A Mayor Who Knows Homelessness From the Inside

Dan Carter was adopted at the age of two after going through the foster care system. By his own account he began drinking and using drugs at 13. He has also said that an undiagnosed learning disability left him functionally illiterate until he was 31, when he learned to read and write.

Carter has named addiction as the number one factor behind his homelessness. He says it cost him his family, friends and work and left him bankrupt in every area of life. He describes homelessness as horrible, and says that people living on the streets are very strong people. The Tyee piece does not date the period, only that it came before he turned 31.

At 31, his sister persuaded him to enter a treatment programme. He calls recovery the only thing that saved his life, and he says he has now been sober for 28 years. That programme was his first step out of homelessness.

He went on to work as a broadcaster and a regional councillor in Durham Region, Ontario, and was sworn in as mayor of Oshawa, a city of about 170,000 people northeast of Toronto, on December 3, 2018. In that role he works on homelessness. He works with Durham Region Non-Profit Housing, which runs a jobs programme and an initiative offering internet to tenants for nine dollars. He also helped fund and launch a mobile health unit staffed by a health care provider, an addiction worker and a social services worker, and is working on single-room shelter concepts with support services. He says his goal is to keep expanding services until nobody is homeless.