‘Harm reduction is love’: MLTC outreach brings care to Meadow Lake streets

“I think this is a safe place that when they come here, they know that we’re safe and that they’re able to open up,” Main said.

The outreach brings health and addiction services directly to people, including sexually transmitted and blood-borne infection testing, counselling, treatment planning, referrals, and follow-up care. The vehicles also provide private space for one-on-one counselling and testing.

Candace Bourassa, an LPN and recovery outreach specialist with MLTC, said the work is responding to growing concerns around substance use and infections including HIV, hepatitis C and syphilis.

“Because we are in a crisis. Drug use, substance use has gone through the roof,” she said.

Meadow Lake Tribal Council wellness and addictions worker Patricia Main, left, and recovery outreach specialist Candace Bourassa stand in front of the council’s mobile outreach vehicle in Meadow Lake on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (Image Credit: Kenneth Cheung/meadowlakeNOW)

For some people who approach the team, asking for help is only the first hurdle. Main said workers have heard from people who want to enter treatment but do not know how.

“We’re able to sit down with them individually, and walk through the program and walk through the process with them of what to do and how to get to point A to point B,” she said.

Treatment itself does not always resolve what waits for someone afterward.

Bourassa recalled one client who spent about 100 days in treatment before returning to the same problem that had been there before – no place to live.

“So they stayed on their path for however long, but then they’re still unhoused. They still exist. The same problem still existed. So then they relapse,” she said. “So that’s our goal: to eliminate the gaps in healthcare, so they to help have them more a success rate.”

Other barriers can be more basic.

Bourassa said some clients have no identification. The team plans to help people obtain health cards, birth certificates and other documents needed for day-to-day life.

“That’s what’s holding some of them back right now.”

Bourassa sums up the team’s approach in four words.

“Harm reduction is love.”

She said the work is about keeping health care accessible, keeping people safe and meeting them where they are. Main said that also requires people to look beyond addiction and homelessness.

“There is somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son, somebody’s mother, somebody’s father, you know, and they all have a story. So if we begin to understand, instead of asking the wrong questions, we need to say, what’s the pain? You know, what’s causing the pain?”

Bourassa said stigma is one of the barriers she hopes the outreach can break down.

“Addiction knows no; it’s not discriminatory. It could affect anybody.”

“More people have it than you even know. Like your neighbor, every profession; it knows no boundaries, and ultimately, nobody’s better than the next person. I just wanna help them all and help them find their help, help them with their self-worth and love.”

Social service students take part in Meadow Lake Tribal Council’s mobile outreach service in Meadow Lake on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (Image Credit: Kenneth Cheung/meadowlakeNOW)

Meadow Lake Tribal Council’s mobile outreach service operates along Railway Avenue near Main Street in Meadow Lake on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. (Image Credit: Kenneth Cheung/meadowlakeNOW)

Bourassa has worked with MLTC for four years and has been a nurse for 18. The people she meets through the work, she said, have changed her perspective too.

“Our clients are so smart. They are so smart. They are so knowledgeable. I learn things from them every single time I converse with them,” she said.

She has also seen how closely people living unhoused in Meadow Lake watch out for one another. If Bourassa has not seen someone for a while, she said others can often tell her where that person is. Sometimes they tell her someone else needs help.

“They watch out for each other,” she said. “They know, or they’ll say, ‘Hey, you should go check out so and so because I think he needs to talk to you.’”

The Meadow Lake outreach is also being used to gather information about the services people are asking for, including counselling, treatment and testing. Main said MLTC wants that information to better understand needs in northern communities and where additional resources may be required.

The outreach is expected to move farther north in October, with Main naming Birch Narrows, Buffalo Narrows, Clearwater and English River among the communities the team plans to visit.

For now, the work continues each Friday in Meadow Lake. One conversation, referral or request for help at a time. And for one woman, it has already become part of an effort to give her children a different story.

“It’s a cycles can be broken through love,” Main said.

“We’re just here to walk with all the relatives, you know, and to begin to pull them out of the pain, the shame, whatever story they’re in, and to believe and call the gold out of them because they all carry gold, they all have gifts and talents.”

“So I think this is what the whole program is about: to see cycles being broken.”

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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com

by Kenneth Cheung

‘Harm reduction is love’: MLTC outreach brings care to Meadow Lake streets

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