A mayor whose past determines his approach to homelessness and addiction

USA

In Dan Carter, whom I profiled this week, Oshawa, Ontario, has a mayor with an unusual background. But the city is facing a situation that many, perhaps most, Canadian municipalities face: a growing population of homeless people, many with addiction and mental health issues.

[Read the Saturday Profile: Once a Homeless Addict, a Mayor Takes On Housing and Drug Crises]

As I describe in the profile (the link can be accessed without a subscription to the New York Times), Mr. Carter was a homeless addict from his teenage years before turning his life around at the age of 18, which brought with it an extraordinary number of setbacks brought along. 31.

I leave it to the profile to tell his story and document his major actions during his time in office. Not surprisingly, Mr. Carter, now in his second term, has atypically made tackling homelessness, addictions and mental health issues top priorities during his time as mayor.

The political debate surrounding homelessness often falls into two camps. Some Canadians feel threatened by homeless people, thinking they are a source of crime, and some business owners think they keep customers away. The people in that camp usually want them to disappear from the streets. The other camp argues that they are citizens in desperate need, and not a nuisance.

I asked Nathan Gardner, the executive director of the Back Door Mission, which provides a variety of services to the homeless in downtown Oshawa, a city of 175,000, whether Mr. Carter had changed perceptions in the city.

“He has supported the people since he came to power. He has always focused his message on helping this population,” Mr. Gardner told me. “On a political level, this is not always the case. But from the beginning, he delivered the message: This is a very complex, very difficult population to help and we must try to do our best as a community.

But Mr. Gardner said the combination of the pandemic, increased homelessness and the housing and opioid crises has likely shifted public opinion in the city “more toward the negative” over the past two or three years.

Still, he credited Mr. Carter with limiting the impact of that shift.

The mayor, he added, took a “potentially volatile situation that could have turned into real vitriol and some kind of chaos, and he really managed to contain it and advocate a middle ground for this population.” ”

Mr. Gardner, among other things, said he believed the city would have bowed to calls to close its center had Mr. Carter not been in office.

Mr. Carter talked about the many frustrations he has encountered. As mayor he lacks the power to take direct action. Instead, he has served more as a dealmaker. Oshawa is part of a regional government – in its case, Durham – that controls the funding of social service programs. Addictions and mental health care are largely covered by the provincial government. And housing is a mix of these two levels, with the federal government joining the mix.

One of Mr. Carter’s biggest successes, according to Mr. Gardner, has been convincing provincial departments and ministries to focus on issues in Oshawa.

The mayor was twice asked to run as a progressive-conservative candidate for the Ontario legislature. And he remains close to some members of the province’s current Conservative government.

But Mr. Carter is not a typical conservative. Among other things, he strongly believes in a guaranteed annual income, an idea that has little support among Canadian conservatives.

“I say I have a socialist heart because I really do,” Mr. Carter told me in his office, where a wall was dominated by photographs of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., one of his heroes. “I could never run for federal election because I don’t know where I would stand.”

But Mr Carter also said the time had come to stop tackling issues involving homeless people in a piecemeal, piecemeal manner across levels of government and agencies.

“I need the federal government to actually lead,” he said. “Don’t just write a check and say, ‘Here’s $30 billion.’ But also bring us together and say, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’”

He added: “I really believe we can actually solve this problem. It will take the next 25 years before we can address this. What I do know as an addict is that if we keep doing what we are doing, things will get much worse.”

Trans-Canada

Cameron Ortis, the former civilian head of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police intelligence unit, testified that he passed secrets to members of organized crime as part of a project so confidential he could not reveal it to anyone else in the force. But a jury convicted him on four charges under secrecy laws and two criminal charges. Prosecutors will ask in January that he be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison.
The explosion of a luxury car at the entrance to the Rainbow Bridge in Niagara Falls, New York, caused widespread disruption and panic in a busy part of the US-Canada border. Investigators are still unsure of the cause of the explosion, which killed a couple on their way to a concert in Toronto.
In The Times’ Opinion section, Montreal filmmaker Raquel Sancinetti uses video and animation to document her relationship with her friend Madeleine, who is 107 years old.
“Nanalan,” a Canadian children’s show that debuted in 1999, has found a new audience on TikTok.
India is facing questions over its involvement in an assassination plot in the United States after US officials said they raised concerns to New Delhi over a foiled plan to kill a dual US-Canadian citizen, Mujib Mashal reports. This follows Canada’s accusation that the Indian government was involved in a murder in Surrey, British Columbia.
Peter Tarnoff, a senior US diplomat who helped arrange the escape of six US embassy officials from their refuge with Canadian diplomats in Iran, has died at the age of 86.
An exhibition by Toronto artist Shary Boyle using ceramics, performance and animation, film, painting and textiles is now on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Critic Jillian Steinhauer writes that the exhibition “considers how we create our identities and present them to others – and in turn how those performances feed back into who we are.”
Works by Canadian authors John Vaillant and Naomi Klein are among The New York Times Book Review’s 100 Notable Books of 2023.

Ian Austen, born in Windsor, Ontario, educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has written about Canada for The New York Times for more than two decades.

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