The Globe and Mail is visiting communities across the country to hear from Canadians about the issues affecting their lives, their futures and their votes in this federal election.
In the parking lot of a homeless shelter in downtown Moncton, Jeff and Joanne Jonah pop the trunk of their white SUV as a frigid wind blows in off the muddy banks of the nearby Petitcodiac River.
Soon, a man leaning on a golf wedge approaches. “You like bologna, don’t you?” says Mr. Jonah, greeting him with a hug. Leaning into the open trunk, he pulls a sandwich from a cooler bag, a Wagon Wheel cookie and a bottle of water and hands them to the man. Others soon gather, rolling up by bike and on foot with hands swollen from the chilly spring wind.
The need on the cold, cracked pavement of downtown Moncton is obvious. It has grown in tandem with the city itself. Moncton, the second-fastest growing city in the country, has been grappling with homelessness and the skyrocketing cost of housing over the past four years, driven as in many cities in Canada by a surge in immigration. The population of the Moncton metro area grew 5.1 per cent last year – an additional 9,400 people in the medium-sized, bilingual city, according to Statistics Canada. (Calgary had the highest growth rate at 5.8 per cent.)
While the cost of living is lower than that of many cities in Western Canada and Ontario, Moncton’s growth has spurred a huge demand for housing. Last year, vacancy rates for rental apartments hit a historical low of 1.2 per cent, even as rents have increased 40 per cent over the past five years. The average price of a home has jumped 65 per cent over the same period.
Signs of the boom are all around. Cranes swivel in the air, building high-rises taller than Moncton has ever seen. At local schools, students spill into portable classrooms set up to deal with overcrowding. And traffic inches along Main Street, where a cluster of recently opened Asian and Southeast Asian restaurants are just about to serve lunch.
“It’s nice to see the boom in Moncton,” said Mr. Jonah, who’s been assembling sandwiches and hot turkey dinners with his wife in their local church kitchen and handing them out to those in need for the past year. “It’s nice to see us becoming a multicultural city, but there’s the underbelly of it all that’s happening with people literally losing their homes and apartments.”
The number of people experiencing chronic homelessness has been rapidly increasing over the past year, surpassing levels in Fredericton and Saint John, the province’s other two medium-sized cities, according to the Human Development Council, a New Brunswick research group focused on homelessness.
Kim Usher, who has been living without a home in Moncton for the past two years, said it’s impossible to find a place she can afford. The average rent for a bachelor apartment in Moncton is one-third more than a monthly basic social assistance payment. “It’s kind of hard because when you get your cheque and by the time you get the things you need for the month, you have no money left over for rent,” said Ms. Usher, holding a Nutella and Marshmallow Fluff sandwich from the Jonahs.
Outside a shelter, Joyce Burley said she’s been on a wait-list with the provincial housing authority for 12 years, all the while couch surfing with friends and living in shelters. “I call every week, every day,” she said, standing in the cold with a tear running down her cheek. “I wish there was more housing. There’s nothing.”
Demand for support services is also at an all-time high, said Deborah Thomson, the executive director of the Salvus Clinic, a non-profit that helps place people in homes. Staff can’t keep up – a problem that is sometimes exacerbated by opposition to new affordable housing developments, she added. “The Maritimes has that wonderful persona of being down-home, friendly and giving, and they are, but in Moncton there is a certain amount of NIMBYism – not in my backyard.”
“We need deeply affordable housing units,” she said, adding that it helps somewhat that the province capped rent increases at 3 per cent. “People just can’t afford the rents that are being charged.”
With election day approaching on April 28, Canada’s federal parties have all pitched plans to alleviate the national housing crisis. The Liberals’ platform involves launching a housing agency to oversee $35-billion in prefab and affordable home construction, scrapping the GST on new homes under $1-million for first-time homebuyers and cutting red tape on home building.
The Conservatives are proposing waiving the GST on newly built homes priced under $1.3-million, requiring cities to free up land for housing projects and selling federal buildings so they can be converted into affordable housing.
The NDP plan would expand the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s mandate to include offering long-term, low-interest mortgages to first-time homebuyers; ban corporations from buying affordable rental housing; introduce stronger rent protections; and earmark $1-billion over five years to buy public land for rent-controlled housing construction.
Finding tradespeople to build it all, though, isn’t expected to be easy.
Connor MacLeod, a glazier working on a new apartment building in downtown Moncton, said clusters of new buildings are going up all over the city, so services such as his are in high demand. “There’s been a lot of buildings thrown up very fast,” he said while on the job at a construction site.
There is an upside to the city’s rapid growth as well: a new multiculturalism in what was just a few years ago considered a largely white city.
At Darbar, an Indian restaurant that opened last summer on Main Street, Nav Kaur, 25, is serving lunch. Originally from India, she said she and her husband moved to Moncton last year from Halifax after their work permits expired. Moncton happened to be the closest city, and it’s where they both found work – she serving butter chicken and samosas, he working for the city’s garbage collection services.
After living in Surrey, B.C, and Toronto, where Ms. Kaur studied business administration at Humber Polytechnic, she said Moncton is where she hopes to settle down if she gets her permanent residency. “Here, it’s more comfortable,” she said, explaining that it’s easy to shop for Indian groceries and get around the city. “The people here are more friendly. I’m not struggling. Everything is in my reach.”
Through the 2025 election, producer Kasia Mychajlowycz is travelling across Canada to ask locals what’s on their minds. In Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, many spoke of increasing patriotism and anger at Donald Trump, as well as their struggles with cost of living in rural communities. Subscribe for more episodes.
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