Ottawa police, paramedics take fresh approach to ByWard Market [Video]

Austin Gionet cruises past Ottawa’s ByWard Market building when a woman flags him down. 

Her name is Thumper. She sleeps in a staircase nearby and needs his help. Her hand is swollen around her thumb. 

“I punched the security guard,” she tells Gionet, smiling.

Thumper insists it was a joke, but her hand is hurting so Gionet wraps it.

He suggests she see a doctor at a walk-in clinic the following day, and hopes that by gaining her trust she might one day take his advice. 

“I don’t like going to the hospital,” Thumper tells him. “Once you’re a mental patient they treat you like a mental patient as soon as you walk in and I hate that.”

It’s interactions like this that Gionet says drew him to the job. The …