This week we bid farewell to Edmonton’s downtown Italian Bakery, which has turned out to be one of those nice things we can’t have anymore. The bakery’s been in the same location in the city’s Chinatown since 1960 — our Chinatown has some Vietnam, Italian and Portuguese seasoning. In 2020, with social conditions in the neighbourhood in free fall, the building fell victim to arson, but after a prolonged renovation it reopened 13 months ago.
I had a beautiful Christmas, full of laughter and light. But through it all, I kept wondering about the woman on the sidewalk.
She is camped out on a busy street just a few blocks from my house in west-end Toronto. She sits on one of those folding camp chairs with her back to a small tree. Her feet rest on a second chair. Layers of blankets and sleeping bags cover her from head to foot.
She has been there – or spots nearby – for months. Day after day, night after night, in all weathers, she sits silent and unmoving in the same place. She wears a big hood and a vest that covers her neck and mouth, so only her eyes are visible – wary, watching. If it rains or snows, she raises an umbrella and holds it on her lap.
Homelessness soared to the highest level on record this year, driven by forces that included a surge in migrants seeking asylum, a national housing crisis and the end of pandemic-era measures to protect the needy, the federal government reported on Friday.
The number of people experiencing homelessness topped 770,000, an increase of more than 18 percent over last year and the largest annual increase since the count began in 2007. Nearly every category of unhoused people grew, with the rise especially steep among children and people in families.
The report, released by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, showed that homelessness had risen by a third in the past two years, after years of only modest fluctuations. The agency blamed factors such as “our worsening national affordable-housing crisis,” inflation and the end of certain aid programs from the pandemic.
Non-profit Transition Québec in Gatineau has opened a shipping container village that was built to manage a 268% increase in homelessness since 2018.
Meanwhile, many migrants who recently came to Canada have been housed in hotels with catering and security.
Twenty-six years ago, Lorenzo Berardinetti was a leader at the dawn of a new civic era, the head of the Scarborough delegation in the first Toronto megacity council.
Six years ago, he was at Queen’s Park, helping steer the province from the helm of its justice policy standing committee after winning four elections as a Liberal MPP.
Tonight, he will have his bag searched. He will take his shoes off and have them inspected for weapons and drugs. He will sleep in a room with 23 other people.
An Ontario Superior Court judge issued a ruling Monday that the City of Hamilton did not infringe upon the Charter rights of 14 homeless people who were evicted from local park encampments between 2021 and 2023. As Canadian jurisprudence on this issue seems tinged with judicial activism, and has often protected violent encampments at the public’s expense, this decision is an unexpected victory for common sense.
California’s biggest downtown areas are crumbling under the weight of homelessness and drug addiction, causing a vital part of its economy to dry out.
Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco have made countless headlines since the pandemic about their drug-infested streets where businesses are quickly pulling out due to high crime rates and low consumer passage.
But for people like Matt Haney, a Democratic Assembly member from San Francisco – who lives in its terrorized Tenderloin District – these deteriorated downtowns are vital to a city’s survival and community building.
Premier Doug Ford’s government is introducing new legislation that it says will give municipalities and police services legal tools to dismantle homeless encampments and crack down on public drug use with fines or jail time.
Ford announced the pending legislation at a news conference Thursday morning, the last day the legislature will sit before leaving for winter break.
“These encampments are taking over public spaces, with illegal drug use happening out in the open,” Ford said. “Enough is enough, this has to stop and it will stop.”
Poverty activists are condemning Doug Ford’s Ontario government for threatening to use the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms’ notwithstanding clause to clear homeless encampments. Invoking the clause, however, is an entirely justifiable response to a recent, precedent-setting Superior Court ruling that used shaky logic to grant encampments borderline-immunity from public accountability.
After nearly a decade of Justin Trudeau holding power supported by the NDP, it is revealed that home ownership in Toronto and Vancouver is now more unaffordable than New York, Miami or L.A.
“Canada’s housing prices have risen faster than any other country in the G7 since Justin Trudeau took office,” said federal Conservatives in a recent statement.
A Winnipeg shelter says it’s seeing a rising number of seniors accessing its services, with some experiencing homelessness for the first time.
“A lot of them are simply being priced out of life, for a lack of a better term,” said Darren Nodrick, the director of development at Siloam Mission in Winnipeg. “Increased cost in rent as well as food is just too much.
“Some folks that are accessing our drop-in are coming for meals because they’re having to choose between rent and/or food.”
Trudeau and all his LPC members are heartless lying scumbags.
Downtown Kitchener Ontario. Anyone remember growing up in Canada and seeing anything like this? How about prior to 2015? Trudeau has failed Canadians & Canada in immeasurable ways. pic.twitter.com/txlwhLCWqY
— Ryan Gerritsen (@ryangerritsen) November 29, 2024
One residential construction worker would have to produce nearly three-quarters of a home each year to meet the federal government’s 2031 housing goal, a number of homes-per-worker nearly two-times higher than today’s average, given major challenges around innovation and supply chains.
Last April, the Trudeau government announced its new housing plan, which included the promise of 3.87 million new homes by 2031.
As cities across North America grapple with homelessness, one Canadian city has taken a different approach by regulating tent encampments instead of banning them, as it tries to tackle what one official calls the issue “of the decade”.
Andrew Goodsell has called his small orange tent on a grassy patch in downtown Halifax home for almost a year.
In late October, on a park bench outside his makeshift dwelling, the 38-year-old described life at the homeless encampment where he lives with about a dozen or so others as “depressing”.
Honest but otherwise known as washing your hands of it.
There are children playing in Allan Gardens — a pleasant sight that had long disappeared from view.
Moms and nannies pushing prams without fear of a looming menace or having to sidestep needles underfoot. No annoying music assaults the eardrums from boomboxes. Nobody cooking meth or blatantly consuming a host of street drugs.
Dogs are being walked — and not the curs kept as pets by homeless people who may not have had a single other source of companionship in their hardscrabble lives.
The homeless are shifted elsewhere because they are a political asset to the likes of Chow.
They’ll crow about this success today and be demanding more funding a week later.
Rinse and repeat.
A chill wind is blowing across Ontario.
As winter looms, homeless people are hunkering down in tent encampments. With the ground hardening under them in public parks, rival political camps are digging in for a fight.
So politicized is this issue that we cannot even agree on how to describe the people or decide on a policy. Activists insist that people in need are not the homeless but the unhoused, or “people experiencing homelessness” — a phoney war preoccupied with terminology over policy.
