Susan Karner is a board member with Square One Community, Inc., a Moose Jaw non-profit working to establish a low-barrier, housing-first women’s shelter and a permanent warming space in the city.
“I do this in my mom’s memory. She was homeless, and I don’t want, you know, homeless people, or their families or friends to have to carry that pain, like I did and do,” Karner said.
Her mother, Brenda Karner, died Sep. 17, 2003, after a lifetime of mental health issues, addiction, abuse, trauma, housing insecurity, and criminal behaviour.
She was 60 years old.
Who was Brenda Karner?
Susan Karner has obtained copies of her mother’s criminal record and the transcription from her last court appearances. Those institutional records are extensive, beginning with Brenda’s first mental health episode at only 12 years old.
“I don’t know a lot about her childhood,” Karner said. “I know it was difficult for her. … She told me that she was sexually assaulted by a paperboy, and that really bothered her. And at the time, I think her parents didn’t really know what to do with her.”
What they did end up doing with Brenda was sending her to a now-closed assisted living facility for people with intellectual disabilities — a place she did not belong, according to their admitting criteria. She went on to be placed at a ‘home’ in Weyburn, was returned to the assisted living facility, and then she was ‘certified’ and admitted to the former Saskatchewan Hospital for the Insane.
She learned a lifelong distrust of institutions and institutional staff. She never voluntarily stayed in a facility ever again.
“My mum talked a lot in her older years about (growing up in an institution),” Karner remembered, “She told me stories about how they got a lot of shock treatments and she was afraid she wouldn’t wake up from some of them, and how she broke a window to try and get out.”
Brenda finally left the hospital she’d been committed to at 19. She got married and had three children.
But in her daughter’s opinion, Brenda had already accumulated overwhelming trauma from systemic physical, sexual, mental, and emotional abuse.
Even then, Susan said, it was not too late. Her mother could have been helped. There could have been programs teaching Brenda how to have healthy relationships, how to parent, how to be stable.
Instead, the next forty years were a revolving door of treatment centres, jail, homelessness, petty thefts, and more. She was sent to any and every available facility, from Moose Jaw to the Battlefords to Prince Albert.
“They said that my mom was hostile, abusive, loud, and demanding, and sometimes violent, and was difficult to get along with,” Susan said. “I believe that wouldn’t have been her true self to be that way, but it was led by being neglected and abused in a system. She had anger if she was pushed and bothered a lot, but otherwise I remember her as very quiet and gentle with few words and spoke only when necessary.”
By her 50s, Brenda was also terribly underweight, unwell, and chronically unhoused. It became clear to everyone familiar with Brenda that without help, she was going to die of exposure.
Where to put people like Brenda Karner?
In 2001, during a sentencing hearing for a probation breach — she drank alcohol —, Provincial Court Judge David Orr said:
“I want to say something about this woman because I know something about her, both by personal observation and from the records that I perused. I’ve lived in Moose Jaw for four and a half years, and I have repeatedly seen Brenda Karner on the streets of Moose Jaw, wandering around, pushing her belongings around in a pilfered grocery cart, mumbling to herself or shouting incoherently at people in the street … living in the street, being jeered at by teenagers and cursed at by people in the street … in a fashion more suitable to Calcutta than it is to a civilized city in Canada. And I mean no disrespect to Calcutta because for all I know they’re kinder to people like Brenda than we have been.”
Orr went on to call witnesses from a multi-agency coalition that had been specifically formed to find a place for Brenda Karner. Those agencies included Community Living Division, Moose Jaw Police, Sask. Mental Health, Social Services, and Sask. Justice.
The transcript is an awkward read, as representative after representative explained to Judge Orr that they could not take care of Brenda.
“I’m being told, I mean repeatedly,” Orr states in his conclusion, “that there is literally no facility of any kind in this province, private or public, which will admit (her) … And as I mentioned a moment ago that if I don’t sentence her to jail she’ll die of exposure.
“This is to me a pathetic, sad state of affairs … I also find it frustrating to have reports submitted to me which imply that Brenda Karner is a unique problem who somehow has arrived the day before yesterday from another planet, because every judge in Saskatchewan … I’ve ever talked to about this issue recognizes that there are in this province dozens, if not hundreds, of people in her plight.”
The situation has not improved
Days before she died, Susan Karner had a chance to visit with her mother.
“I don’t share it very often,” Karner recalled, “but I remember my mom saying, ‘Patience is a virtue,’ and I said, Mom, what? Why are you saying that?
“And she goes, ‘Well, when you wait things out, good things happen.’ And I thought, Wow.”
Karner said that those words inspire her, but also make her wonder, because Brenda spent much of her life in a cell of some kind or another, waiting for good things which did not happen.
There is still nowhere for people like Brenda Karner. The days of ‘committing’ people against their will for any unacceptable behaviour — often including unwed pregnancies or being 2SLGBTQ+ — are over, a fact recognized societally as positive.
Nevertheless, no ethical, humane replacement has ever been established. The system is still constructed as though substance abuse disorders and mental health issues are voluntary, and struggling individuals can be cured if only they are punished enough, or as though a six-week stay in a treatment centre with no follow-up will convince such individuals to simply hoist themselves by their bootstraps and get on with things.
“You still have to care for them,” Susan Karner pointed out. “There needs to be some form of community.”
Square One
Karner hopes that her work with Square One will contribute to some kind of lasting change. She hopes to inspire more people to be kind and recognize that everyone has a family and a story.
“Even that judge said, in the courtroom, that he’d see people swearing at her and doing things to her. Our family had a difficult time that way, because you’re not just doing that to my mom, you’re doing it to me, you’re doing it to us.”
Karner also hopes that she, her fellow volunteers, and the community of Moose Jaw might finally establish a women’s shelter and a warming space — there are kilometres of red tape.
Such spaces need security, insurance, staff training, sustainable funding, heating, cooling, locks on doors, and more — it takes money, time, and expertise.
Judge Orr, in 2001, said that he had spoken with people who said that Brenda Karner ‘made her lifestyle choice’ and she should be left to live on the street. Others suggested that Brenda should be allowed to die, and that ‘everyone would be better off’ that way.
“There has to be a solution,” Susan said. “Death isn’t a solution. Freezing to death out in the cold isn’t a solution. … Even if they’ve been systemically abused and they don’t trust the system, let’s at least make sure they’re warm and fed. Then, we can work on building that trust again.”
Learn more about Square One on their website at squareonehousingmoosejaw.com/.
On Thursday, March 9, Square One is holding a Walk for Warmth fundraiser. Learn more about that fundraiser on their website — sign up, collect pledges, form a team, and show up to help Moose Jaw reach net zero homelessness.
