“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

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.

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.

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.

A dozen Ontario mayors are asking Premier Doug Ford to use the Constitution’s notwithstanding clause to give authorities and police more power to break up homeless encampments and force more people into mandatory drug and mental-health treatment.

The demand, made in a letter dated Thursday, was signed by Barrie Mayor Alex Nuttall and Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, both of whom have championed the idea of mandatory treatment in recent weeks, as well as Mayor Paul Lefebvre of Sudbury and Mayor Drew Dilkens of Windsor. But absent are signatures from the mayors of the province’s largest cities: Toronto, Ottawa and Mississauga.

And where is Chairman Chow?