PERSPECTIVES – Tragedies of Dundas Street: Homelessness, Inequality and Canadian Neoliberalism
Scenes from Zombie-Land: London Ontario, Dundas Street
If you don’t know already, ask any local Londoner: they are likely to tell you that downtown London and especially Dundas Street is the “no-go zone,” “the zombie land.” What they mean is the daily unfolding of the human tragedies of homelessness and rampant drug addiction that have marred the face of downtown. You see numerous people lying unconscious on the side of the street, some going through the notorious fentanyl fold, needles and drug pipes left on the sidewalks. The sad news is that London is not an exception in comparison to other Ontario cities; it is just one of the worst ones.
When you look at the numbers, you start to fathom the depth and urgency of the problem. A 2025 report by Western University Centre for Research on Health Equity shows that since 2022, the number of people experiencing homelessness has increased by 25% across Ontario and 19% within London. The number has gone from 1844 in 2022 to 2200 in 2025, and that is only people who have interacted with the authorities and given consent to be included in data collection. The number of people facing homelessness and various types of housing insecurity is certainly larger. The report highlights that we have lost 174 lives to preventable deaths due to this crisis in London since 2022, and “without urgent action, homelessness could triple in the next decade.”More mind-blowingly, 30% of the homeless population is Indigenous while only 2.6% of the city’s general population is Indigenous.
When crises like homelessness look this dire, it is not just a local happenstance or series of unfortunate accidents. Rather, it must be a sustained and cumulative trend over the decades. The number of deaths due to drug overdoses in Canada has increased by more than 800% between 2000 and 2023 (from 795 people to 7,162). The Statistics Canada chart below shows the accidental drug poisoning deaths from 2000 to 2023.
Another indication of the same long term tend is the rise of child poverty in Canada. A UNICEF May 2026 report shows that Canada’s official child poverty rate “has been trending upward in recent years” and “almost double what it was in 2020” (p. 2), putting 1 in 5 Canadian children in poverty. This is a continuation of their October 2023 report, which showed 1.8 million Canadian children experience food insecurity. Rates are disproportionately high for marginalized groups: 37.4% for First Nations children on-reserve (24% off-reserve), 19.4% for Inuit children, and 18.6% for Black children. Alarmingly, 44.1% of children in lone-parent families live in poverty.
Child poverty in vulnerable neighbourhoods is highly correlated with chronic homelessness, drug problems, children’s nutrition, health and education status: “The number of Canadians living in poverty has been rising steadily since 2020. Most recent available data estimates that in 2023 10.9 percent of Canadians – approximately 4 million in total – were living in poverty. This is up from 6.8 percent in 2020. From 2020 to 2022, an additional 360,000 children were pushed into poverty.” (OXFAM 2026, p. 3). As UNICEF 2023 reports, “Canada’s wealth gap between the most and least wealthy rose along with child poverty,” which is “the fastest increase on record since the Great Recession of 2010.” (p 13) This happens while more than a quarter of the Canadian population in 2025 was considered food insecure and food banks across the country received 2.2 million visits every month.
Now, note that this sustained trend for Canada’s working-class families does not represent the lack of wealth and productivity of the nation. Since 1981, real GDP per capita has grown at an average annual rate of 1.1%, increasing from about $36,900 per person to $58,100 per person in 2025 in inflation-adjusted dollars. What is lacking is not wealth production but the distribution of the wealth. A 2026 report by OXFAM Canada titled “The Rise of the super rich” shows that therichest 1% in Canada (net worth of $7M+) hold $3.9 trillion, which is nearly as much as the bottom 80% of the population combined. Meanwhile, the bottom 40% of wealth holders collectively hold just over 3% of Canada’s total wealth. Another 2026 report shows that since the early 2000s, extreme wealth concentration has persisted: The figure from the report shows the top 0.01% holds 4,041 times more wealth than the bottom 50%.
Between 2024 and 2025, the wealth of Canada’s richest 40 billionaires grew by almost $95 billion, an increase of over 20%. The combined wealth of Canada’s top 40 billionaires in 2025 is greater than the GDP of many countries, including New Zealand, Colombia, Finland, Chile, and South Africa.
To put this wealth gap in more perspective, take the case of Finland. Canada’s child poverty rate is approximately 70% higher than Finland’s despite the two countries having nearly identical GDP per capita. Finland’s child poverty rate is the 3rd lowest among 40 high-income countries. At the same time, Finland has been a role model in Europe in fighting homelessness, where homelessness has dropped 75% since 2008 while totally eradicating rough sleeping (sleeping outside). No hidden secret in Finland: their “Housing First” policy simply treats housing as a human right rather than a privilege, and in the long term it has saved their country money to spend on housing rather than emergency services and policing related to homelessness problems.
The figure below from the OXFAM report shows that globally the wealth of billionaires has been consistently increasing from 1987 to 2025.
Consider the two consistent trends seen in the numbers. While working-class families have increasingly lost more of their loved ones to drug overdoses and have had their kids fall victim to child poverty and food insecurity, the Canadian super-rich have grown their wealth out of proportion. Both trends are cumulative and consistent over years. These two robust trends implyincreasing class inequality and redistribution of wealth from lower layers to the top.
This is not abnormal. The US economy has followed the same pattern. A 2020 study by RAND researchers found that there has been a radical redistribution of wealth from bottom to top and in favor of the super-rich. The bottom 90 percent has been deprived of 47 trillion compared to the scenario where the distribution of income would have remained as equitable as it was in the 1960s.
This robust pattern is the ultimate structural factor that is behind the immediately visibleapocalyptic scene of poverty and homelessness in downtown London. While there have been some creative short-term solutions like limited housing programs and local community charitable donations and interventions to mitigate the effects of homelessness and housing crises in London, one still needs to think about long-term solutions. Now that we have detected the pattern and trend in the language of numbers and statistics, let’s turn to what explains the patterns, namely, Canadian neoliberalism.
Canadian Neoliberalism in Action
Neoliberalism can be understood as a set of policies and ideological framing of how markets and societies work that became the mainstream view about policymaking since the 1980s. Its dawn was pioneered and advanced by Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Regan in the USA,where they started a neoliberal counter-revolution against the working class and laws and regulations protecting working people.
Since the 1980s, the Canadian political elite brewed its own blend of neoliberalism. The story can be traced back to the Macdonald Commission (1982-84) appointed by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in 1982 to investigate the country’s long-term economic prospects following the 1981–1982 recession. They proposed the regular dogmas of the neoliberal doctrine: more flexibility and deregulation in the capital and labor market to allow for internationalization and global competitiveness, embracing free trade agreements and more reliance on market mechanisms, and finally, cutting welfare programs. As Jessica Gill from the University of Waterloo has argued, the election of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1984 cemented this agenda through his three principles of social responsibility, fiscal responsibility, and fiscal flexibility. These three principles basically meant cutting social benefit, tightening the eligibility criteria so a good number of working class will be excluded. Universal programs, like Family Allowance, were disbanded and got replaced with limited and temporary benefits. These universal programs were hard-won achievements of the Canadian working-class movement during the 1930s and 40s,which culminated in the post-war Keynesianism of the federal government.
Keynesianism was a set of economic policy agendas and ideas inspired by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, adopted by most Western governments to revive from the depression and unemployment of the 1920s and 30s. It highlighted the importance of public spending to maintain household viability and stable employment and a stable pattern of consumer spending and keeping economy from unproductive wealth concentration and severe inequalities. Neoliberalism was a radical shift away from this framework. The principles relocated the funds to the business classes under the name of promoting investment and employment. As is the case with all neoliberal policies, instead of income security, this policy led to precarious employment, class inequality, and more imbalance in bargaining power of the workers in the job market. As Gill observed, fiscal flexibility was a euphemism for outsourcing the social responsibility of the federal government for welfare programs to individuals themselves or NGOs and local authorities and hence justifying tax cuts for the rich.
The same neoliberal agenda has been fiercely followed by both liberal and conservative prime minsters till present, where privatization and deregulation are framed as making the governmentefficient and small, while in effect, it meant increasing insecurity for the working class. For example, Employment Insurance (EI) eligibility requirements were drastically tightened; while 83% of the workforce was eligible for EI benefits in 1989, only 42% were eligible by 2018. In the late 1990s, the federal government abandoned the financing of social housing, outsourcing the responsibility to the provinces and municipalities, leading to a massive construction slowdown. One of the harshest phases of the neoliberal assault on the Canadian working class was undertaken by Ontario Conservative Premier Mike Harris (1995–2003) under the banner of “Common Sense Revolution.” As Gill observes, the 21 percent cut to welfare payments was justified by “pathologizing the poor and invoking images of welfare recipients as undeserving of assistance, whose personal failings, or lack of motivation, led them to poverty.”
This assault culminated in Doug Ford’s aggressive austerity from 2018 onward. As Ryan Kelpin (2024) from York University has rightly observed, the Ford era is marked by a marriage between right-wing populist rhetorics with aggressive neoliberalism. He passed legislation that froze the minimum wage, stripped paid sick days, eliminated equal pay for equal work between part-time and full-time workers, and made it harder to unionize and removed job protections by allowing non-construction employers (municipalities, hospitals, universities) to hire non-unionized labour at will. Most notably, his Bill 124 limited compensation increases for public sector workers (like nurses and teachers) to 1% per year, overriding their collective bargaining rights. Note that all the elements of fanatic market fundamentalism are enacted under the banner of protecting the “little guy” and “taxpayers” from liberal globalists and downtown elites.
Conclusion: from Dundas Street in London to Parliament Hill in Ottawa
Elegantly summarizing the core of neoliberalism in a 2022 interview, Noam Chomsky, the American renowned intellectual, mentions the above-mentioned RAND study about reverse redistribution of wealth from the bottom 90 to the super-rich over the last 40 years. Then he moves on to observe:
“Well, were they a success? Depends on who you ask … So that’s a success if you’re on the very top; it’s a wonderful success. If you’re the rest of the population, it’s a catastrophe […] So let’s tell the truth about neoliberalism. It’s class war. Furthermore, the talk about the market is mostly a joke. It’s the market for the poor and the working class. It’s massive state intervention for the rich and powerful.”
“It’s class war.” This captures the spirit of neoliberal capitalism and explains the two robust patterns that we recognized: increasing misery for the Canadian working-class families and increasing success for the Canadian super-rich. It explains the bifurcation between the two worlds. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that Canadians don’t live in the same world. On the one hand, we have the “third-world” Canada where the working class is facing a standard of living and poverty increasingly resembling that of so-called “third world countries.”: a world where drug addiction, overdoses, and child poverty are rampant, and zombie land on Dundas Street has become the new normal. On the other hand, we have the “first-world” Canada where the super-rich have never been more successful and richer. Such a gap and divergence between these worlds is obviously not sustainable. In the absence of organized labour, such inequality and pressures translate themselves into Trump-style right-wing populism and parochial nationalism with disastrous consequences for immigration, multiculturalism, and foreign policies.
There are some obvious realistic measures to take to push back against this top-down class war. We should uproot the dogmas of market fundamentalism. We need vocal advocacy against neoliberal fanaticism, which has portrayed itself as common sense or inevitable. Housing is not a privilege, but a human right. That should not be controversial. As Finland case shows, it works and, in the long run, is cheaper than dealing with emergencies of homelessness. Long-term stability and social welfare for working-class families are not a waste of money. It ensures a healthy and just economy and the prospect of a younger generation of working-class families having a fair chance to crawl out of the class gap. Furthermore, we need a progressive wealth tax that targets the ultra-rich. As the OXFAM report mentions, a few moderate and realistic measures like a wealth tax and preventing the use of tax havens can mitigate the crisis notably. A wealth tax that “starts at one percent on net-worth over $10M and rises to two percent on net-worth over $50M, and three percent on net-worth over $100M,” can produce a revenue of $121 billion over the next 5 years. This money can be redistributed to handle the tragedies of working-class lifeand support childcare, health care, and affordable housing. Alongside a wealth tax, we need to reform income tax. Average earners pay more than 36% of their income in taxes, while the richest 1% pay just over 23% (OXFAM 2026, p.4).
Pushing back against neoliberal ideological dogmatism and reforming the tax system seems like doable steps. This is what stands between us and the possibility of bringing life back to the human tragedies of Dundas street and restoring stability to the homeless people falling victim to Canada’s cold winters. Still, to even enact such moderate measures, we need to free ourselves from deeply entrenched dogmas of neoliberalism in the mainstream policy making discourse and recognize the reality of top-down class war. We also need massive mobilization and grassroots movements to revive working-class parties. The rise of the Democratic Socialists in the US in congressional and municipal politics can be a great inspiration for restarting a new brand of Canadian labour movement.
A version of this article titled ‘The homelessness scourge in cities like London, Ont., exposes the evils of wealth inequality’ was previously published in The Conversation on July 26, 2026.
