Dying in Canada: How Nigerians Living Hard Life in Toronto. This is a heartbreaking reality for Nigerians living in Canada. Poverty and economic difficulties pushed them to migrate, hoping for a brighter future, only to encounter new hardships abroad. Having escaped difficult conditions back home, they face daily struggles and unexpected challenges in foreign lands. But like a flock of ducks desperately chasing bugs in a field, their survival is tied to the ease of doing business and other opportunities brokered by their attainment of legitimate resident status – a privilege many Canada-based Nigerians have been denied. Interestingly, the number of people living in emergency shelters or on the streets surged in all regions of Quebec over the last four years but rose most sharply outside Montreal, a new report says. Commissioned by the province’s Health Department, the report found that “visible” homelessness in Quebec incre ased by about 44 percent between April 2018 and October 2022 and by 33 percent in Montreal. The analysis by the province’s public health institute says Quebec is witnessing a “regionalization of street homelessness,” as the number of people living outside has become increasingly significant in regions such as Mauricie-Centre-du-Quebec, Estrie and theOutaouais In Quebec, one of the country’s largest cities, for instance, one in two homeless people can be located in rural areas in odd places. This is explained by Julie Bourdon, the Mayor of Granby, who noted that, “visible homelessness did not exist three years ago in Granby,” adding however that “rents are very high now compared to two years ago.” As dire an economic situation in Nigeria is at the moment, not even dollar-a-day Nigerians at home are living in the kind of places some Nigerians are said to find as homes in Canada, all in the quest for ‘better’ Iiving condition and jobs abroad. Due largely to the rent crisis arising from low housing supply and affordability issues which also define the housing market in Nigeria, some Nigerians who left Nigeria for Canada are now living in cemeteries and streets-places that are odd and unimaginable.
