She’s been an addict all her life. “And I’ll be an addict for the rest of my life,” she says. 

But the opportunity to train as a peer support worker for sex trade workers, many of whom are addicts too, has changed her life.

“I used to be high from the time I woke up until the time I couldn’t stand any longer to get high,” she says. “That’s how bad of an addict I was.” 

Now she’s a “soft user” and has been housed for 7 years. She’s taken back her life and enjoys helping her peers.

TORONTO - Five months after being fired, Gaetan Heroux still hasn’t given up hope of regaining his job as an ID worker at Neighbourhood Link and returning to his office on Sherbourne Street in Toronto’s Downtown East End.

Heroux was terminated last December after refusing to relocate to Scarborough, a move his supporters felt was punishment for standing up for Street Health workers embroiled in a bitter struggle to unionize their workplace and negotiate a first contract.

Almost 100 people braved the cold Tuesday to stand in solidarity with workers as they attempt to negotiate their first collective agreement at Street Health, a non-profit community-based agency providing physical and mental health programs to homeless and under housed individuals in the southeast core of Toronto.

In April 2008, sixteen workers voted for a union at Street Health; only six voted against it.

On November 23, Gaetan Heroux announced that he would not be moving from his office at Street Health and would continue to work there as he has for the last ten years. A few days later, he received a directive from Neighbourhood Link (Heroux’s employer) saying that his files and computer would be moved on Friday, December 4 to their office at Victoria Park and Danforth in Scarborough.

You can no more drive Gaetan out of Dundas and Sherbourne then you can tell the Pope that he can’t be in the Vatican, said anti-poverty activist John Clarke, as he addressed a group of supporters Monday during a rally outside Street Health.

In early December, Gaetan Heroux is slated to move his administrative office inside the offices of Neighbourhood Link (his employer) at Danforth and Victoria Park Avenue.

But Heroux said he won’t go.

For over 20 years, Gaetan Heroux has worked with homeless and poor people at Dundas and Sherbourne in Toronto’s downtown east end. But the much loved anti-poverty activist now faces forced relocation after he and fellow ID workers wrote a letter of support for the unionized staff at Street Health,a non-profit community-based agency providing physical and mental health programs to homeless and underhoused individuals.