What’s it like inside a park encampment?

In today’s The Big Story podcast, you’ve walked past them or through them. They’re in every Canadian city and town. The result of the housing crisis colliding with the opioid crisis and slamming into a pandemic. And for all the reporting has been done on them, for all the politicization of the camps themselves and what they do to a neighbourhood, perhaps not much is understood about the people inside them. Who they are, how they got there, what they need to get back on their feet and where they might get it.

Brennan Doherty wrote this story for The Local. “I would say that the encampment residents very much feel like they are kind of under siege from the world, really,” said Doherty.

Today’s episode, whatever you think of that encampment in your neighbourhood, is a chance to understand the phenomenon a little bit better.