A mayor, once a homeless addict, tackles housing and drug crises

There are politicians – almost all of them – who try to put the best possible gloss on their professional resumes and past lives. Then there’s Dan Carter.

“For 17 years I was an absolutely terrible person,” said Mr. Carter, the mayor of Oshawa, Ontario. “Horrible individual. I lied, cheated, stole.”

Homeless and addicted to drugs from his teens until he was 31, and essentially illiterate due to severe dyslexia. He was fired from more jobs than he could remember, Mr. Carter said, adding: “I really had no skills, no abilities. no education, nothing.”

But perhaps it was this atypical background that appealed to voters in Oshawa, a city of 175,000 on the shoreline of Lake Ontario, who first elected him mayor in 2018. Or at least, his story positioned him as someone who could apply his personal experiences to the city’s most pressing problems.

Written in colored markers on a whiteboard in the conference room next to Mr. Carter’s office at City Hall are the problems facing Oshawa: the number of overdoses (398 last year); the number of homeless people (currently about 350); the cost to the city for the overdoses (over half a million Canadian dollars, or about $365,000, last year). Next to this list is a flowchart of his plans to change things.

“It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be labor intensive, but that’s what it takes,” said the 63-year-old Mr. Carter during a walk through City Hall. He gestured to a nearby park where several homeless people gather in the cold: “Or,” he said, “we could just keep doing this.”

Mr. Carter was born in New Brunswick and was adopted by a family in Agincourt, Ontario, a farming town that quickly became a suburb – part of Toronto’s Scarborough neighborhood.

Growing up, Mr. Carter struggled to connect with his strict adoptive father, their only connection: a radio program about current affairs. After every show, he and his father would debate politics.

His dyslexia, which went unrecognized during his school years, made learning almost impossible. But a bright spot was his relationship with his three older siblings, especially Michael, a Toronto police officer whose death, at age 28, in a motorcycle accident, deeply shocked the 13-year-old Mr. Carter.

At his brother’s wake, Mr. Carter’s friends introduced him to alcohol, starting a downward spiral.

“All I knew was that alcohol gave me the things I desperately wanted,” Mr Carter said. “When I drank, I felt confident. When I drank. I thought I was funny. When I drank, I was charismatic. When I drank, I didn’t have to think about the failure I was.”

Alcohol, he said, also helped him forget that he had been sexually abused at the age of seven by a man at a gas station on his newspaper delivery route; he still finds the smell of gas and oil unbearable, he said.

Mr. Carter is remarkably self-deprecating and in one area he has always been self-confident. “All I can do is talk and all I can do is sell,” he said. With those skills, new clothes and lying about his age, he started a series of retail jobs at the age of 14.

But alcohol and drugs consumed his earnings. He bounced from job to job until he found himself unemployed. Apartments gave way to rooms, rooms to friends’ couches, and eventually to the streets of Toronto.

Having no friends and being estranged from his family, at the age of 31 he called his sister Maureen Vetensky out of desperation. She was a successful businesswoman in Toronto and told him to come to her house.

When he arrived, Mr Carter said: ‘She hit me on the side of the head and said, ‘You have two choices. Either you get sober or you die today.’”

With local addiction treatment programs at capacity, Maureen flew her brother to Los Angeles for treatment. That experience, he said, gave him an important insight into treating addiction: It takes time. His treatment lasted a year.

It’s not a message welcomed by administrators in Ontario’s perpetually strained public health care system, he acknowledged.

“But if I had been on a treatment program for 21 or 28 days, I can tell you I wouldn’t be sitting here today,” he said.

On his return, Mr Carter worked at an off-track gambling club, where an actor suggested his voice would work well on television.

The idea stuck.

Despite having no experience, he convinced a local cable TV station to let him host a talk show. He later founded a production company, used an inheritance from his father to buy a building to create a small studio and persuaded a broadcaster to carry the show. Mr. Carter’s pay initially consisted only of a cut of advertising revenue.

“The Dan Carter Show” made him a local celebrity, and his guests on the show gave him the education he had been missing.

His talk show celebrity and the political connections he developed led to his first successful mayoral campaign in 2018, in which he won with about two-thirds of the vote. He was re-elected in 2022 by a similar margin.

As mayor he continued to work on his lack of reading skills; both writing and reading remain a struggle. He sets aside extra time to complete the briefing papers at City Hall.

Dan Walters, who met him about 20 years ago through community work for the Oshawa-based Ontario Tech University, said Mr. Carter was bringing people together and getting projects going even before he entered politics.

“He’s a good showman,” Mr. Walters said. “But beyond that, there’s a certain layer of authenticity that people are drawn to, and he’s just absolutely smart. I think people see him as a leader because that’s what he is.”

Mr. Carter’s policy agenda goes beyond homelessness and addiction. Days before he was first sworn in as mayor, General Motors told him it was about to close auto production in the city after more than a century.

“I have never publicly criticized General Motors,” Carter said. “Instead, we worked and worked to find ideas to bring them back.” The factory reopened in 2021 and now employs just over 3,400 people, up from 2,500 when it closed.

Even as mayor, Mr. Carter said, he has discovered there is only so much he can do about addiction and mental health.

“My frustration is that I am the local mayor of a town,” he said. “But not only do I have to get eight of my colleagues from all other municipalities to agree with me, but I also have to compete against a system that absolutely has its own mentality.”

What he can do is try to humanize the homeless and people with mental health issues for his constituents.

“It’s like they’re untouchable,” he said.

An early attempt to help the city’s homeless by installing plastic, portable toilets downtown failed when some were set on fire and others used for drug injections or prostitution. He eventually funded new, permanent public toilets at a nearby shelter.

Mr. Carter also managed to secure financing for 27 small housing units, but not for the 24-hour occupancy he said the facility needed. A murder soon followed.

“I’m absolutely sick of it because all I want is to see the program succeed,” he said. “But I’m not going to give up.”

He has been criticized for hiring private security guards to work the streets of downtown Oshawa in 2020. Mr Carter said they are there to help the homeless, but critics call this harassment. (The guards are now being replaced by social workers.)

There have also been setbacks in his personal life. His sister Maureen died by suicide in 2000. In his grief, Mr. Carter said, he left his second marriage (he has since remarried). But neither episode, he said, tempted him to return to his addictions.

Mr. Carter said he will not seek a third term, but he vowed not to give up on the issue that brought him into politics.

“People say, ‘Oh, the mayor hasn’t done enough for the homeless, he hasn’t done this, he hasn’t done that,’” Mr. Carter said. “What I can tell you is that every day when I come to work, the most important thing I think about is the people suffering on the streets.”