You have to wait for the commercial...

Man dies after waiting 34 hours in Canadian E.R.

Shoot, Fuse, you beat me to this one. But you are right. It seems that Canada really is becoming more like the US every day.

I suspect this was a case of someone who habitually used the E.R. as a place to hang out, and in time he became invisible to staff.

Here, some people use the public library for that purpose. Also we have some very nice 'drop in' places that street people use.

We don't have 'street people' in the usual sense of people with no place to go. Here, it's more common for people to use their rent money for drugs or alcohol, get evicted, from a series of apartments or rooms, then find no landlord will take them. *

We used to have a system in which Social Services would pay the rent directly to the landlord, but that was scrapped as 'demeaning' to the tenant. It was felt that the landlord would not (and often did not) respect the tenant as the 'client' unless the cash was paid by the tenant.

My brother had a nice house -- a little too much house for him and his wife -- so they built and rented a very nice suite in the basement. They had a series of tenants, all receiving social assistance, and in each case the story was:

Got the first month's rent
That was the last rent they saw.
By the time they went through the eviction process legally, three months had gone by.*

So they couldn't afford to collect only one month's rent out of three, and they couldn't afford not to have a rental income, so they sold the house.

It's not legal to refuse to rent to someone on Social Assistance. That's discrimination.

* It's illegal to refuse to take someone who happens to be on s.a., but it's legal to refuse to rent to someone who does not have a good reference from the last landlord.

quote:

Originally posted by DorianGreyed:
Shoot, Fuse, you beat me to this one. But you are right. It seems that Canada really is becoming more like the US every day.

Well, here's what I think is the difference: it's a really big story here. That's the way it should be.

quote:

Originally posted by dg:
Well, here's what I think is the difference: it's a really big story here. That's the way it should be.

At least two similar stories have been big news here and made it to both the national news and the AP board (known as the "double crown of journalism").