What if the city’s unhoused population isn’t the problem when it comes to the growing tensions on the streets of Montreal?

What if it’s everyone else’s attitudes toward homelessness that are really the issue?

A new report on social cohabitation released by the Office de consultation publique de Montréal last week challenges elected officials, service providers, business owners, police and “housed” Montrealers alike to take a long look in the mirror.

The landmark report was ordered by Mayor Valérie Plante when efforts to establish resources for the vulnerable backfired in certain neighbourhoods and provoked a backlash in others before they even got off the ground.

If Plante’s hope was to open hearts and minds while countering NIMBYism, the OCPM certainly delivered. But if the intent was to ease pressure on the city over its approach to addressing homelessness, that didn’t happen. The opposite, in fact.

The OCPM calls for a complete rethink of what “cohabitation” even means, whether for decision-makers at three levels of government or “privileged” Montrealers with a roof over their heads.

But it also casts many of the prevailing policies for dealing with vulnerable people in a harsh light, from ousting the unhoused from métro stations, to city-run warming centres with nothing but chairs for those spending the night, to park benches with armrests to prevent sleeping, to no-dozing policies in libraries, to police ticketing people for loitering, to bulldozing encampments that spring up in parks or on vacant lots.

The report offers up 22 recommendations for improving what have often been described as deteriorating conditions on city streets, first and foremost “formally declaring — for example, with a........

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