The first time Colin Beaudry was arrested, he was just 13 years old. Now, at 47, Beaudry is finally breaking a cycle of addiction, incarceration and homelessness — a change he hopes will inspire others.

Beaudry now lives alone in an apartment he finally secured in April after a year of living on the street. He even has a cat named Kit Kat.

“Maybe I’ll give someone else hope, too,” said Beaudry as he sat at a picnic table in Dundonald Park in Ottawa’s Centretown neighbourhood.

“If they see that someone else could make it, that was in the same shoes as them — not a lot of people make it out of where we are — maybe it’ll show someone else that you can do it.”

Beaudry is tall and lanky with shoulder-length brown hair. He speaks quietly and smiles subtly.

He says he was bullied in school and it’s why he started lashing out. Before he turned 12, Beaudry moved into residential care at Sudbury’s Algoma Hospital, now part of Health Sciences North.

At the time of his first arrest, Beaudry was living at a group home in Sudbury, Ont. During one summer, staff took the kids to a camp and Beaudry used the opportunity to break into nearby cottages and steal alcohol. That event marked the beginning of many years spent in and out of jail for offences mostly related to breaking and entering.

“I was hooked on drugs. I had to support a habit, so you do crime to get the drugs you need,” he said.

Beaudry also served three separate federal sentences, spending four years behind bars for the last one. At that point, being on the inside was easier than being out, said Beaudry.

“I feel more comfortable inside because it’s where you spend all your life,” he said. “It’s easier in there for me than it is out here on the street. I find it difficult sometime because I feel like I can’t relate to people.”

Beaudry has enrolled in an addictions and community service worker program at Willis College. He hopes to graduate in the spring. (Rebecca Zandbergen/CBC)

Tragedy delivers another blow

When Beaudry was released from prison in 2012, he worked on himself, he said. He met a woman and two years later they had a baby named Autumn Wendy.

Sadly, Autumn died at seven weeks after contracting group B streptococcus, which turned into pneumonia. She died from sepsis, Beaudry said. Two years later the couple broke up.

“It led me back to being on the street again,” he said.

In 2020, Beaudry moved to Ottawa and met Shawna Thibodeau, a woman who had escaped abuse in 2008 and fled to Ottawa to begin a new life.

“When I got here with my child I needed help, just like many of us do,” Thibodeau said.

Once she was back on her feet, Thibodeau started volunteering with different service agencies and began distributing bags of toiletries and snacks to vulnerable people, including Beaudry. By 2023 he was homeless, living on the street and sometimes sleeping at the Ottawa Mission.

“It wasn’t very good … it’s always full there. Hard to get to bed and stuff,” Beaudry said of the downtown shelter. Beating a drug addiction is nearly impossible when you don’t have a safe and private place to live, he said.

“When you’re homeless, it’s always around you and it’s hard to get away from it,” said Beaudry. “So you end up using. It’s always in front of you.”

Eventually, Beaudry ended up in the Mission’s live-in treatment program, which doesn’t require clients to be abstinent. That kick-started his road to recovery, he said.

“You can stay in your room all day if you want, so that kind of helped me out till I got my place,” said Beaudry.

After escaping an abusive partner, Shawna Thibodeau began helping people who live on the streets of Ottawa. (Rebecca Zandbergen/CBC)

It took getting a home to get clean

This past April, with the help of a Canadian Mental Health Association worker, Beaudry was offered an apartment, paid for monthly through the Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP). Today, for the most part, he’s clean, he said.

“All I needed was a set place that was safe for me,” he said. “I don’t have to be around anybody if I don’t want to. It just makes it a lot easier to be off drugs that way.”

It’s a sentiment housing advocates have long echoed.

“In order for you to get clean, in order for you to get your life back together, you need a house first, you need a base,” said Austin Ward, who is Métis from Manitoba and a housing specialist with Options Housing, a non-profit that runs supportive housing in Ottawa.

Austin Ward is with Options Housing and helps people experiencing homelessness find places to live. He is Métis from Manitoba and visits Dundonald Park every Tuesday to meet with people in a sharing circle. (Rebecca Zandbergen/CBC)

Though Beaudry isn’t currently working, he hopes to. He’s enrolled in the one-year addictions community services worker program online at Willis College, a private career college. He hopes to graduate in the spring.

“I figured I want to help out, too — maybe help someone like me that was addicted before,” said Beaudry. He also recently reached out to Thibodeau to see if he could help her distribute her bags.

“It’s like a proud mama bird and your bird just flew from the nest,” said Thibodeau. “I bawled my eyeballs out. It’s a wonderful story.”

“I feel good, pretty much, day to day,” said Beaudry. “Not every day is peaches and cream, whatever, but I’ll make it through.”