The Current - Fishing industry and housing costs fire up Halifax voters

Episode Date: April 23, 2025

Matt Galloway travels to Halifax to hear what’s on voters’ minds, in the final stop of The Current’s election road show Crossroads: Coast to Coast with Canadian Voters.  First up, the sea is both a livelihood and a way of life in Nova Scotia, flowing into how many people will vote. Galloway talks to a fisherman fed up with how his industry is being treated by the federal government, a restaurant owner serving up haddock with a side of national pride and a seaweed exporter worried about U.S. President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs.  Then, housing costs have soared in Halifax since the pandemic, leaving people like Michelle McClung feeling squeezed. Her adult children can’t afford to move out, including one son living in a campervan out front. She wants less talk of Trump, and more work to solve the housing crisis and bring down the cost of living.

Fisherman John Coppock and his son Craig were hoping that their day on the water would finish with a good haul of cod. Instead, they reeled in way more than they bargained for. They had a net filled with fish and to their horror and surprise, the body of a man. I'm Kathleen Goldthar and this week on Crime Story, a body in the ocean untangles a sea of lies. Find, I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current Podcast. Finally, some sunshine in Nova Scotia. It's been a wet, cold spring here so far and a trying one for many people. Relationships with the United States is very important. We have to be very careful about our health and safety.

We have to be very careful about our health and safety. Finally, some sunshine in Nova Scotia. It's been a wet, cold spring here so far, and a trying one for many people. Relationships with the United States is very, very important for us. The worry here, like a lot of places, is about what's coming from the United States and China in tariffs. That's meant rough waters for the people here who depend on the sea. You just see the truck there just came in there. That's one of our 18 wheel 18 wheelers they're gonna be taking all the fish that come in today and they're going to take it right down to Boston anything that gets unloaded today which is Tuesday should be on the pier in Boston by tomorrow afternoon and sold by probably Thursday. That's fresh you ain't getting any fresher than that. Lobster is

by far the biggest seafood export in Nova Scotia but there are a lot of families who rely on the sea for other things, fish, crab, seaweed and tourism. We're traveling across the country this election, hearing what matters to people as they cast their ballots. This is the final stop in our election road trip. We're calling it Crossroads Coast to Coast with Canadian voters. I'm Matt Galloway in Halifax and this is The Current. Over there you got all of our pallets ready.

We got three boats that are gonna be coming in here today so we're ready to unload them. And over there is our lobster pound. Inside there we have literally a million dollars worth of lobster sitting in that pound right now. Come, come take a look. This wharf is in Sambro, 30 minutes outside of Halifax. Derek Hill fishes halibut and this morning he's all smiles

in a pair of sporty sunglasses. Hi I'm Derek Hill also known as Captain Deeds. I am a fisherman for Ivy Rose. I'm the captain of the Ivy Rose. I fish in a sand row for halibut, tuna and swordfish. This is not just a job to me this is my lifestyle and I love what I do. Like the wind it seems that big grin of Derek's is a constant here even when you're talking about his livelihood. You know what? When I first started fishing, when I first

started coming around here, I pulled up in a Pontiac Sunfire two-door Fi-Speed with a big rust hole on it that made it look like I took a cannonball from the Luesburg fortress. That's what I started out in. And I worked, and I had no cap and license at the time. And I got on on this boat here, and I've worked literally changing garbage just when I first started out and then after another few years here I got my captain's

license I started taking the Ivy Rose out and now I got a brand new truck and honestly like hard work in Canada pays off. Derek's just landed after two weeks out at sea. I have been on land for 15, no, 17 days since January 6. Now until a couple of weeks ago, Derek was an undecided voter, but today he's had a lot of time to think on the boat, and he says he is voting conservative. He's not alone on this wharf or in his industry. I was very undecided. I hopped right on the Kearney train. He was exciting.

He was a new face on the Liberal Party. He most importantly wasn't just a true no, which I, as you see with the numbers, he is actually gathering really strong polls right now. I would say everybody here, from that I have been talking to, because this is actually one of the first times we've been off in time to vote, I'd say we're all going to actually vote, at least a good 90% of us, because we really do not agree with how the liberals have been treating our province. My boss, he has, me and him have been discussing politics since I started here, he's very politically

inept, I would say, but he has not voted, he has not cast a vote in about 20 years. He hasn't felt the need to cast a vote in about 20 years, and this year he came to me and said, I'm actually concerned with how things are looking in the government. He said, I do not want the liberals to get back in, he said, because of how everything is going with us. Now we're still doing good work-wise, but we're not doing what we were 20 years ago. So he feels it's time for a change. So he came to me and said, you know what, me and you will go for supper

and I will drive you to a voting poll for the first time in 20 years. I'll drive you as long as me and you can go vote conservative together. And I told him, I'm still undecided, but I think that's the route I'm gonna end up going. The liberals are treating us like criminals. When a fishery officer comes on the boat now,

he comes on assuming we're doing something illegal. We are workers. We're just trying to get by and feed our family. And when a fishery officer comes on our boat, they immediately, I got detained twice for stuff I haven't even done. I have never ever actually been charged through the fishery successfully.

Anytime they come on, they're always assuming we're doing something illegal. Rather than trying to be your friend I offer them a tea, a coffee. I have yet to have a fishery officer come on the boat and accept my tea or coffee because there's no trust there from them to me. And when it happens to the Conservative Party, when they come and they're more open, they're more open about our industry, they're trying to make it, like, they want us to move forward. They want us to progress. Now the liberals, they're trying to get rid of things that don't look as nice and don't look as pretty, and I believe they

give too much power to the DFO to try to punish us for stuff that we haven't even done or are even thinking of doing. I've been dealing with fisheries now for 15 years. I fished down in the United States. I used to fish at a new Bedford, Massachusetts I was part of a global operation for fishing through NAFO and that was when I started out in five years and fish DFO fishing Officers were actually really nice to me back back then they would take the tea. They would take the coffee They would sit down they would hang out and I didn't feel like I was being subjected as a criminal as

soon as they walked on boats. Now, over the span of the last eight years, I've noticed that the fishery officers have been more aggressive with how they're handling us. I don't know if it's connected to the Liberal government, but their attitude towards us has changed over the last eight years and changing the government might in fact change how they perceive us as well. That's fishing captain Derek Hill in San Bro, Nova Scotia. Faisal Junas has fresh fish delivered almost every day to his restaurant in Halifax, and that is where we are going next, Freddie's Fantastic Fish House. You said 20 pounds?

Yeah, I just said 20 pounds. I'll try it out. If it's good, we'll take a lot more, okay? We're fighting the battle on our own. Okay, all right. Thank you. Thank you very much, Corey. I'll send that over tomorrow. Price of Haddock just went up $9.95. I used to be $6.30 a year ago. Now it's $9.95 a pound. 50% increase. And that's our main thing is, hey,

so something's going on with $10 a pound. There's a sign out front. It says, proud to be Canadians in big red letters. Feed local, proud to be local. The secret to the restaurant, the 26 years in this restaurant business, and for Freddie's, it says for us, quality of the fish

and we get Digby scallops, Digby clams, world renowned stuff, but the prices are just skyrocketing. Faisal's wearing a Nova Scotia tartan scarf. He's in his sixties and he planned to sit this election out. I wasn't too interested in the election four months ago, three months ago. I let it go and I was so disinterested, I wasn't going to even participate. And then when Mark Cardney came in, it was a whole new, I got revived. That sign outside there, it's because of him. It's because of him. You know, the proud to be Canadian. Well, for us, it was always proud to be Nova Scotian. Not to, and Canada's implied,

but to put the second sentence, perhaps to be Canadian, is because I'm really uplifted. What is this moment? We've been talking to people about the tariffs and about how the relationship with the United States has changed. What has this meant for you? What is the fight such as it is with the United States meant for you? For the fight with the United States, I think there's, you know, amongst the people that can actually win this election, I don't think the other person

can do a good job at all. I think Mark Carney is well educated, he's smart, he's very good temperament, and he knows how to deal with, you know, the world. And I think he can put Canada on world-level status. I notice that the other side uses a lot of slogans and sarcasm. That's not the way the world runs. The way that Mark Herning dealt with Trump, that's the class act. Until you acknowledge our sovereignty, I'm not going to talk. That's why I think that Pierre Pauli was not the right person this time. What have you done in the restaurant, aside from putting up the sign, what have you done

in the restaurant in your own little way to kind of make a stand for Canada? I stopped all the American goods. We don't do Coke anymore, we only Pepsi. We don't do Crafts and Heinz and all that. Now we use French's, but truthfully, the other brand tastes better. But, you know, so much for taste, and more for patriotism, that's all. Smells so good in here, thank you very much. Stay down for lunch?

I might have to. I might have to. Fazl's restaurant is about to open for the day. I'm here, not just for fish, but to meet JP Deveau. He's president of a leading Atlantic Canadian company in an industry you might never have considered big business. That industry is seaweed. Hi, how are you? Hi, JP DeVoe.

Matt, how are you? Nice to meet you. There has been a lot of talk about how we need to depend less on the United States and start peddling our wares further away. JP has managed to do that. His dad started Acadian Sea Plants more than 40 years ago in JP's childhood bedroom. Sea plants mean seaweed. That's absolutely right. Now JP is selling seaweed products to 80 countries

around the world. We grab a little corner table by the window. How does somebody get in the business of harvesting and selling seaweed? Well you know it's interesting. My father started this company back in 1981. I came home from university. I went in the house. My mother said to me, before you go downstairs, you don't have a bedroom here anymore. Your father started this company, but you're welcome to sleep on the couch. That was the beginning of Acadian Sea Plants back in 1981. What do you do?

Just describe it. We say selling hard and harvesting seaweed, but what do you actually do? If you take a look at where we are today, we have employees in 22 countries around the world. We export our products to 80 different countries we have operations here in Canada in Ireland and in Scotland and we make a whole range of different products all derived from marine plants dumb question But where do you get the seaweed from? So if you know when you take a look at our raw material It comes from really two sources. Okay. We either get it from the ocean, where we harvest it, which many harvesters will go and harvest the seaweed in the intertidal zone, or we have our own seaweed cultivation

farm, so that's where we grow our own seaweed. You can grow your own seaweed? We grow our own seaweed. And what do you, you said it's turned into many different products. What are the products? People think of seaweed as, that's it, but there's more things you can do with it obviously. So the biggest product line that we have is a product that's used to help grow crops. It's a crop bio-stimulant and that's the one that we export to 80

countries around the world and it really takes the stress out of crops when they're being grown whether they don't have enough water or they're poor water quality or it's too hot or too cold our products helps to alleviate that stress and that so it's it alleviates the effects of climate change which is really an important thing today. What would surprise you do you think or what would surprise people who don't know anything about CBI? What would surprise them about the work that you do? Well I think the thing that's really surprising is just how scientific it is. We have over 50 researchers on staff, 15 PhDs, we publish papers over and over again to show the efficacy of

these particular products and we really created a whole business and industry here in Canada that never existed before. Where are you largely selling your products? You mentioned a number of different countries. So our largest customer is now located in Brazil. Before it was in the United States. And so we're actually quite pleased that we don't have as much of a dependence on the United States at this time. Pleased because of the elephant in the room. Well when you take a look at that back in 1981 we had about 90% of our business was in the United States and so we were very vulnerable. Today we only have about 20% of the

business of our business in the United States. You had a plant in Maine is that right? We had operations in Maine up to two weeks ago. And you had to shut them down. And we shut them down. Tell me about that and why you felt you had to do that. Well, it was a really a sad event in the history of our company in here, but there was really three different things that were happening in here.

One, the exchange rate. So we looked at the exchange rate, it's been pretty stable around 70 cents here for the last little while. The second thing was the transportation cost. But the third aspect was the whole question of what's going to happen with the tariffs. And so we were coming into the beginning of the season and we had to make a decision, do we operate or do we not operate? And so economically we analyzed it in so many different

ways and then we made that tough decision to shut down our operations in Maine. As we've been crossing the country, one of the things that we've heard from business owners is that the tariffs are one thing, but it's the uncertainty in some ways that's the real killer. That this thing changes day by day or hour by hour, depending, people believe, on the whims of one person. What does that uncertainty mean to you? So businesses love to plan.

I'm saying that's the most important thing you do is you put together a plan, and then you execute that plan, and then you deviate from the plan. And when you deviate from the plan is you put together a plan and then you execute that plan and then you deviate from the plan and when you deviate from the plan you put together another plan so this is the whole aspect of you know being able to put together a proper plan right to be successful

but in order to put the plan together you need a stable environment we've been blessed by being in canada united states you know western countries that they've really they've really been stable environments that's a different there's a different situation that's going on so that stability that we used to have is no longer there it's make it's very very difficult for us to put put together a plan and take a look

the other day the bank of canada with the prove their projections they said okay we're not putting a forward projection out here we're going going to say, here's this scenario in case there's severe tariffs that are put in place. And here's another scenario if they're not, which is really, they even struggle putting together a plan. So when you look at that kind of behavior, it makes it really, really difficult for industry to be able to go and figure out what it is they need to do. As a small business owner owner a good-sized business owner how do you understand what what trump is doing how do you understand he says that he's trying to protect american business he's trying to protect people like you on

that side of the border but it's creating all sorts of chaos around the world how do you understand what he's up to well there's no question that when you take a look at what president trumpets is is is doing in there he is doing what he thinks is in the best interest of the united states of america and and from that point of view he's trying to influence uh... a lot of different things that have been left alone for a long time to in order to make what he perceives is going to be a better united states into

the future in here the challenge that you have for the rest of us is to figure out if we're that dependent on united states what should we be doing in terms of our arm our business model in that and what should we be doing i mean you've been doing some of this in trying to diversify right so we when you look at this i mentioned that we have to business in over eighty countries around the world and we can so we've had to negotiate with you know uh... with different cultures, different languages,

different ethics, people with different ethics, and all these different things, you figured out a way to work with those particular clients in order to be successful into the future. So when you look at this, right, dealing with President Trump, it's the same type of situation. What's important? What's important to to President Trump? And so it's the basis is to figure out what is important to him so that we can give him something that he can then go to the American public and be able to go and say look look at what I've been able to

do and that's the thing that's important. But you also have to try to figure out what those other markets are, right? How do you go about doing that? How do you go as a business owner and say, listen, we need to look, this is the conversation right now, that Canada has relied too much perhaps on the United States taking the United States for granted and assumed that that relationship

was going to be solid forever. It's in question now. And so how do you go about spreading your wings? Well, the challenge that people have is that you cannot do that overnight. It takes time to do it. And so you need to go and figure out where are the markets that you want to be able to go.

You have to put together the homework necessary in order to do that and to get there. And you gotta put the sustained effort. And there's nothing like the sustained effort that's necessary in order to get that business in the long run. If you don't do that, you will not diversify your markets away from the United States or from Canada. We hear from a lot of business owners who say that what's happening in the United States

has put them on the rack in some ways. They worry about the viability of businesses because that trading relationship has changed. Do you worry about that? Do you worry you're in a lot of different markets, but the United States is the United States. So from our point of view, only 20% of our business is in the United States. And so what we also bring in inputs from the United States. So we have to worry about, well, not only what will

President Trump do from a tariff point of view, but what will Canada do in retaliation? So those two things are really, make a very, very complex argument. Thankfully, from our point of view, because our dependence on the United States is not that high, because we have already diversified, we will be able to figure that out. But if you're an organization that has 80% of your business in the United States, you really have some serious soul-searching to do.

What do you want to hear from the people who want to lead this country? We've been speaking to people across the country who feel like in some ways there are specific industries that get a lot of attention, whether it's the auto sector, whether it's aluminum and steel, and maybe farmers aren't feeling as prioritized as they would like to. Maybe people in fisheries aren't getting the same amount of attention. What do you want to hear from people who want to lead this country? Well, when you take a look at this particular election, I mean, if you look at the number one issue, the number one issue is really who is going to be able to properly negotiate

with President Trump and his organization in order to get a good and appropriate deal for not only the United States, but for Canada, for us, all right? So that's the important issue we do that correctly then all the other things that we care about whether it's housing or or or health care and all these other things there will be money in order to be a little paper all of that flows you think in this election from the relationship with

with the president in dealing with donald trump well if if if president trump puts in a across the board 25% tariff on all goods that are moving across the border like he did for about two days there a couple about a month ago which we got caught in all right so we paid that we paid the tariffs during those two days if that happens and Canada retaliates and we will have to retaliate because that is the only way that you can deal with that. If that happens we will go into a very serious recession and if that happens we will not be able to afford to be able to pay for the things that we as a country value. If those tariffs come in, I mean do

you have a census of the dollar figure? How much that would impact you day by day? The impact on us is millions of dollars on an annualized basis. Millions of dollars every year. That's correct. Which for, I mean, for any business owner has got to be a lot of money. Well, I don't know about you, but a million dollars is a lot of money to me.

It's a lot of money to me too. Um, do you have a sense as to who you're going to vote for? I'm going to vote for the person that I believe will have the best chance of negotiating a proper deal with President Trump. What's that person's name? I think I just told you how I was going to vote for.

You have to be careful. I mean, talking about politics is tricky. Is your sense, you must talk with other business owners, that people, we found that people are so dialed into this election right now. People are really paying close attention. Is that your sense when you talk to other colleagues? There's no question that the interest in this election is such we haven't seen in years. You know, we see this on the street. You see this with other business colleagues. You just see the sense of unity of, okay, we need to be able to deal with President Trump.

Now that feeling is a unifying feeling. Having said that, of course everybody decides who's going to be the best person to be able to deal with that. But there is a moment that's happening in this country right now. It is a defining moment for us. You think that's what it is? It's a defining moment for Canada. Absolutely. If we get this right and we're able to go and to provide President Trump or what he sees as a win for the for the United States and we're able to go and negotiate and it becomes a continued win for Canada then we will be able to do the things that we want to do into the future. What's your

favorite thing to do with seaweed? What's your favorite use of seaweed? The favorite for me my favorite thing to do with seaweed is to eat it. But from that point of view, and we do make material that goes into the Japanese food market. For sushi and what have you. For seaweed salads. So if you ever eat a seaweed salad in a Japanese restaurant and you see pink seaweed or yellow seaweed, it's highly likely it's ours because we're the only ones that make the yellow

one in the world. Now I know something new. Thank you very much for talking to us, Chippy. It's a likely it's ours because we're the only ones that make the yellow one in the world. Now I know something new. Thank you very much for talking to us, JP. It's a pleasure, Matt. Thank you. JP DeVoe runs Acadian Sea Plants. It's based right here in Nova Scotia. In the fall of 2001, while Americans were still grappling with the horror of September 11th, envelopes started showing up at media outlets and government buildings filled with a white lethal powder, anthrax. But what's strange is if you ask people now what happened with that story, almost no one knows. It's like the whole thing just disappeared. Who mailed those letters? Do you know?

From Wolf Entertainment, USG Audio, and CBC podcasts, this is Aftermath, the hunt for the anthrax killer available now. That's all they're talking about is Trump, this and China, and we should do this and we should do that and don't go to the States. And like, I get it. That's, those are big, important issues.

You know, what about the housing? What about trying to eat? You know, if that doesn't get better, there's going to be a lot more homeless people. There's no stability anymore. Halifax is not the most expensive place to live in the country, and for a time, it was actually considered affordable.

But that has changed. A lot of people wanting to get out of major cities like Toronto, saw Atlantic Canada, as a pretty idyllic option. Lower cost of living, wide open spaces, the ocean is right at your doorstep. But the locals quickly felt the effects of all of that. And for people like Michelle McClung, that means her adult children live at home, including one in a camper out front.

Woof! Woof! Woof! No idea. Come on Harper, come in. She's a good boy. Come on. I'm gonna get a cookie. Come on, let's get a cookie. Come on. I'm getting a cookie. Come on. Let's get a cookie. Come on. Michelle bought this mobile home 25 years ago. She was a single mother with small children. Now at the age of 62, she says her modest home is a luxury that her children could never afford.

Yeah. Don't know how bad this is. The youngest son stays in here and he does his own thing. He works and he stays in there. Three of my four kids have moved home. You can't rent an apartment for under $2,000. Forget buying a house. Three of them moved home one at a time. You know, they work good jobs and they make decent money. You cannot rent an apartment, you know, and still be able to buy food, pay for your car. You know and and still be able to buy food pay for your car You know, there's there's you just don't can't make enough and then I'm in here Packing boxes because we're planning we got to move stuff around and so and then we have one more room at the back

It's really messy Already know This actually was my office and Where I would sew and stuff. He's got a hide-a-bed thingy. Would like to get back in here. When I moved here, it was a lot simpler to get a piece of property.

You know, like I put a mobile home on it. So I was here with four kids. You know, by myself, I worked three jobs. I worked at the liquor store, I worked at a computer place, and I did a set of books for a company. To be able to afford something right now is, it's unreal. Like the last four or five months I saved up $200 in four or five months. How is that going to get me an apartment?

It's not, unless you have a two income household that is making $30, $35 an hour, that might get you by. You know, I look at all these big giant houses that are being built and I'm thinking the bank owns those, not the people living in it. You know, the government's talking about, you know, Oh, we're going to build, you know, more apartment buildings and we're going to do housing, but nobody's still going to be able to afford it. Minimum wage just went up. It made a whole $15 difference in my paycheck. What's still going to be able to afford it. Minimum wage just went up. It made a whole $15 difference in my paycheck.

What's that going to do? You know, I don't have a mortgage. I don't have a car payment. So I'm very lucky, luckier than most people, you know, because everyone has a car payment or two, they have a mortgage, they have skyrocketing power bills and groceries. I don't even want to get started on groceries. You know, I mean our grocery bills now are about $300 every week. And that's no meat and hardly any vegetables because we can't afford it.

We put the addition on was 12 by 28 and put two bedrooms on. So Isaiah lives in here. Like I like antiques and I like to strip furniture and stuff. And it's in a shed. And my daughter said, you have too much stuff. And I said, no, if I had all my rooms to myself, I'd have furniture in all my rooms. I said, but because I have four extra bodies in the house, I said, my stuff's in the shed. When Matthew came home with his RV, park it there, whatever, it was after that that I noticed

there's more RVs and campers in the neighborhood and the tip outs are out, and that tells me people are living in it. There are, there are people all over, there are adults like, you know, in their 60ss end up losing their homes or the apartment they were in because they were in evictions and they end up in a motorhome, you know, or they end up in a camper in their daughter's driveway, you know. It's not just him. It's young people. It's old people. And building more sky-rise apartment buildings, that's not going to help any. You know, that's not

going to help anybody. I know a that's not going to help anybody. I know a little more now than I did a year ago. I'm, I really don't want the liberals back in like for, for Canada itself, because of everything that has happened in the last eight years. My kids have had to move home. You know, they're adults, they're grown adult men. They don't want to live home. I mean, no adult child wants to live home unless they're a freeloader. They don't want to be here. They can't move out.

You know, I really don't want all my kids living home. I'd like to have a life. Those were Michelle McClung and her son Matthew just outside of Halifax. Irfan Al Qasim builds homes in and around Halifax. Right now, he's working on a new development. So we've got a lot of construction going on. Currently about 50 homes under construction, all at different stages and over 100 guys that will be working on our sites at any point in time. This is a very fast growing community and we're happy that we're able to build homes for Canadians. Workers are framing these houses, 70% of them are sold, most are first time home buyers,

able to afford these homes thanks in part to the income they will make on the basement apartments. Secondary suites have helped a lot of people to qualify for purchasing a home. They can use that rental income towards their mortgage payments. It helps people that are looking to buy their own home and it helps people that are looking for a, you know, a more affordable option to rent. There's a shortage of housing here in Halifax, but I never knew that these basement units would be sought after this much. We need the federal government's help on this, reducing the sales tax. We'd like to see them help us remove a lot of the restrictions and regulations that prevent

us from being able to come up with all these different products and creative solutions for people. We could turn every one of these semi-detached homes into single-family homes with secondary suite just by doing a zoning change that does not increase the density, it doesn't change anything, it just allows single-family homes instead of semi-detached suites using the the same amount of lot frontage. In this election I will be voting for the Liberals and I am hoping to see a lot of positive change come from the new government taking place.

Geoff Carabinale is a professor of social work at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He's co-director of the Dal Social Work Community Clinic, working with low income people to help them stay in their homes. He's been listening and he's with me in our Halifax studio. Good morning to you.

Good morning. What are you hearing from people who are trying to find a place to live in this city? The vacancy rate is just above 2%. The rent here in Halifax on average is higher than the national average, where they I think might surprise some people. So what does that mean for people who are trying to find somewhere to live? Very, very, very difficult. It's, you know, a lot of people speak of a huge housing crisis. We see it on the ground day in and day out. I've been working in this city for 25 years now and it's never been as difficult as it is now. We see it's so many folks that you know working, engaged in in civil

society and but just it's so difficult to find something that's safe, that's affordable in this town. There are a couple of things about that. One is in civil society, but just it's so difficult to find something that's safe, that's affordable in this town. There are a couple of things about that. One is, every time I come here, I see more construction that's happening. The buildings that were just a hole in the ground are now 15 stories.

There are new holes in the ground. Why isn't that addressing the question? Yeah. We've seen a deep loss in older units, older apartments that were affordable. And at the same time, yes, you're absolutely correct, we're seeing a lot more development, but it's unfortunate development that's not hitting notions around affordability. It is going to provide, you know, good solid housing for upper middle class populations, but it's really missing the point around notions of affordability. Affordability kind of find like, you know, the Green Party and the NDP defining it as,

you know, 30% or less of your income pre-tax. Who is this hitting the most? I mean, I have some experience with students because I'm here moving a student out of residence into their first apartment. And you see the crunch that students are facing. But as you said, people who are working are also, there's a homelessness crisis, but there are also people who have jobs

who are trying to make ends meet as well. From your perspective, who is this hitting? So it's all those categories. So definitely, you know, people who are experiencing homelessness right now, it is unbelievably difficult to find anything that is affordable and safe and healthy for folks. Those are all important parts to it as well.

Not just a place, but a place that's affordable and safe and healthy. Absolutely, absolutely. You know, a place that you can call a a home and we've really, really lost that. Some of it is we've lost it because we've kind of seen housing less as a right and more as kind of a profit geared position. So in that way, we've kind of moved away from the spirit of what housing really should be. So it's hitting definitely low income populations.

We're seeing more people that are living in shelters, living in encampments that actually work but just cannot afford to live anywhere safe. You're seeing it with students. I've seen many, many students that are in my classes, but also just broadly in the university world that are having a much, much more difficult time. And also maybe contemplating whether they should move out of the city, decide to maybe do education online.

Which is a loss for a town like this. Which is a loss for a town. And it's also, yeah, the experience of, that's just talking about students, because we were just chatting about that earlier. Yeah, the connection you make kind of in classrooms and within the university walls kind of gets lost if you're doing it, you know, via distance or you're not, you can't spend the time in the city.

What do you make of the fact that in this election, it feels like all of the parties have engaged in housing in a way that is different than in elections passed. Absolutely. Like it's one of the core agenda topics, which is really important. It just speaks to the urgency of this agenda piece. What do you make of what you've heard so far? I mean, the liberals have what they're calling a war effort using prefab housing, moving

its scale in a different way. The conservatives have said they would build something like 2.3 million homes over the next five years. Cities would have to free up land. They'd have to speed up development permits and lower development charges. And if that didn't happen, those cities would take a hit. Yeah. How do you assess how the main parties are addressing this crisis? So I think it's, again, it's really important that we're speaking to this issue. Interesting

enough, we're not speaking around homelessness, we're speaking about housing. So just to take the point around housing, we're speaking at least to notions of affordability. Are we just talking about home ownership or are we talking about rentals? I think around 70% of folks own their homes, so I can understand why it's directed in that way, but it's really the NDP and the Green parties that are speaking to renters and the experiences of renters and providing more renter rights to the discussion. I think it's really important that the liberals are speaking to actually creating a department. We don't know much about this yet, but a department that would be really focused on building affordable

housing. The prefab kind of construction, I think, speaks to the urgency. We see the conservatives are speaking to kind of tax incentives to kind of get housing produced and then converting federal space and land to affordability. The NDP and the Green, they're speaking to the notion that we have to protect kind of what type of affordability exists now and to increase it and also they speak to stuff like co-ops and land trusts and and social and public housing which is I think not

as much discussed by the main parties. We just have a minute or so left. Have you decided on who you're gonna vote for? Yes I voted last week. Do you mind me telling who you voted for given everything that we've just talked about and your expertise in this world? Right. So I voted for the NDP. They hit, I think, the values that are important to me around looking at housing as a right and providing a platform of stability at a time that has deep, deep prices. So I think I respect each party's platform has merit,

but the NDP I think really speak to a direction that is gonna be deeply important in a time where we're talking about just prices being just out of control. Just very briefly, we just have a few seconds left. Are you confident that talking about this will get people to address this crisis? Talk is one thing. Right, right.

So yeah, I've been talking for 25 years about homelessness and the importance of supportive and supported styles of housing. It's on the agenda now, not because of me. I'm just saying that I think the more we speak to dynamics like this, the more it kind of it becomes part of the narrative of civil society. And these are really important issues. There are citizens that are suffering. I hope you're right.

It's good to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Jeff Carabinale is a professor of social work at Dalhousie University in Halifax and co-director of the Dal Social Work Community Clinic.