Community health nurse Cathy Crowe has worked with the homeless and disadvantaged on the streets of Toronto for almost a quarter century. Long ago, a homeless man at the corner of Sherbourne and Dundas Sts. in downtown Toronto described her as a “street nurse.” That is how Crowe prefers to refer to herself still, signing off an email to me this week with “Cathy Crowe, street nurse.” As the content of her note made clear, however, Crowe does not regard those she works with as “street people.” In fact, Crowe and others who work closely with Toronto’s homeless consider “streetperson” to be a derogatory term. Crowe’s email drew my attention to an article published in the Star on April 30. Headlined, “Man admits to strangling streetperson,” it reported on the savage beating death of a “kind and gentle” 33-year-old homeless woman named Bly Markis — but known to many as “California.” The story recounted the moving testimony of Markis’s parents as Martin DeNarvaez, 25, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in her April 2008 death. Her mother, Eleanor Markis, noted Bly was a successful working woman until she got into drugs at age 30, leading to a slide into homelessness. Crowe, who is currently the voluntary executive director of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee, questioned the story’s headline. “The article itself was sensitively written but I found the caption diminishing and pejorative,” Crowe said. “I’m hoping you and the Toronto Star will be willing to engage in some discussion regarding how people who are homeless are portrayed and labelled.”
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