There are politicians — almost all of them — who try to put the best possible shine on their professional résumés and past lives. Then there is Dan Carter.
“For 17 years, I was an absolutely horrible individual,” said Mr. Carter, the mayor of Oshawa, Ontario. “Horrible individual. I lied, cheated, stole.”
Homeless and addicted to drugs from his teenage years until he was 31, and essentially illiterate because of severe dyslexia, he was fired from more jobs than he could remember, Mr. Carter said, adding, “I really had no skills, no abilities, no education, no nothing.”
But it was perhaps this atypical background that appealed to voters in Oshawa, a city of 175,000 on Lake Ontario’s shoreline, who first elected him mayor in 2018. Or at least his story positioned him as someone who could bring his personal experience to bear on the city’s most pressing problems.
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