“Homelessness & Affordability Crisis”

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?

The Bank of Canada is walking a tight rope as they rapidly cut the key interest rate to salvage the country’s sluggish economy while risking a drastic run-up in real estate demand and pricing.

The central bank announced Wednesday it’s cutting its key overnight interest rate by 50 basis points — a half percentage point. That brings the overnight rate to 3.75 per cent.