Once a Homeless Addict, Mayor Takes On Drug Crises

HE CAN RELATE –

Nov. 25, 2023 – “For 17 years, I was an absolutely horrible individual,” said Carter, the mayor of Oshawa, Ontario. “Horrible individual. I lied, cheated, stole.” Homeless and addicted to drugs from his teenage years until he was 31, and essentially illiterate because of severe dyslexia …

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

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

“It’s going to be expensive, it’s going to be labor intensive, but that’s what it’s going to take,” said Carter, 63, during a stroll around city hall. He gestured toward a nearby park where several homeless people congregate in the cold: “Or,” he said, “we can just keep doing this.”