The main sense you get from reading the latest city report on homelessness is that this is an industry. As with any industry, the last thing it wants to do is go out of business which is why the “solutions” offered up are about perpetuating the problem, not solving it.
It’s probably appropriate since the report is actually a “Stakeholder Engagement Report” titled, “What We Heard: 2025-2030 Strategic Plan to Address Homelessness.”
“It has reached the point now where it is an actual humanitarian crisis,” Greg Gurnick, a Berkeley property owner, told the San Francisco Chronicle this week. He’s talking about Ohlone Park, where tents, needles, and human waste now crowd out the dog walkers. The crisis is real — but it isn’t just in the tents. It’s in the nonprofits and agencies that are supposed to help.
Canada’s housing market is “cracking” under the weight of U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war, with housing resales down in markets across the country, a new report said.
The Royal Bank of Canada report looked at the data from the MLS Home Price Index, which is essentially the median price of a house in a market.
The sharpest pullback in people getting into the housing markets has been in southern Ontario and British Columbia, RBC economist Robert Hogue said.
Not to worry they’ll just open the mass immigration floodgates wider to juice the housing shortage.
Most Americans understand the link between homelessness and crime. But activists and academics reject the connection, insisting that the homeless pose no elevated crime threat. A new report from the Cicero Institute complicates their argument, revealing that a large share of the nation’s homeless population is composed of registered sex offenders.
The report, covering 41 states, compared counts of sex offenders listed as “homeless” or “address unknown” on state registries with the federal Point-in-Time Count database to determine what proportion of a state’s homeless population appears on its sex-offender registry.
HAMILTON — Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre said Wednesday he would give police more power to dismantle tent cities, which he claims are making public spaces unsafe.
During a policy announcement in Hamilton, Ont., Poilievre said Liberal policies, including the funding of safer supply programs, are responsible for the increase in homeless encampments across Canada.
“For those trapped in these camps, our brothers, our sisters, our friends, our neighbours, they are left to suffer in the cold, to overdose, and sometimes to die alone,” he said. “Letting these tent cities spread is not compassion. It is chaos.”
Soaring housing costs, with many homes nearing $1 million, have sparked an exodus from cities like Vancouver, and Canadians want their next prime minister to do something about it.
Janet Robertson had few choices after being evicted from her apartment of two decades in Vancouver, Canada’s most expensive city.
Even listings in nearby suburbs were out of reach after years of paying 900 Canadian dollars, or $650, monthly for her studio apartment. She kept going until she could find something she could afford and ended up renting in a town about 60 miles east of Vancouver.
“I really didn’t have any other options but to come to Chilliwack,” Ms. Robertson said.
Indian spiritual teacher Osho once said, “Democracy basically means government by the people, of the people, for the people — but the people are retarded.”
His words resonate as millions of Canadians — like Matt Janes, pictured above — prepare to vote for Liberal Leader Mark Carney, who recently unveiled a $130-billion spending plan. The plan echoed Justin Trudeau’s mission to spend Canada into prosperity and offset what he calls “the biggest crisis of our lifetimes.”
There’s a hard truth that Canadians need to wake up to, especially homeowners: The government is broke.
The numbers don’t lie. Federal debt has more than doubled since 2015, climbing past $1.2 trillion. Interest payments on that debt are now larger than what Ottawa spends on health care transfers to the provinces. They’ve run out of room to borrow without consequences. They’ve run out of excuses, and now, they’re running out of people to tax — except you.
If you own a home, particularly if it’s paid off, congratulations. You’re about to become the government’s next target.
Interesting that the people most likely to vote for Carney are home owners hoping to protect their equity by continuing the housing shortage caused by Liberal party mass immigration policy.
And now they find that their hard won gains may be stolen by their savior Carney.
As they say: Be careful what you wish for.
Which party leader will help young Canadians? Old and young disagree, Nanos poll finds
… Broken down by age, those in the 18 to 34 category were by far the most likely to trust Poilievre and the Conservatives to help young Canadians over Carney and the Liberals, at 38 per cent and 26.4 per cent, respectively.
Respondents who were age 55 or older had the opposite view, with 41.4 per cent naming Carney as the most trustworthy on that issue and 25.8 per cent favouring Poilievre.
Those in the 35 to 54 category were more evenly split between the two leaders and their parties, leaning towards Poilievre and the Conservatives by just 1.8 percentage points.
Mass immigration caused the housing shortage.
It was a thoughtlessly cruel policy decision by the Liberal government that has visited great harm to Canadians.
Before Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Canada and threatened its sovereignty, the Canadian psyche was consumed with another major issue: housing affordability. With an election on the horizon, voters are wondering if any party has a plan to fix what has become a generational problem.
Willow Yamauchi says she was just a “regular” person when she and her husband bought their family home in Vancouver 25 years ago for a modest sum of C$275,000 – around C$435,000 ($312,000; £236,400) in today’s dollars.
That same property is now worth several million.
In the city in Canada’s pacific northwest, Ms Yamauchi’s story is as common as the rainy weather. The average price of a detached home in Vancouver in 2000 was around C$350,000. Now, it is more than C$2m.
The federal Liberal government is belatedly trying to fix a housing affordability crisis it created though immigration policies which caused population growth to far exceed Canada’s capacity to build new homes to accommodate it, according to a new Fraser Institute study.
“Despite unprecedented levels of immigration-driven population growth following the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada has failed to ramp up homebuilding sufficiently to meet housing demand,” said Steven Globerman, co-author of the study, “The Crisis in Housing Affordability: Population Growth and Housing Starts 1972-2024.”
Demand for the services of local food banks has never been higher, and Carolyn McLeod-McCarthy of the Guelph Food Bank says she’s worried about the impact U.S. tariffs will have on the local economy and workers.
“We’re quite nervous about what that’s going to mean for being able to provide food to people in need,” McLeod-McCarthy told CBC News.
She said the southern Ontario food bank is seeing more people needing help than ever before.
You never used to find tents in Scarborough’s Collingwood Park.
The tiny oasis of greenspace tucked near Sheppard Avenue East and Kennedy Road is usually home to little more than grassy expanses, winding paths, a narrow creek and play equipment. But this spring, as outdoor homelessness has continued to surge across Toronto, 11 campsites were set up throughout the park.
Last spring, there was only one; in the three springs before, none at all.
The soaring cost of home ownership is a challenge facing people across Canada, arguably nowhere more so than in big cities like Toronto.
From the 1980s through the late 2000s, the price of the average home in Toronto and the surrounding Greater Toronto Area stayed within three to five times the average annual household income.
But since 2010, that ratio has shifted dramatically. The average home now costs nearly 10 times the yearly income of the average household, based on data from the Toronto Region Real Estate Board (TRREB) and Statistics Canada.
Combine that with the fact that Toronto and the GTA account for one in six seats up for grabs nationally in the federal election and it’s little wonder the main parties are trying to woo voters with promises to make housing more affordable.
Only the CBC could produce propaganda like this.
At no point is the Liberal Party’s scandalous mass-immigration policy mentioned as a cause of Canada’s horrific housing shortage.
Let’s stop building houses for foreigners and build them for Canadians! pic.twitter.com/PSTNet2ZOq
— Maxime Bernier (@MaximeBernier) April 9, 2025
New Yorkers are remarkably united in their support for involuntary treatment for the seriously mentally ill. According to polling from the Association for a Better New York, New Yorkers across boroughs, political parties, and demographic groups overwhelmingly back forced treatment.
