A homeless person lies on Dundas Street in London, Ont., in 2019. (Wayne Ray), CC BY-SAAsk any resident of the southern Ontario city of London, and they’ll likely to tell you that the downtown core of the community, especially Dundas Street, is a “no-go zone” or “zombieland.” What they’re referring to is the daily unfolding of the human tragedies of homelessness and rampant drug addiction that have marred the face of the downtown area.Walking along the streets, there are numerous people lying unconscious, some enduring the notorious fentanyl fold, and needles and drug pipes are left on the sidewalks. London is among Ontario’s hardest-hit cities in terms of homelessness, but it is by no means unique. A 2025 report by Western University Centre for Research on Health Equity shows that since 2022, the number of people who are unhoused has increased by 25 per cent across Ontario and 19 per cent in London. The report warns “without urgent action, homelessness could triple in the next decade.” London reflects a broader trendSocial scientists know that when social ills like homelessness are this dire, it’s part of a broader sustained and cumulative trend. The number of deaths due to drug overdoses in Canada has increased dramatically over the past two decades, from 795 in 2000 to 7,162 in 2023. The chart below illustrates the trend:Child poverty rates in Canada have also increased. A UNICEF May 2026 report shows that Canada’s child poverty rate has almost doubled what it was in 2020, putting one in five Canadian children in poverty. As a 2023 UNICEF report stated: “Canada’s wealth gap between the most and least wealthy rose along with child poverty.” From 2020 to 2022, an additional 360,000 children were pushed into poverty, according to a recent Oxfam Canada study. Despite worsening conditions for working-class families, Canada’s wealth has grown; real GDP per capita increased from $36,900 in 1981 to $58,100 in 2025 (annual rate of 1.1 per cent). Another 2026 report by Canadians for Tax Fairness shows that since the early 2000s, extreme wealth concentration has persisted in Canada: the average family in the top 0.01 per cent holds 4,041 times more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent.The problem isn’t a lack of wealth, but how unequally it’s distributed. The Oxfam report found that Canada’s richest one per cent — those worth over $7 million — hold $3.9 trillion, which is nearly as much wealth as the bottom 80 per cent combined.The wealth of Canada’s top 40 billionaires in 2025 exceeds the GDP of countries like New Zealand and Finland. And yet countries like Finland are doing much more to close the wealth gap. Despite a GDP per capita similar to Canada, Finland ranks among the best at reducing child poverty and has cut homelessness by 75 per cent since 2008 through its “Housing First” policy, which treats housing as a human right rather than a privilege.Neoliberalism in actionThe numbers reveal two consistent trends: while working-class Canadians are increasingly dealing with drug overdoses and child poverty, the country’s super-rich have amassed unprecedented wealth. Together, these trends point to a long-term redistribution of wealth from the bottom to the top.The United States shows a similar pattern: a 2020 RAND study estimated that there has been a bottom-up redistribution of wealth, where the bottom 90 per cent lost US$47 trillion through rising inequality between 1975 and 2018.These trends underlie the poverty and homelessness in downtown London. While there have been some creative short-term solutions from London’s local community, understanding the problem’s roots requires examining structural forces — namely, neoliberalism. Read more: What exactly is neoliberalism? Since the 1980s, the Canadian political elite brewed its own blend of neoliberalism. Some academics have argued that the election of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney in 1984 cemented neoliberalism in Canada. Since then, the same neoliberalist agenda has been followed by both Liberal and Conservative prime ministers. Privatization and deregulation of capital and labour markets are consistently framed as making the government smaller and more efficient.For example, Employment Insurance (EI) eligibility requirements have been drastically tightened. While 83 per cent of the workforce was eligible for EI benefits in 1989, only 42 per cent were eligible by 2018. Under Mike Harris’s so-called Common Sense Revolution in Ontario from 1995 to 2002, welfare payments were cut by 21 per cent while poverty was portrayed as personal failings rather than structural inequality.This assault culminated in Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s aggressive austerity measures since 2018 onward. The Ford era has been 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 for workers to unionize. All of these hallmarks of neoliberalism have been enacted under the banner of protecting the “little guy” and “taxpayers” from the rich elites. How to close the gapIn a 2022 interview, American political activist and linguist Noam Chomsky captured the essence of neoliberalism, observing that it represents a top-down “class war” — a system of market discipline for the poor and state support for the rich. This explains the parallel rise in hardship for Canadian working-class citizens and the super-rich’s wealth. The pattern reveals a widening divide between two Canadas: one marked by working-class misery, drug abuse and homelessness; the other by unprecedented prosperity among the uber-wealthy. This wealth gap is unsustainable.Realistic measures can challenge this top-down class war, including advocacy against neoliberal fanaticism, which has portrayed itself as common sense. Housing is not a privilege, but a human right. As Finland shows, Housing First policies are effective and cheaper long-term than dealing with emergencies of homelessness. Furthermore, Canada needs a progressive wealth tax that targets the ultra-rich.As the Oxfam report mentions, a wealth tax that “starts at one per cent on net worth over $10 million rises to two per cent on net worth over $50 million and three per cent on net worth over $100 million.” That means it could produce revenue of $121 billion over the next five years. This money could support childcare, health care and affordable housing. Alongside a wealth tax, Canada must reform income tax. Average earners pay more than 36 per cent of their income in taxes, while the richest one per cent pay just over 23 per cent, according to the Oxfam study. Canada is also the only G7 country without an inheritance or estate tax.Pushing back against neoliberal dogmatism and reforming the tax system seems like doable steps. Still, to even enact such moderate measures, we need to free ourselves from deeply entrenched philosophies of neoliberalism and recognize the reality of a top-down class war.Farid Saberi does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.