Three angry men and a triple crisis in Durham region

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Three angry men sit around a conference table. They have summoned a reporter to describe the crisis that has swamped the community they lead, making them feel frustrated and often abandoned.

The conference room is in the municipal headquarters for Durham Region, just east of Toronto. With three quarters of a million residents and thousands more arriving every year, Durham is booming. Its biggest city, Oshawa, the historic auto-making hub, is issuing record numbers of building permits and drawing throngs of students to its expanding colleges and universities. Just down the highway in Pickering, dozens of residential towers are springing up to house the newcomers.

But there is a cloud hanging over its success. Like so many places in Canada, from small towns to big cities, Durham is facing a triple-pronged crisis of drug addiction, mental illness and homelessness. Though the region set a goal of eliminating homelessness by 2024, the unhoused population has been rising instead. The number of fatal drug overdoses reached 129 in 2021, seven times the figure in 2013.

The three leaders have called the meeting to explain what they are up against. Over the next two and a half hours, they give vent to their exasperation.

The police chief goes first. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Peter Moreira spent three decades as a Toronto cop, 10 of them on the homicide squad. He investigated 100 murders and saw “the worst things one human being can do to another.” His last post was head of 51 Division, a tough downtown precinct on the east side of Yonge Street.

He arrived in Durham this spring to lead the regional police force and found himself facing many of the very same problems. Police spend a lot of their time dealing with a small group of people, many of them experiencing mental illness or addiction. Just 10 individuals account for 60 per cent of crisis calls. Drug dealers and other criminals swoop in to exploit them.

Chief Moreira tells every politician that will listen that things will get worse unless the country invests in better mental-health treatment. “It is a massive gap and we need to start treating mental illness seriously,” he says. “It underpins everything that we deal with.”

Next to speak is the mayor of Oshawa. Dan Carter has seen the triple crisis up close. He was sexually assaulted as a child and suffered from an undiagnosed case of dyslexia. He started drinking hard in his teens after his brother was killed in a motorbike crash. He ended up living on the streets. He finally recovered in his 30s and started a career in broadcasting, then entered politics, winning the mayor’s chair in 2018.

Now, like counterparts across Canada, he is confronting what he calls “the worst health crisis this country has ever faced” – worse than AIDS, worse than the heroin epidemic, worse even than COVID-19 in its stubbornness and complexity.

He lists off some numbers. Twenty-two people a day die of opioid overdoses in Canada. About 240,000 Canadians have no home, a scandal in “one of the richest countries in the world.” Untold numbers suffer from mental illness, some of them sleeping on sidewalks. The crisis is so severe that, by rights, “it’s got to be on the front page every single day.”

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The drain on Durham’s resources is enormous. Each overdose call ends up costing about $4,000, once the time of all the paramedics, police and firefighters is figured in.

The victims themselves “believe they’re absolutely invisible, that they don’t matter and nobody cares.” Whatever their condition, Mr. Carter likes to remind people, “they’re somebody’s kid.”

He has taken calls from the parents of those who have died on his streets, asking: Why didn’t you save them? “What do I say?” Mr. Carter asks.

The regional chair goes next. John Henry says that, for years, he has been calling on Ottawa to declare this problem a national crisis and “fund it in the way it needs to be funded.” Instead, he gets crickets. “Have you heard a federal leader of any one of the three parties stand up and talk about the challenges that we’re having and how we’re going to fix this together?” he asks.

Once in a while, he says, a higher government will throw Durham a lifeline – a funding announcement here, a supportive remark there – but much of the time he feels “we’re an island, trying to fend for ourselves.”

Unless things turn around, Mr. Henry says, “I’m worried about my kids. I’m petrified about my grandchildren and what they’re about to inherit.”

None of the three is admitting defeat. To help deal the troubled people on its streets, the region has started sending mental health workers out with police and social workers with paramedics. It is opening a new youth refuge in Oshawa and new homeless shelters in the adjacent city of Whitby. Mr. Henry says that, altogether, the region is spending $75-million on housing and homelessness this year.

Nor are they laying all the blame at the feet of others. Mr. Carter, the mayor, says he has made mistakes himself. One was putting most of the services for vulnerable people in one place: a strip of downtown Oshawa. That drew predators and worsened the disorder on the streets, he says, angering residents and business owners. “That was a critical error. I take full responsibility for that.”

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They get help from other governments for some of their programs and they appreciate it. But all three feel that something has to change, and fast.

“I’m really, really worried that despite all of our best efforts, without some support in the area of mental health, we’re going to start seeing a slow but steady decline. And at some point, we’re going to hit that tipping point,” says Chief Moreira.

Mr. Carter says that “we’ve got to get serious on all levels of this.” Though he doesn’t want the chief just “throwing people in jail,” he says the courts need to get tough on traffickers for “selling their poison,” even if it means charging them with criminal homicide.

If he were to talk to Justin Trudeau, he says, he would ask: “Mr. Prime Minister, what was the last time that the opposition party leaders and yourself got into a room and sat down to talk seriously about the number one health crisis this country has faced?

“For God’s sake, do something.”