people’s human right to housing, cities and provinces should provide essentials to people living in encampments — heat, sanitation, electricity — if officials cannot provide them with a safe, stable place to live.
Those kinds of basic amenities “would have helped” prevent some of the deaths, McCullough said.
“We keep running into a … ‘Not in my backyard’ situation,” he said. “People all agree something needs to be done, but don’t do it near me. It’s demoralizing.”
The public needs a better understanding of what is happening in Saint John — and in New Brunswick — to drive people into homelessness, he said.
“A whole lot of the folks who are unhoused are not substance abusers, or they weren’t when they first got on the street,” McCullough said. “We know folks who are on the street that have full-time jobs. They’ve been renovicted, they’ve been basically told to get out.”
A “renoviction” occurs when a landlord evicts a tenant to renovate an apartment and put it back on the market for a higher rent.
New Brunswickers will elect a new provincial government on Oct. 21. McCullough said he hopes party leaders will put forth strong housing policies that recognize the systemic issues forcing people to try to survive in encampments.
As of about 2:30 p.m. local time Wednesday, no party or leader had made a statement about Langille’s death on social media, nor had any party issued a media release about it.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 2, 2024.
— By Sarah Smellie in St. John’s, N.L.
