Known for its deep roots in Canadian history, Atlantic Canada’s most populous city offers a more dystopian view of the country’s present: hundreds of tents have spilled into public squares and parks as officials grapple with an unprecedented housing shortage.
TLC spoke with current and former tenters — and with church and community leaders tasked with trying to amelioriate a crisis seen more and more across North America.
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Photography by Trinity Gadway
Two crisply dressed men, late in their middle years, converse next to a display of cookies at an Atlantic Superstore in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.
“Well, you’re lucky to have a roof over your head,” one says to the other. Their conversation continues, making mention of the homeless encampment near the old jail, and the tents that have been popping up there — and all over the Halifax Regional Municipality, of which Dartmouth is a part.
“More and more show up every day,” the other says.
Conversations like these are easy to overhear in Halifax: at the store, on the ferry, at restaurants, at church, and in the streets. Like other parts of the world, Halifax has long had a resident homeless population — a typical mix of street people who are struggling with behavioral or mental health issues, coping with recent financial shortfalls, or who otherwise prefer a more itinerant way of life. But in the last two years, homelessness in the coastal Canadian city has become far from typical, with exploding numbers of unhoused and underhoused people from demographics that have never before faced the prospect of sleeping in a public park. The problem has become so visible that it is as impossible to ignore as it seems difficult to address.
“Up until a few years ago we did not have this problem,” Sam Austin, deputy mayor of Halifax, told TLC. “In 2018, the point-in-time count recorded 18 people that were homeless and living outside. That number grew. It was up to 74 last year, and this year it was 178, and those are always undercounts as well, because you don’t necessarily reach everyone. So, really, that’s quite an exponential growth curve, and suddenly people are confronted with folks living on our streets, when that was not part of our reality in any major way just a few years ago.”
The Rev. Dr. Kyle Wagner, rector of Christ Church in Dartmouth, oversees a hub for social support. “It feels like society is crumbling,” he said. The parish has operated a food pantry for 40 years and hosts a community fridge that exchanges food between haves and have-nots. Close to an encampment site and some supported housing locations, Christ Church also hosted a provincially run shelter last winter until the province shut it down.
“I read articles on the Great Depression, and I think that’s what we’re in,” Wagner said. Numbers at the food bank have exploded, increasing from 60 to 70 clients before the pandemic to 150 now. Christ Church works with Feed Nova Scotia, which multiplies client counts by three to estimate household size, meaning the parish now helps feed closer to 500 people every week. “People who have never accessed a food bank before are now using it regularly.”
Knowing just how many people are sleeping rough in Halifax is a challenge, as a few different organizations track homelessness in the city. One of them, the Affordable Housing Association of Nova Scotia, counted 1,029 actively homeless people in the city, with about 40 percent of them women, more than a 500 percent increase since 2019. Meanwhile, inventory of rental units in the province is extremely low. According to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s January 2023 Rental Market Report, Halifax has around a 1% vacancy rate, the second-lowest in Canada. The same report indicated a record increase in average rents in Nova Scotia.
“Overall, same-sample average rent increased by 8.9%, despite Nova Scotia legislating a temporary 2% rent cap for existing leases in November 2020,” the report said.
High costs, low vacancy, and more homeless people than ever have translated into encampments on a previously unseen scale. With few options to place people in housing, the city council voted to designate encampment sites last year, though they are far from the only sites in which people are living outdoors.
Austin said this policy has given people places they could go legally while also allowing the city to encourage them to live in parks that are better suited to encampment. However, he said, the decision also amounted to an admission that people would have to live outside in a place that gets plenty of wet, cold weather.
“It is, I think, a good policy, but man, it’s kind of dystopian in a lot of ways,” Austin said. “It’s trying to make the best of an awful situation, but is it actually helping things?”
Mel is 73 — almost 74 — and before the summer, he had never been homeless before. When he spoke to TLC, he was living in a tent on the Grand Parade, Nova Scotia’s most prominent public square. Like all the homeless people TLC spoke with on the streets of Halifax, Mel was most comfortable sharing only his first name.
The Grand Parade is home to Halifax’s city hall and St. Paul’s Anglican Church, the oldest Protestant church in Canada. At its center is a cenotaph commemorating those who died in Canada’s wars, along with a monument to police officers injured in the line of duty. Other than on Nov. 11 — when many hundreds gather for Remembrance Day ceremonies honoring war dead — the Grand Parade is characterized by its open space. Mel’s tent was one of around 30 or so on the day he spoke with TLC.
Mel had been living in housing designated for seniors, but repeated issues with noisy neighbors prompted him to move out in April. “I just walked out of there,” he said. “I couldn’t take it anymore.” He visited family in Newfoundland and then sought out old friends in Barrie, Ontario. After that, he returned to Halifax in June, where he found his only option would be living in a tent.
Mel said he spent his career working as a cleaner, including at the hospital at the Stadacona Naval Base in Halifax. He retired when his knees could no longer take the work. He was due for a full knee replacement, but he couldn’t move forward with any procedures; tents are not ideal for surgical recovery.
The Grand Parade is not a designated tent site. Mel said he pitched his tent there for safety. Every homeless person TLC interviewed said that encampments, especially those more secluded, can attract problems — drug dealers go in search of clientele, while others arrive hoping to procure cheap drugs or sex. The visibility of the Grand Parade discourages these activities, a plus for people trying to avoid trouble.
Nevertheless, trouble still comes. The Grand Parade is near the heart of the city’s nightlife; Mel said that university students come at night and bring noise and harassment. “They get crazy here at nighttime, running around,” he explained. “‘Get out of my park. You shouldn’t be here.’ And calling us lazy bums and drug dealers and everything else.
“I have never had anything to do with drugs,” Mel said. “I haven’t had a cigarette since I was 18 years old. And a beer? A case of beer will last me three weeks.”
The Grand Parade is a significant tourist site, and Mel said he has interacted with some. “I’ve said hello to them, or smile, stuff like that. Some of them, they put their hands up to their face. … A couple people passed along here two days ago, and one gentleman says, ‘Huh, another Vancouver.’”
Mel said he couldn’t see Halifax becoming “another Vancouver,” where homelessness has long been higher, as people won’t tolerate the colder weather. October had been warm, but Mel said he was ready to put his tent behind him — and that he wouldn’t last much longer sleeping rough in a tent.
“I get so tired of going to it,” he said. “I’m just tired of it.”
Mel made his escape a few days after he spoke with TLC: a local affiliate of Canada’s Global television network ran an interview of him, and a landlord came down to the Grand Parade and offered him a place to stay. After months of living in a tent, Mel had a roof over his head — he had become one of the lucky people who escape.
“Band-Aids” for Hemorrhages
According to Darrin Smith, an independent advocate for homeless people, the avenues of support — shelter and supported housing, social assistance funding, healthcare, and food pantries — amount to a “Band-Aid” not meeting current need. Smith, who has been involved with street missions at St. Paul’s, thinks the numbers are severely undercounted and that the province has failed to acknowledge the existence of some encampments, such as one in Halifax city’s oceanside Point Pleasant Park.
“Now it’s not just bleeding, it’s hemorrhaging,” Smith said. “So Band-Aids aren’t working.”
For example, Smith cited news that a 400-unit community of affordable housing was facing “demoviction” — demolition and eviction of the 1,500 residents there.
“I got a couple [of homeless] families that work. I got a husband and a wife and a child who are living in a utility trailer, because social services says he makes too much money, but yet they can’t afford to pay rent as well as heat,” Smith said.
Austin talked about the gap between what people can receive in income assistance and rising costs of living. “If you’re homeless in this province, you get $380 a month to survive on,” he said. “Could you feed yourself and everything else you need for $380 a month?”
Austin said social assistance rates haven’t been adjusted since 1996. “Of course people are going to end up doing things like panhandling and stealing.”
Vince Calderhead agreed. He is an attorney with Pink Larkin in Halifax and an advocate for improved social assistance. He has talked to people in encampments to learn about their situations.
“Social assistance rates, by definition, are a policy decision, and so when you set rates that are at 30 percent of the poverty line, then you are choosing to have people live in that depth of poverty,” he said. “By not increasing rates at all, you’re effectively decreasing the standard of living by that amount, and look what we have.”
No public housing has been constructed in Halifax in 30 years, in spite of the city growing by more than 200,000 people since then.
“The scale of the challenge has changed dramatically in the last two to three years as people saw their rents and mortgage rates skyrocket,” said Claudia Chender, a member of the legislative assembly for Dartmouth. “Until recently, governments in Nova Scotia have not been contending with historically low vacancy rates and rapidly increasing interest rates.”
In fact, Nova Scotia is facing a shortage in more than just public housing. In a 2021 interview with CBC News, real estate consultant Neil Lovitt said the province had a shortfall of more than 20,000 units in the previous five years. Chender cited an even higher number for the years ahead. “We need to build 70,000 more units to make up the shortfall by 2030, including tens of thousands of affordable units and stronger tenant protections to keep people housed,” she said.
And then there’s healthcare. At the start of September, 142,000 Nova Scotians were on a waiting list for a family doctor, according to the CBC. A 2023 report from Medimap, a service for booking medical appointments, indicated that Nova Scotians wait longer than any other Canadians to see a walk-in doctor and that their wait times swelled from 44 minutes in 2021 to 83 minutes this year. Meanwhile, emergency rooms across Nova Scotia make headlines for wait times — and for the rate at which patients give up and leave the hospital without seeing a doctor.
The multitude of problems in Nova Scotia helped Premier Tim Houston lead his Progressive Conservative party into a majority government in 2021. His party holds sufficient votes (should its members agree) to enact change in Nova Scotia, at least when funding allows.
“We don’t want to see anyone sleeping rough and are working hard to put in place the supports that are needed to keep people safe,” Krista Higdon, a spokeswoman for the provincial government, told TLC.
She referenced “a number of recent investments to support people experiencing homelessness.” Among those investments, Higdon said, are 417 units of supportive housing that have opened in the last two years. Higdon also cited three Dartmouth hotels that had been converted into homeless shelters with integrated healthcare services, as well as increased funding for housing support workers across the province. The province, she said, has also committed to funding drop-in centers.
On the Grand Parade, St. Paul’s has been trying to serve its new neighbors through some existing ministries. The parish has been inviting tenters to Wednesday lunches. The Rev. Canon Paul Friesen, rector of St. Paul’s, said the parish has also brought extra food and groceries to the encampment. “Informal communications are important,” he said, “speaking with tenter organizers/advocates, working together on cleanup, etc.”
Kathryn’s path to homelessness started when she was declared missing while travelling in Quebec. “I ran out of cash and my phone broke at the time,” she said. She was declared missing for 14 days.
“When I got back, my landlord had already started the eviction process against me,” Kathryn told TLC. “I thought the tenancy board was going to be impartial, and I was really wrong. I learned that the hard way.”
Kathryn said she wanted to pay rent that was due, but that issues regarding undisclosed roommates were raised. “I thought that the tenancy board would be looking for the truth, but they weren’t,” she said. “But I’m okay with that, but everyone else is also experiencing that and I can’t wait to just talk to people, and just let them know exactly what to do in these situations.”
Kathryn was evicted on July 18.
“I lived in my car for a while,” she said. Then she found the encampment in Halifax’s Victoria Park, which lies across the street from the Anglican Cathedral Church of All Saints. “I found a family here. Because in my car I was alone, and food was a struggle, and no one understood what I was going through. Here, everyone understands what I’m going through, because we’re all in it together. To me, this is my tent town, this is my village, these are my people, I’ve got my girls around.”
Like Mel, Kathryn said people from outside of the encampments can bring trouble, looking for drugs or sex, including someone who had propositioned her. “I’m like, ‘No. No, no, no, no.’ You learn really quickly — you don’t let anyone past the boundaries of your body in the street,” she said. “They just all want to give you drugs at first, and it’s like, ‘Please, let me give you all this,’ but you know there’s strings attached at the end of that.”
Kathryn said living on the street has meant coming to trust her intuition and herself. But she has also formed strong relationships. She’s been learning from others how to winterize her tent, for example, and said people look after one another. She expressed concern about the number of people who are homeless now — “They’re going to have some people die, if they don’t do something soon” — but also clearly found bright sides to her situation.
“Honestly, I was scared to death of being homeless. It almost broke my mind. And once I actually experienced it, it was such a relief,” Kathryn said. “And a reset. And this is how we’re supposed to live, in little villages, and I’m experiencing how humanity started.”
Pandemic Subsides, Inflation Rises
Kevin Little, outreach facilitator for the Connections That Work program of the Public Good Society of Dartmouth, has been working among food-bank clients in the area for 15 years. During the pandemic, he delivered food due to restrictions at food banks. “What I saw was all kinds of money going out — not a ton of money, but certainly enough money that people could live and feed themselves,” he told TLC. “But we all knew that that time was going to come to an end.
“Eventually, housing started to go up and up and up and up. And groceries started to go up and up. And all of the sudden, the food bank, which had always been … the same number of clients.
“The numbers doubled and tripled, the food banks were just totally overwhelmed,” he said, “and they don’t know, the volunteers, what they’re going to do. Because they don’t have enough food for all the people who are coming to food banks.”
At Christ Church, Wagner has also noticed how church and nonprofit resources are no longer keeping up with need. In the shelter Christ Church hosted last winter, Wagner knew of “two gentlemen that had full-time, well-paying jobs, but just couldn’t afford to rent,” he said. “That’s a crisis, in my opinion. If you’re making a half-decent wage and you can’t afford food or shelter, something’s wrong with the system.”
The priest said this increased pressure feels like “offloading” of essential governmental services onto the church, having to contend with aging demographics, limited staff, and pews that aren’t as full as they used to be. “We’re constantly needing volunteers,” he said. “A lot of the volunteers will get burned out. They can only volunteer so much.”
Some community members who have no affiliation with Christ Church have started helping out, he said. Students at Dartmouth High School are starting to volunteer, as well.
“I don’t think a lot of people realize how much the church does,” he said. “Now that [the food bank] has exploded in use, people cannot deny the work the church is doing. It’s in their face, it’s in the media, they themselves are starting to experience it.
“When people call [provincial helpline] 211 for help, 211 is diverting them to churches. That hasn’t happened in a long time, or ever.”
The middle class, Wagner said, is starting to feel the pinch, and this group is most likely to put pressure on the government to step up. “People that never were worried about the cost of groceries are now worried about the cost of groceries: $10 for a box of cereal.”
At the food bank, “people are angry,” Wagner said. “There’s a lot more anger at the food-bank door. People are frustrated based on their circumstance. Whether they don’t have food or can’t see a doctor, sometimes we take the brunt of that.
“Something has to change.”
Like Mel, Jason said he had never been homeless. The 43-year-old native Nova Scotian talked with TLC next to his tent in Dartmouth Cove. Around dinnertime and under sunny skies, the former chef talked as he cooked packet noodles and canned tuna over a butane stove.
“No good being a chef and no food to cook,” he said. “I just want things to get better.”
Jason was staying at one of the designated sites but left for the same reasons Mel cited: drug activity and “drama.” Unlike Mel, Jason said he had a history with drug use, as well as six years of sobriety.
Jason said he was living in Ontario with his fiancée and that their lives were going well. They had a few cars and a nice home. In 2021, his fiancée died in a horrific car accident. That, combined with the financial troubles caused by COVID, brought Jason back to Nova Scotia.
After falling out with a girlfriend in Dartmouth, Jason found himself living in a tent — trying to get clean and avoid trouble.
Jason said one of the hard parts about being homeless is the things people say and the judgments they offer. “I don’t think they realize that people have different types of life,” he said. They think it’s easy, he said, to climb your way out of a personal crisis.
“If you knew what it was like to live like this, you would not even dare think to put someone down or judge them or make them feel the way that you’re making me feel, because it’s not nice to hurt someone that’s already hurting inside, and to put someone down that’s already down. It just makes people more miserable,” he said.
“Something needs to be done. There’s too many of us that are out here struggling, and the ones that really need to get into the shelters and the hotels … are the ones that can’t get in. Like me, I’ve been trying to get in for months, and I can’t get in. And I’m down there every day, and all my friends are getting in. And I hang with them for two months and they’re getting in, and I’ve been trying to get in longer than them.
“So I don’t know what’s going on. It’s not nice.”
Jason’s tent had disappeared from the cove by the middle of October; he had decided to leave after belongings were stolen from his tent when he wasn’t there. Before leaving, he said he would try to find a more secluded place to stay.
“Stop Pointing Fingers”
Questions remain about just how homeless Nova Scotians will find a way out of the cold this winter.
On September 12, those questions boiled over at a meeting of Halifax’s city council and the premier. As reported by Global, one council member asked Premier Houston how he sleeps at night, given the scope of the crisis, while others suggested the city was in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. “Maybe having the Red Cross come in will embarrass the province into doing their bloody job,” said Lisa Blackburn, who represents Beaver Bank.
For his part, Houston said the crisis was “everyone’s problem.” The premier said, “Pointing fingers and blaming somebody else, I mean that’s for other people to do. But what I would say is, it would be appropriate for the council to look in the mirror a little bit, too.”
Amid finger-pointing and animosity at different levels of government, and with burnout in churches and other organizations, advocacy is the best course of action, said both activists and the homeless.
“People should be advocating directly to the Houston government, especially to the premier’s office and government MLAs [Members of the Legislative Assembly] who can raise this issue at their caucus table and put the pressure on the premier that is required to move the needle,” said Chender, leader of the province’s New Democratic Party. “The provincial government has responsibility for housing and must be the ones to urgently act to address this crisis.”
Smith agreed, saying churchgoers, like all taxpayers, should be doing the same thing: “Starting to question what the Nova Scotia government and the federal government are doing, and start asking the stronger questions as to why they’re not doing it properly.”
“So many things need to happen,” said Christine Hoehn, a parishioner and retiree who serves as volunteer coordinator of Christ Church’s food pantry. “I think ultimately we need to advocate for minimum income … people cannot afford housing and food. There is no housing? Okay, so we advocate simultaneously for housing and fair income, whatever that is and whomever you lobby for that.”
Hoehn told TLC, “We need to advocate politically, but we also need to advocate in our own social strata, because that can do a lot and change.”
Part of her advocacy is “amongst my friends, amongst my kids, amongst my kids’ friends who are in their 40s.” She said her grandchildren are conscious of what they’re seeing in the street. “Being conscious of what’s going on — I think that’s already a big step.”
Wagner, who examined politics within Anglicanism in his doctorate, said parishioners who think they are apolitical often take political actions without knowing it. “I think the church has to take a larger role in advocacy because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we’re struggling to be the service provider.”
For example, Wagner said that a $15 minimum wage only just came to Nova Scotia, eight years after it was first recommended. “The structures have to be changed. Or they have to be ripped down or built up again.”
Lolo is friends with Kathryn; she spent all of last winter in a tent in Victoria Park. She lives with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and is on the autism spectrum. She has a home but visits friends living in Victoria Park, where TLC spoke with her.
In Lolo’s view, underlying economic and social conditions have sent people into the streets.
“Even if you can get the housing, it’s all slum housing that is worse for your mental health. In my situation there are so many German cockroaches — the landlord isn’t providing pest treatment. They’re so gangster, I feel like I pay rent to the cockroaches, right?”
The mental-health-to-homelessness pipeline is of particular interest to Lolo, as are the ways in which housed people think of homelessness. She said landing in a mental health ward quickly leads to loss of your job, especially for hospitalizations of more than a week. Then a person is funneled into disability in order to pay for medications, “so they just throw a bunch of medications at you. And then you’re kind of stuck on a loop where it’s like, okay, I can’t work on these medications. I can’t do any better.”
And for women, homelessness can also be more attractive than being in an abusive situation, especially if they are struggling with other issues. Being housed through a relationship can become exploitative, and any inability to cook or have sex can mean a quick loss of interest. In a tent, she said, women don’t need to worry about this pressure.
Another pressure reduced by homelessness, Lolo said, is that to achieve potentially impossible life transformations while already down on your luck.
“There was a gentleman that lived in this park, he used to be a lobster fisherman. Someone stabbed him, and he was no longer able to lobster-fish, and he lost everything. He lost his house. He lost everything. And it’s like, you’re in your 30s, how are you going to pull out of that? All you’ve done is lobster-fish. You’re never going to find anything with that level of skill — that you can’t use anymore — that’s even going to be close to that level of payment.
“Why would you even want to work hard, when you already experienced an apocalypse in your life? You experienced your life ending and now you’re here.”
Whether unhoused or underhoused, people are stuck in circumstances where they are unlikely to improve the quality of their social interactions and where, to maintain their limited subsidies, their entire lives come under scrutiny. The strings attached to social assistance programs tie people to those programs. “It used to be you couldn’t even have a car and be on disability. And now, you can’t have any more than $1,000 in your bank account and be on disability. So, I have severe disability. If I get sick, I live alone, I can’t have savings in case I need to get medications or in case I need to order food if I can’t leave my place?
Lolo said the city and province should be setting people up for success: helping people find employment that suits their disabilities, relaxing asset-related eligibility for disability, and even teaching homeless people better camping skills, first aid, and the basics of tent-mending.
“It’s About Love and Compassion”
Kevin Little spoke about centering conversation on compassion. “One way to get everyone together and to talk about this thing is to start with the basics: Don’t we all think we should not have tents? Don’t we all think we should not need to beg for food to eat?”
According to Little, acting out of compassion doesn’t involve merely big-picture conversations, but changing how people behave in their daily interactions. He said he finds that many people providing social services to the poor will not return clients’ phone calls. “When I call the agency and I ask why, their response is, ‘Because we don’t have anything to give them.’”
Little said he tells agencies that he doesn’t like giving bad news, either. But “when you don’t call the client back, not only do they not get what they’re hoping to get, but they also feel that nobody cares.
“There are a lot of people I talk to who feel they don’t matter. Not just because they’re living homeless or they don’t have enough food, but because when they call people who they think can help them, they don’t get a call back. I always call people back. Always.”
Lolo agreed that ignoring people in peril, even when you have nothing to give them, creates larger problems. “Men, especially the good ones, there’s a thing that can happen where so many people will just walk by them,” she said. “After a couple of months, they can experience a level of psychosis, where people don’t give them that basic eye contact like you’re a person.
“When they’re panhandling and people just walk by them … you can just say no, right?”
Lolo said she is more interested in solidarity than in advocacy. She said she is not interested in speaking to government — “they have all the data” — but about all the “people with their heads down” standing with people on the streets. “If we all just said, ‘You know what, Canada, Trudeau, I’m not going to work until you fix the housing crisis,’ and if we all just came outside, sat down, and waited, it would probably take two days. If every single person, every doctor, everyone just, came out said, ‘You know what, man, we’re watching the game. Netflix is going to last me a month, at least.’ But it takes everyone on the same page.”
When asked about this possibility, Kyle Wagner said, “I would certainly welcome a general strike. Something drastic has to happen. … Canada needs to do a lot of soul-searching. And we need to look to the world for better examples. We are not the best example right now.”
Like Lolo and Little, Wagner sees love as essential in addressing the housing crisis.
“The simple teachings of Christ can certainly change the nature of the world today,” Wagner said. “The gospel is a perfect formula to push for change. I think Christ, at the time, was radical, and it was political. To me, Christ and God are in this whole equation, more so than ever before.”
The task for Anglicans, he said, is to bring the gospel’s message of compassion to leaders in government, and to ask them to adopt those teachings — not as a religion, but as a compassionate way of governing. “If you could apply the gospel to government agencies, it’d be wonderful to see what would happen,” he said.
“We have a model. How boisterous are we going to be with proclaiming the gospel? That’s the challenge for the Church, and it’s certainly a challenge for parishioners. The Church is not perfect; we’ve screwed up many, many times and hurt lots and lots of people. But if you look at the gospel message, it’s a good message. It’s about love and compassion for the sick, the elderly, the poor, the young.”
