Social Justice

Social Enterprise

2008-02-28T14:29:00.000-08:00

From the Business section of the Monday, January 28, 2008, Toronto Star, page B4, an article about the Centre for Social Innovation:

The Bottom Line

'SOCIAL ENTERPRISE MOVEMENT' HAS A RICH HISTORY

Dale E. ShuttleworthSpecial to the Star

It was most gratifying to read Carol Goar's recent editorial column in the Toronto Star, "Focal point for social innovators" (Jan. 18, 2008). Ms. Goar describes the Centre for Social Innovation, a renovated warehouse in the Spadina Ave. area of Toronto.
The centre houses 85 "social enterprises," including organizations concerned with the environment, the arts, social justice, education, health, technology and design. The article pays tribute to the "social enterprise movement" in Quebec and Vancouver for providing the impetus for this very successful venture.

In fact, the cause of social enterprise has a rich history in the later part of the 20th century, including New Dawn Enterprises in Sydney, N.S. and the Mondragon Movement in the Basque Region of Spain. In each instance, these pioneers in "community economic development" had a built-in relationship with an educational and training facility to encourage co-operative enterprise and entrepreneurial skills.

Toronto also has provided leadership in the areas of community education and community economic development - essential components in the creation of social enterprises. In 1974, the Toronto Board of Education assisted in the establishment of the Learnxs Foundation Inc. as part of its Learning Exchange System.

The foundation represented an additional source of support for the burgeoning "alternatives in education" movement. In 1973, the Ontario government had imposed ceilings on educational spending and together with reduced revenue due to declining enrolment the Toronto board had limited means to fund innovative and experimental programs. The Learnxs Foundation was an independent "arms-length" non-profit charitable enterprise, which could solicit funds from public and private sources and generate revenue through the sale of goods and services to support innovative programs within the Toronto system.

What followed during the 1970s was a series of Learnxs-sponsored demonstration projects as a source of research and development in such areas as:

* School and community programs to improve inner-city education;
* A series of small enterprises to employ 14- to 15-year-old school leavers;
* Youth Ventures - a paper recycling enterprise employing at risk youth;
* Artajunction- discarded material from business and industry were recycled for use as craft materials for visual arts classes;
* Toronto Urban Studies Centre - a facility to encourage the use of the city as a learning environment;
* Learnxs Press - a publishing house for the production and sale of innovative learning materials.

The York Board of Education and its school and community organizations jointly incorporated the Learning Enrichment Foundation (LEF), modeled on Learnxs. Originally devoted to multicultural arts environment. LEF during the 1980s jointed with parental groups and the school board to establish 13 school-based childcare centres for infants, pre-school and school-age children.

Training programs for youth, immigrants and refugees soon followed. Often with teachers in the workplace, provided by the board's Adult Day School, training program included renovation and construction, industrial maintenance, home helpers, health-care aides, childcare assistants, food service and catering, courier, light delivery, bus drivers and clerical services.

In 1984, LEF was asked by Employment and Immigrant Canada to convene a local committee of adjustment in response to York's high rate of unemployment and plant closures. The York Community Economic Development Committee, besides LEF and the school board, included the City of York, the York Association of Industry, the United Steelworkers and the Ontario Ministry of Labour. Outcomes of the work of the Committee included:

* York Business Opportunities Centre. In 1985, with support from the Ontario Ministry of Industry, Trade & Technology, LEF opened the first small business incubator operated by a non-profit charitable organization. Originally 28,000 square feet, the centre was later increased to 74,000 square feet providing small business incubator and training space for 40 enterprises creating 160 new jobs in the first three years. Business education students from the Adult Day School provided clerical and administrative services to tenants. An LEF childcare facility was also established at the front of the building.

* MICROTON Centre: This training facility was devoted to micro-computer skills, word and numerical processing computer-assisted design, graphics and styling, and electronic assembly and report. Located in three surplus classrooms at Vaughan Road Collegiate, it was jointly sponsored by the board of education, LEF, Commodore Business Machines, Comspec Sysems, Corel Systems and the York Business Opportunities Centre. MICROTRON served York Board employees, small business and industry, government departments, voluntary organizations and the community at large.

* MICROTRON Bus: This refurbished school bus incorporated eight workstations from the MICROTRON Centre. It visited small business, industry and service organizations on a scheduled basis to provide training in word and numerical processing for their employees and clients.

In 1996, the Training Renewal Foundation was incorporated as a non-profit charity to serve disadvantage youth and other displaced workers seeking skills, qualifications and employment opportunities. Over the years TRF has partnered with governments, employers and community organizations to provide a variety of services including job-creation programs for immigrants and refugees, OED high school equivalency, cafe vending service workers, industrial warehousing and life truck operators, fully expelled students, youth parenting, construction and craft workers and garment manufacturing.

These three community education and training organizations have been unique in the "social enterprise movement." They have combined the resources of the governmental, commercial and voluntary sectors to address skill shortages in the labour market while providing entrepreneurial opportunities for some of the most disadvantaged segments of our society.

Dale E. Shuttleworth, executive director of The Training Renewal Foundation, is a former co-ordinator of Alternative and Community Programs with the Toronto Board of Education and Superintendent of Community Services with the City of York Board of Education. The Bottom Line is a weekly guest column. Please send your submissions to the bottomline@thestar.ca

Student Defenders

2008-02-18T17:58:00.000-08:00

From the Greater Toronto section of the Toronto Star, Monday, January 21, 2008, page A8, an article about law students at a legal services clinic:

STUDENTS GREAT DEFENDERS OF THE NEEDY

At the Downtown Legal Services clinic, young legal eagles find a rewarding learning experience that fills an overwhelming need

Peter Small
Courts Bureau

Kareem Leslie stares up at Justice William Wolski in drab Courtroom 112 at Old City Hall, and softly says one word: "guilty."

During an argument last July, he hit a fellow rooming house tenant on the head with a garbage can and pulled her hair, according to an agreed statement of facts read into the record. Grabbing a kitchen knife, he said, "I'll kill you."

As the slender 19-year-old man with slicked black hair and an earring pleads guilty to one count of assault, student Kate Brindley, 26, stands beside him. She is with Downtown Legal Services, a clinic run by the University of Toronto's law school.

Like 200 law students each year, she is getting a gritty first-hand taste of tribunals and lower courts while providing free services to poor clients.

Crown prosecutor Robert Wright asks the judge to give Leslie a suspended sentence and a year's probation, which would leave the young man with a criminal record.

But Brindley points out that Leslie is gainfully occupied as a full-time student and has moved away from the rooming house where the argument occurred. "He has had no contact with this woman ever again," she says.

Wolski is surprisingly generous. He grants Leslie an absolute discharge, despite the violence of his crime, noting that temper tantrums are not unusual for people living in close quarters. Leslie will have no criminal record.

It's a sweet turn of events for Brindley, a second-year law student from Thunder Bay who negotiated the guilty plea.

"I'm very happy for my client," she says.

For her, working at the clinic has been the most rewarding part of law school, giving her a taste of the challenges faced by people without means. "It's a learning experience for me, and this is very real for them."

As Leslie prepares to leave court, he confides that he couldn't have afforded a lawyer. "She had my back," he says of Brindley. "She worked really hard to help me."

Downtown Legal Services, one of six legal clinics operated by Ontario law schools, is at the cutting edge of the province's access to justice crisis.

Occupying smart but modestly decorated rooms in a three-storey brick house on Spadina Ave., the clinic manages to look both efficient and welcoming.

In a phone room, first-year law students supervised by more experienced scholars screen calls, make referrals or offer guidance on simple matters.

In other offices, upper-year students interview clients or stare at computers and law books as they prepare cases.

In a small conference room, second-year law student Joel Hechter holds a seminar for three first-year women on how to apply the Charter of Rights to real caases.

All the work is supervised by the clinic's three staff lawyers.

"We tend to be, like community clinics, a place of last resort," says executive director Judith McCormack. Out of 4,000 people who call each year, the clinic serves 1,000 directly. Most of the rest are referred to other services. "The need for legal services outstrips our ability to provide," she says.

The clinic handles immigration and refugee issues, academic offences and appeals, tenants' rights, children's rights, family law and summary conviction (the more minor) criminal charges - all free of charge.

Back at Old City Hall courthouse, student Sam Siew, 21, stands beside a 37-year-old woman who pleads guilty to assault and threatening death. Her case is remanded to May 14.

Justice Peter Hryn agrees to a minor variation on her bail, which should be a simple matter.

But the paperwork must be signed by another judge before it can take effect. At a clerk's office, Siew and the woman, who asked that her name not be used, learn that the form has been signed in error by a justice of the peace, instead of a judge.

For more than an hour, the second-year law student and the woman walk between offices chasing the judge's signature. For a time, the bail paper gets lost in one of the offices.

Dressed in an impeccable blue suit, Siew explains their dilemma to four clerks and secretaries in a calm, reasonable manner. He phones a lawyer at the clinic for advice. Finally, the paperwork is located. Now, the right judge must be found.

"These kinds of things put people off," Siew confides. "Even though the system is broken, we have to work in it to make it better."

McCormack says the at one of the chief benefits of the clinic is that it exposes future lawyers like Siew - as well as those who go on to become judges, policy-makers and politicians - to the struggles that the poor and marginalized face in getting representation.

"We have kind of a front-row seat in the access-to-justice crisis,"she says.

The clinic gets almost two thirds of its $760,000 annual budget from Legal Aid Ontario. The rest of the funding comes from student fees and the U of T faculty of law.

Downtown Legal Services has scored notable successes in courtrooms or tribunals, sometimes setting legal precedents, because the students bring time, enthusiasm, and fresh ideas to their work, says Karen Bellinger, a staff lawyer specializing in criminal cases.

"They may not have the polish of some lawyers, but I don't think anyone beats them for sheer dedication and heart," Bellinger says.

Poverty, Education and Immigrant Children

2008-02-11T18:21:00.000-08:00

From the Canadian Immigrant, January 2008, page 32, an article about poverty, education and children from immigrant families in an an area of Toronto where the majority never graduate from high school:

HEADING DOWN THE RIGHT PATH

Program helps youth in Regent Park - where more than 70 per cent of kids from immigrant families never receive diplomas

By Zalina Alvi

Sometimes all you need is a little support to get you on this right path. For high school kids in Regent Park, support comes in the form of the Pathways to Education program.

Since its launch in 2001, the program that provides support to at risk and/or economically disadvantaged youth in one of the poorest communities in Toronto has helped more than 300 young men and women graduate from high school. This is following a dropout rate that, before 2001, saw 56 percent of youth, and more than 70 per cent of kids from immigrant families, never receiving their diplomas.

According to Norman Rowen, the developer and ex-director for the Regent Park program and current director of research and evaluation for Pathways to Education Canada, the support the program provides is responsible for getting these kids across the finish line.

"The program was designed to say, 'What are the challenges that the kids face, and what are the supports that can be provided to change that dropout rate?'"

Today, that rate has fallen to about 10 percent for students involved with the program, with more than 80 percent of those who graduate going on to pursue postsecondary education. In a community where the challenges that youth face are aggravated by issues of poverty, this is a remarkable feat.

Rowen understands the seriousness of poverty in the community especially in light of the recent United Way report that identified Toronto as the poverty capital of the country.

"It is a view of trying to address some of the issues involved in poverty to give folks a better education," he explains.

"Attacking poverty through education has been a longtime dream of many folks."

The program offers four kinds of support to tackle these issues: academic, in the form of tutoring five nights a week; mentorship, which includes career counselling in grades 11 and 12; financial, including bus tickets to get to school and a postsecondary education tuition fund, and a student-parent support worker, who acts as a mediator and counsellor for the kids.

Many of the kids benefiting from the program are coming from immigrant families, a factor that brings with it its own challenges. For some, getting used to the education system is a difficult transition. For others, their situation is worsened by the fact that some parents have credentials that go unrecognized in Canada.

"That's part of poverty they face," Rowen asserts.

But this year, about 830 students are participating in the program, representing between 90 and 95 percent ofthe youth population in the community. In fact, it has been such a success that in September 2007, Pathways to Education Canada was created and similar efforts were launched in other cities around Canada, including Lawrence Heights, Rexdale, Kitchener, Ottawa and Montreal-Verdun.

Rowen explains why the program works.

"It's not simply mentoring, it's not simply tutoring, it's not simply a caring adult; it's actually organizing the immediate financial and long-term supports together with the other kinds of support - academic, social, motivation, psychological, all of those kinds of things that make it possible for kids to be successful."

And Rowen makes it clear that the youth remain the focus and motivation behind the program.

"The kids in Regent Park are a normal distribution of kids. They may have the stigma of being low income or tough, or gangs or whatever. But, in fact, they're normal kids. They're just kids who are homogeneously poor, that's the thing they have in common."

The thesis we went in with was that with those supports, the kids in Regent Park could be as successful as anybody else in the city of Toronto."

War on Poverty

2008-02-01T16:13:00.000-08:00

From the Comment & Editorials section of the Toronto Star, Thursday, January 17, 2008, page AA4, a comment on the war on poverty:

KEY PLAYER IN WAR ON POVERTY

John Cartwright

Poverty reduction has been identified as the Number 1 challenge for 2008. The issue has been front-page news in all the major Toronto media, and now the Ontario government has concurred. The United Way's Losing Ground report, followingby U of T's The Three Cities within Toronto, each show in the starkest terms the impact of the new economy onToronto residents.

As Toronto's poverty rate grows, so must our political will to tackle its root causes. But to actually do that there has to be an admission that the dramatic expansion of poverty is directly related to low income and jobs that don't pay a living wage. Then we have to look at history. What elements were put in place in past years to create the framework for what one prime minister sought to describe as a "just society"?

The notion of a just society is at the heart of Canadian life. In a sense it is the Canadian dream, centring more on the collective spirit than on mere individualism. Building on this dream, we created institutions that helped extend fairness and opportunity to everyone. Universal health care, quality public schools, unemployment insurance and a strong social safety net are just some of the examples of what was undertaken in the past.

For working people, the best anti-poverty program has been collective action to improve wages and benefits. Unions have historically played this role by providing workers with a means for collective action - often across entire sectors of the economy. Manufacturing jobs were once only a source of poverty wages, until the mass unionization efforts of the 1940s. Governments in Canada and the U.S. created a legal framework to curtail the power of business and create some balance in the workplace. Today, extending the voice that unions provide to more workers across the economy is a crucial building block in the campaign against poverty.

Recent protests by temporary workers excluded from the benefits of labour standards and paid holidays points to the growing need for more workers to have a voice at work. Labour laws need to reflect the changing workplace. With more than 40 per cent of workers who came to Canada between 1990 and 1999 earning less than a poverty wage, the exclusion of new Canadians from the benefits of work threatens not only the dream of a just society but the social fabric of society itself.

Without unions a balance of power in the workplace doesn't exist. Unions help to ensure that as the economy grows so do opportunities for everyone. National wealth does little good if it is being squandered by the super-rich on luxury items while those at the other end of the economic scale are struggling with two or three jobs. Our nation's wealth should allow for families to have time together, for people to have affordable places to live, for health needs to be met and for communities to thrive.

Government has a role in ensuring that the rights of workers be protected and that voices of workers be heard. The best way to protect these rights is by respecting the rights of workers to form unions so that they can have a direct say in their future. Ordinary people can then demand a living wage, good working conditions, fairness and equity at work, and advance the principles of a just society through collection action.

Unions have a basic role in demanding that the rights of all workers be respected. By taking the lead in the fight for the $10 minimum wage and advocating on behalf of vulnerable workers. Toronto's unions continue to demonstrate our commitment to those who are trapped in poverty-level jobs. But we also fight for strong public services and social programs that are a key element in our quality of life.

The fight against poverty and for a just society requires that we strengthen our commmitment to every Canadian. These efforts must start with the political will to both rebuild existing institutions and to fashion new ones. Our history shows that working together through collective action is absolutely essential if are to start seriously tackling poverty in 2008.

John Cartwright is president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council.

Economy, Goverment and Family-Friendly Policies

2008-01-16T17:20:00.000-08:00

From the Comment section of the Toronto Star, Friday, November 30, 2007, page AA6, an article about the need for economic and government policies that are friendly to families:

NATIONS THRIVE BY HELPING FAMILIES

Economists are leery about work-life balance. It is too abstract, too incompatible with market principles.

Governments treat family-friendly policies as a frill, a grudging concession to working women.

The media play up images of female executives rushing to daycare centres in their power suits; female lawyers struggling to meet their quota of billable hours after their kids are in bed; female celebrities wrestling with maternal guilt.

The issue is much bigger than this, says the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Yesterday, the Paris based international organization released the most comprehensive study ever done of the tug-of-war between work and family life.

Its conclusion: Countries that want to raise their standard of living, improve their fertility rate, reduce child poverty and narrow the pay gap between men and women have to get serious about offering parents healthier choices.

It is not just a matter of easing workplace stress, says Babies and Bosses. It is a question of how - sometimes whether - individuals contribute to a nation's economy.

"As long as there are people who are constrained in their choices about work/family balance, the result may be both too few babies and too little employment or unsatisfactory careers,"says the 215-page report (available at www.oecd.org).

It is a synthesis of five years' work, reviewing the policies of Canada, Britain, Sweden, Finland, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Switzerland, Japan, Ireland, Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands. Statistics for other OECD countries such as the U.S., Mexico, Germany, France and Spain are also included in the study.

Here are its principal findings:

* Access to affordable preschool care is vital.

Without it, some women postpone or forgo having children. Others sacrifice their career to raise their children. Many make compromises - shortchanging their children or their employers - that eat away at them and impose an unfair burden on their co-workers.

For single mothers, the options are especially stark. Trapped between governments that require them to work and daycare centres that charge more than they can afford, they make tenuous babysitting arrangements or find ways to stay on welfare.

Canada fares badly in this regard. Child care costs 21.3 per cent of the average industrial wage, compared with 4.5 per cent in Sweden, 9.1 per cent in Germany, 19.5 per cent in the U.S. and 33.8 per cent in Switzerland. (The OECD average was 16.3 per cent.)

* Parental leave programs make a big difference.

They give mothers (and fathers in some countries) time to bond with their newborns while allowing them to stay in the workforce.

They encourage young couples to start families, rather than holding off until they can afford to interrupt their careers.

And they provide children with full-time personal care in the crucial early months of their lives.

Canada's policies place it in the middle of the pack. It lags behind most European countries, but is ahead of the U.S. and Japan.

* After-school care is badly needed.

By keeping schools open after classes, governments could go a long way toward aligning parent's' and kids' schedules, alleviate pressure on workers to leave early and reduce the number of latchkey children.

Denmark and Sweden are the only countries with well-established programs. Britain and the Netherlands are moving in this direction.

* Employers are unlikely to act on their own.

Companies that offer flexible hours, work sharing and other family-friendly arrangements report reduced absenteeism, lower staff turnover and enhanced productivity. But the business case is not strong enough to convince most corporate executives.

This means governments have to take the lead, using tax measures, public programs and moral suasion.

Life was simpler, the OECD acknowledges, when families consisted of a breadwinner, a homemaker and a brood of children. But that hasn't been the case for half a century.

Canada can catch up to reality or its politicians can pursue "bigger" priorities: Handing out tax cuts, playing partisan games and dissecting the alleged ethical lapses of a prime minister who left office 14 years ago.

Carol Goar's column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

The Real Meaning of Holiday Cheer

2008-01-10T13:52:00.000-08:00

From the Greater Toronto section of the Wednesday, December 26, 2007, Toronto Star, page A12, an article about a man who spent his holidays bringing food and cheer to the homeless:

'IT SHOULD BE LIKE THIS EVERY DAY'
Man spends his holiday delivering cheer, gifts to the city's homeless in downtown core

Emily Mathieu
Staff Reporter

Parth Bhavsar has developed his own spin on what it means to give gifts at Christmas.

"You just load up the car and get out there," said Bhavsar, 27. Yesterday was his fifth year handing out food and gifts to people living on the streets on Christmas Day.

The packages are a big hit, but it's not just about the items inside, he said.

"Most of the time they just want to chat," he said.

The trunk of the grey Nissan he was driving was filled with bags of warm gloves, hats, homemade turkey sandwiches, fruit and juice. He also handed out items such as packs of facial tissue and small bunches of cigarettes in plastic bags.

"Hey, how are you doing?" he asked one man as he crouched low to give him a package. "Going anywhere for dinner tonight?"

Along for the ride was girlfriend Kyla Falconer, 26, delivering for the second year. She chose to spend Christmas handing out items to people in need "just to help." Christmas has become all about giving - but not to the people who need it the most, she said.

Throughout the morning, the car wove through the downtown care, pulling sharply to the side of the street each time the couple spotted someone who looked like they would benefit from a gift. Falconer and Bhavsar bought all of the items themselves.

The streets were almost entirely free of people, aside from those who were wrapped in sleeping bags in doorways or lying across air vents for warmth.

At many locations, Bhavsar and Falconer were not the first people to lend a helping hand.

"It should be like this every day," Falconer said, gesturing toward a man dozing on a patch of concrete near Queen St. and University Ave. Next to his sleeping bag rested a small pile of Christmas gifts left by other well-wishers.

At one stop the pair handed gift parcels to two men curled into sleeping bags on a patch of pavement close to the corner of King St. W. and Duncan St.

"They are nice," said one man, who identified himself as Frosty, "like the snowman," as he gestured to the duo. Lying with his back to him was Dino, who was "just relaxing" and drinking a juice he'd pulled out of the gift bag.

By the time the men started sorting through their gift bags, Falconer and Bhavsar were back in the car, off to their next stop.

Bhavsar said there really isn't a reason why he decided to start spending Christmas this way.

The holidays could be a happier time if more people helped one another out, he said.

"Turn it into what you want it to be."

Fair-Trade T-Shirts

2008-01-06T10:15:00.001-08:00

From the Ideas section of the Wednesday, October 31, 2007, Toronto Star, page AA8, is an article about the Dalai Lama's visit to Toronto and the issue of whether to sell cheap or fair-trade clothes in fundraising by a Tibetan association:

HAPPINESS IS FAIR TRADE T-SHIRTS

Hillary Vipond

The Dalai Lama speaks today at the Rogers Center. He is coming to deliver a talk on human happiness, but it is his presence and his example that is shifting the priorities of local business in Toronto.

He has been invited to speak by the Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario, and it, like the rest of us, has its own projects and priorities.

One of these is raising money to build a Tibetan centre in Ontario. This year, as in years before, it is selling T-shirts at a profit in order to raise funds. It needs to make as much money as possible off the sale of the shirts and in years past simply has used the cheapest T-shirts available.

Unfortunately, cheap T-shirts invariably mean sweatshop labour, and so this year a member of the Tibetan community suggested that it use fair-trade T-shirts.

This was a difficult decision. Fair-trade shirts are more expensive than sweatshop shirts and cut directly into fundraising, but the price difference is reflected in the living standards of the labourers.

For example, Gildan Activewear Inc. is able to produce very inexpensive shirts. Its labour standards are not high. Gildan is certified as meeting fair labour standards by a group called the Fair Labour Association (FLA), which also certifies Nike, Adidas, and Asics.

The FLA guarantees to meet either the minimum wage in the country or the prevailing industry wage. It fails to mention that the prevailing industry wage is usually sweatshop labour wage, and that the minimum wage in many countries either does not exist or is set to base-level subsistence.

The FLA has also committed to no more than a 60-hour work week, but this does not apply when there are "extraordinary business circumstances." It does not require members to pay overtime unless they are legally obliged to do so. Workers are allowed one day off a week.

The shirts provided by the Fair Trade Clothing Co-op, on the other hand, are from a co-operative in El Salvador that is owned and run by single mothers. The women make on average $89 per week, more than double the standard sweatshop wage in El Salvador. They have the weekends off, and their workdays have decreased from 12 hours to eight. They do not have to leave their children alone at night.

In the end, the Tibetan Association of Ontario had to make a decision between potentially losing some of its income and supporting fair trade, or going with standard business practice. It chose to go with fair trade shirts. The Fair Trade Clothing Co-op in Toronto also lowered the price on the shirts as far as it possibly could without actually losing money. And the consumer will end up paying a little more at the end of the day.

Is all this work worth it? Is the sacrifice demanded from every group at every stage of this process worth the labour standards of people in other countries? Are human rights worth it?

I think so. I don't doubt that the Dalai Lama thinks so. The Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario thinks so. And some consumers will think so.

It is unquestionable that fairer trade - with fewer sweatshops, fewer human rights abuse, less poverty, less child labour - will raise the cost of the products we buy. From sneakers to T-shirts this is true.

But extreme poverty is a human rights abuse, and allowing it to happen for the sake of cheap products is not something we should be willing to do.

Hillary Vipond is an intern with Canadian Crossroads International, an NGO working with southern partners to address the root causes of poverty and HIV/AIDS.

Robert Kennedy: Inspiration for Individual Action

2007-12-22T10:16:00.000-08:00

From The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs, page 367, Jeffrey Sachs, as part of his chapter, "Our Generation's Challenge", includes a section on 'Our Next Steps', such as:

(1) Commit to Ending Poverty; (2) Adopt a Plan of Action; (3) Raise the Voice of the Poor; (4)Redeem the Role of the United States in the World; (5) Rescue the IMF and the World Bank; (6) Strengthen the United Nations; (7) Harness Global Science; (8) Promote Sustainable Development; (9) Make a Personal Commitment.

Here's is the section on making a personal commitment:

Make a Personal Commitment In the end, however, it comes back to us, an individuals. Individuals, working in unison, form and shape societies. Social commitments are commitments of individuals. Great social forces, Robert Kennedy powerfully reminded us, are the mere accumulation of individual actions. His words are more powerful today than ever:

"Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills - against misery and ignorance, injustice and violence ... Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation ...

It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

Let the future say of our generation that we sent forth mighty currents of hope, and that we worked together to heal the world.

Food Banks Not the Answer

2007-12-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

From Eye Weekly, December 20, 2007, pages 8-10, an article about the inadequacies of food banks in dealing with the underlying problem of hunger and poverty:

They're vastly inefficient.
They treat symptoms rather than causes. And as the food bank network expands, so does the number of hungry people.

ARE FOOD BANKS THE BEST WE CAN DO?

By Chris Bilton

'TIS the season: trim the tree, grab a glass of eggnog and drop a can of soup in a food bank collection bin. In the past decade and a half, it's become ingrained in your empathetic psyche that the promise of office parties and statutory holidays also signals the single biggest opportunity for food banks to collect goods from the public. Wherever there's a bin to fill, a few containers of peanut butter or cans of beef stew is all it takes to DO YOUR PART. Besides, unlike giving money to an intangible-yet-undoubtedly-worthy cause, donation to food banks like Daily Bread carries with it the charitable security that everything donated will go directly to someone in need.

Directly, that is, from the big bin by the cashier back into the supermarket's warehouse, where it will be picked up by a delivery truck and driven to the Daily Bread warehouse in Etobicoke. There is will be off loaded by the warehouse volunteers and dumped directly into a cardboard box the six of a SmartCar, which will be pallet-jacked out into the warehouse's main area, where hundreds of volunteers will work together to label and inspect whence it came. Once it's back in an inventory-worthy order, the food agencies around the city, picked by the warehouse workers and agencies around the city, the food will be directly available to fill requests from the various food bank agencies around the city, picked by the warehouse workers who can then pack in into a well-balanced hampers to give directly to those who need it most.

Ironically, this elaborate corporate-style distribution infrastructure developed out of the very basic premise on which food banks operate: that hungry people need food. But that's also the very reason that grocery stores exist, and why, for the most part, everyone in the city lives within a few blocks of one. The food industry has already perfected its methods of harvesting goods from all over the world, packaging them appropriately, importing them to massive distribution centres and shipping them out to every corner of the city.

The food bank collection and distribution network, then, is a staggeringly successful and complex solution to a problem that never existed. People are not going hungry because they lack access to food - nearly all poverty research, including recent studies from the United Way and Daily Bread itself indicates that people are hungry because they don't have enough money. Why do we go through an additional, decidedly labyrinthine, process of collecting food that's already been distributed only to deliver it back to the hungry people who live a few blocks from the grocery store, and not just give them the money to buy it themselves. Could it really be that simple?

Well, yes and no. There's a German adage that says, "Charity sees the need not the cause." And when the needs of hungry people are so great that they require charity on an institutional level, the cause gets harder and harder to see. It's something of a paradox: it may be correct to point out that food banks are a silly way to help poor people, but that doesn't mean they should stop.

Institutionalized food banks: from local charity to big philanthropic business

A recent National Post opinion column sported the heading "Food banks are ridiculous," which in the context of the paper and the spirit it was delivered, seemed a bit of a cheap shot. No one is about to argue that these charity organizations, essentially helping to soften the blow of insubstantial social programs and impoverished living conditions, are doing anything other than what's Right and Good. But there was a small nugget of truth in the Post's prickly declaration - it's not the urge to help the less fortunate deserves ridicule, but that the institutionalization of food banks is actually quite absurd.

In the mid-1980s, they began as a sort of emergency response, but by 1995 (read: the dark years of Mike Harris), the need for food banks spiked. Once the food industry stepped up and offered their unsellable-yet-still-edible extras, organizations like Daily Bread and the Ontario and Canadian Association of Food Banks necessarily assumed the role of food-bank distributors. There are many other prominent food banks that focus on niche communities or specific foods, such as Second Harvest and The Stop and their responsive fresh and organize programs. But Daily Bread, which now, owns it own warehouse and fills orders for is 164 agencies, is by far the largest.

The distribution system established by food banks almost identically mirrors the one that already serves the food industry and supermarkets, except that theirs runs on a veritable army of volunteer labour and donated resources (like fuel, trucking and sometimes physical facilities) to process the food industry's waste. Of the 12 million pounds of food that Daily Bread took in last year, nearly three quarters was mislabelled and about-to-expire food from the food industry otherwise destined for the dump. The industry is more than happy to donate it and save the tipping fees of sending it to a landfill, all the while propping up an image of being good corporate citizens. But what appears to be a commendable effort to reduce waste and satisfy a need is actually something of an illusion.

More food, less waste, compassionate volunteers; what's wrong with this arrangement?

Despite the fact that they are able to solicit specific donations from the food industry, Daily Bread's director of research and communications, Michael Oliphant, explains, "At the same time, we are getting what they can't sell, so that's the part that we don't have that much control over." This is why banks still rely heavily on the thrice-yearly food drives and on purchasing food directly to cover expensive essentials like baby food and canned meats. Ironically, the food donated by the industry that still ends up as waste is almost equal to what Daily Bread receives from food drives.

While the food industry continuously minimizes its shipping and waste (by, for instance, donating unsellable food to save the disposal cost), food banks require a disproportionate amount of labour and resources to expand their operations. According to Valerie Tarasuk, a professor at U of T's department of nutritional sciences, food banks have to do an enormous amount of work to convert any food into edible food donations. As much as the food-drive sorting room provides an excellent photo op, it represents only a fraction of the countless hours of year-round volunteer labour required to feed approximately 75,000 people a month. Just think of the nine million pounds in bulk shipments from manufacturers that also have to be sorted and inspected. And the hours of sorting and re-sorting at the local level. Even after all that effort, it's still not enough.

Daily Bread's statistics show that more than half of the people they serve still need more food either "most of the time" or "all of the time." In terms of a more complete picture of poverty and hunger, Tarasuk says, "The food bank numbers act like a bit of a lightning rod to indicates these problems, but there are probably four or five times as many people in the community who are struggling to get enough food to meet their needs."

So if the biggest food bank in Canada can't meet these needs, what's the alternative? Is there a way to convert the donated food, volunteer hours, financial donations and other incalculable contributions into a more direct link between hungry people and food?

Is an alternative (or a solution) even possible?

What if people instead donated gift cards that could be redeemed at any supermarket, and that came with an automatic discount? Supermarkets and suppliers could write the discount off as a charitable donation to balance out the lost savings in tipping fees, and there would be no need for a massive, inefficient distribution infrastructure, as the food industy has a far better one already in place.

Better yet, the whole operation would be exceptionally accountable and easily managed by a handful of people doing the proper paperwork and handing out gift cards. And since people use food banks for an average of 12 months, as a transitional provisions, all the free-up volunteer labour could be redirected to help them work on the roots of recipients' financial crises and make the transition to self-sufficiency that much faster.

But finding an alternative to food banks still misses the point, considering once again the need over the cause, and ignoring the more pressing issue that almost one third of Toronto families lie in poverty. Consequently, the very existence of food banks creates an accountability vacuum for the government, according to Tarasuk. "From Stephen Harper's perspective, it's a very efficient system," she says. "It keeps everybody thinking the problem's being dealt with. It costs practically nothing, there's virtually no government money moving into the system, and at the same time they can slash away at budgets for things that would allow low-income people to buy their own food."

The real alternative to food banks then, is to make them unnecessary. And not because they are inefficient or unstable or represent a band aid solution but because in a healthy economy where the government boasts a continued surplus, social programs and that healthy private sector economy should be able to provide enough money and affordable groceries. The reason food banks remain a necessity, while the number of hungry people continues to grow, according to Tarasuk, is that "the debate about food banks often becomes an either/or, as if food banks are meeting a need. And the question is [about] their appropriateness to meet that need. ... They're not a particularly relevant part of the solution [to poverty] anyway," she says. "Let's just set it aside and start talking about the problem in other ways."

Even Oliphant stresses the ultimate goal for Daily Bread is to help eliminate poverty itself. "Like any organization that can think critically, when you're faced with a problem that you can never fully resolve, you get to the root of the problem," he says. "And that's why we've put more of a focus on the advocacy and finding political solutions." He thinks that the government is in fact capable of reducing poverty, citing Daily Bread's recent success in influencing policy: a provincial child benefit for low-income kids and a federal income tax supplement for the working poor.

Is it unreasonable to think that food banks could effect a more immediate change in policy by simply saying to the government: "We're not going to do this any ore - it's been your job all along"? Olphant says they're not about to hold the people that rely on Daily Bread hostage. No matter how much they focus on their advocacy efforts, they still devote most of their work to feeding the hungry. And until there is a real effort to reduce poverty, there is no reason to assume that food banks will give up trying to feed those in need.

Only a few weeks ago, as the food drive season was just about to launch, the one Daily Bread food bank in Parkdale came within a few thousand dollars of closing its doors - and still could by the new year. The reflex action from many was to find a way to keep it open at any cost because without it, there is nowhere else for hungry people in that community to turn. Essentially, it's another temporary fix for a temporary solution to a small part of a far larger problem; a clear indication that food bank clients are already hostages, except that no one is making demands and no one seems ready to negotiate.
Email letters@eyeweekly.com

Microloans

2007-12-20T21:41:00.000-08:00

From the Monday, November 26, 2007, Business section, pages B, B4, an article about an artist looking for bridge financing and being turned down by one of the big banks:

Thinking Big
VISUAL ARTIST GETS FINANCIALLY CREATIVE

Big Bank said no to his request for bridge cash, so he visited Alterna

Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew
Business Reporter

Visual artist Jason Baerg had a development deal for his newest and most ambitious work to date and just needed some short-term bridge financing to tide him over until the pledged funding arrived.

So he approached one of the Big Five Banks in January.

"They closed the door really quick. They just said, 'No'," said Baerg, 36, who has a fine arts degree from Concordia University and has exhibited his work across Canada and sat on national art juries for the Canada Council for the Arts and Indian and Northern Affairs Canada.

The new project is called Metroscope, and he describes it as "an investigation of the psyche of the city." Among other things, it's about being an artist in an urban centre, tapping into urban subjects to engage an urban audience.

It would involved a documentary, as well as billboard-size art pieces and eventually, an Internet site that would let users make their own contributions to his work.

Baerg had firm financial commitments for the project from Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), SunTV and the National Film Board of Canada. The bridge financing was meant to help him get started, develop his ideas and hire a crew.

When the bank turned him away, Baerg went to Alterna Savings.

Susan Henry, manager of community economic development, saw Baerg The Artist. But she also saw The Entrepreneur.

She liked that he had formal education, but that wasn't all.

"He had really thought out everything in terms of what he wants, how he's going to use the financing, how he's going to pay it back. I found him to be very detailed and organized."

Henry knows that helping artists with their business plans can be a challenge, particularly when it comes to film projects. "Projects not finishing when they're supposed to can pose a big problem to your cash flow. Also, you may budget a certain amount and it may go over, or the documentary you've made may not get picked up by a distributor."

The best thing Baerg had going for him that he already had financing commitments from two broadcasters and the National Film Board. Baerg got a microloan for $5,000. He paid it back one month later and got another loan for $10,000.

Henry also saw Baerg juggling different projects, with different timelines, so she helped him fine-tune his focus and set priorities. It became a vision for what his business would look like next year and the year after that.

"It was a way to set goals. She said, if you're going to be making this feature length documentary in the spring, you need to be here financially," Baerg said.

"A small loan equalled a lot of extra support."

Baerg, who was born in Sarnia, was raised in Prince Albert, Sask. He returned to Ontario at 15. By then, he knew that he wanted to be an artist.

After getting a degree from Concordia, he completed a graduate studies program in new digital media at George Brown College.

Baerg then moved to New York City, working as "interactive architect" as it was called then. He helped develop websites for the growing armies of companies that were interested in establishing their businesses online.

"It was a really amazing, exciting time," Baerg said. "Then Sept. 11 happened." Baerg re-evaluated, and decided to return to Canada.

"The New York landscape is really different when you're not born and raised there. They have no idea what the Banff Centre for the Arts is; they don't understand the significance of the Canada Council of the Arts," he said.

"Back in Canada, I was much more established. I really came back to leverage my own ideas." Baerg, who is part Cree Metis, earns money writing for the Centre for Indigenous Theatre. He also applies for his own grants. These funds help sustain him while he's creating the artwork that he may later sell to a collector.

"It's all in starts and stops," he said. "Sometimes you're pursuing an art project and then a big grant comes in. And if you're writing grants for an organization, you can get a pay cheque from them for doing that."

Thought Baerg is an artist, his financial struggles are much the same as any entrepreneur just starting out. When he was a student in Montreal, he worked as a bartender to make money to develop his art. When he first returned form New York, he did construction jobs.

"I really believe that it doesn't matter what business you're in a restaurant or fine art business," Baergsaid. "You need to invest everything you've got, financially as well as in your sweat equity."

Getting the financial side of his business under control allows Baerg to focus on what he loves.

"If I were to be strategic and if the bottom line was dollars today, I probably could produce a work that would be extremely commercial. But I'm much more interested in innovation and pushing the boundaries of media," Baerg said.

"My bottom line currently is not just about the green. It's about what do you really want to do, what do you really want to say."

Alterna Savings Q&A

Since 2000, Alterna Savings has given out more than 400 loans totaling nearly $1.5 million.

Q: What is a microloan?
A. A business loan that's less than what a traditional financial institution would typically offer, for entrepreneurs who would not otherwise qualify.

Q. How much is it for?
A. It's a loan ranging from $1,000 to $5,000 for start-ups, to a maximum of $15,000 for more established businesses.

Q. What's the interest rate on a microloan and who can apply?
A. The standard rate is prime plus 6 per cent. Alterna Savings' program is geared to low income, self-employed people with small business start-ups that have been operating for between one and five years.

Q. What qualifications are needed?
A. Alterna Savings prefers its new applicants to be graduates of a recognized small business training program, such as those offered by the YMCA, Toronto Business Development Centre, or Centennial College of Entrepreneurship.

Clean Water and Aids Orphans in Uganda

2007-12-18T20:35:00.000-08:00

From the Saturday, November 24, 2007, Toronto Star, page AA3, an article about providing clean water and sanitation in Uganda:

CLEAN-WATER PROJECT HELPS ORPHANS

Kampala - Nakayima Nassolo watched her four children die from AIDS and now at 80 years old she is raising 16 grandchildren.

"I love all my grandchildren," said Nassolo, which is referred to as a princess because she was considered royalty in her Muganda clan.

"It's unfortunate I have had to experience AIDS in my family," she said through an interpreter.

While Nassolo's story of caring for children aged 4 to 17 is dramatic, many grandmothers are finding themselves in this position because AIDS kills some 6,000 people each day in Africa - more than wars, famines and floods.

But Canada, in part, has ridden to her rescue with money for running water and a sanitary sewage system, both of which she was more than happy to show off to two visiting Canadian politicians - Conservative MPs Rahim Jaffer (Edmonton-Strathcona) and Helena Guergis (Simcoe-Grey), who is also the junior foreign affairs minister.

"I don't know about the rest of you but this is a very emotional experience," said Guergis.

Ugandan-born Jaffer and Guergis, who are engaged, are part of the Canadian delegation attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting here.

The aid money for Nassolo came from the African Medical and Research Foundation, which receives $2 million annually. Among other things, the non-governmental agency focuses on safe water and sanitation. It also provided money for an improved sanitation system at a nearby school, Little Stars, where children sang with enthusiasm about hygiene.

"These sorts of things that seem so small to Canadians ... are so huge here for people and the quality of their lives. Just to see that should make everyone very happy," Jaffer said.

The foundation's Joshua Kyallo said in a slum area, poor hygiene and lack of sanitation can result in the outbreak of diseases that are water-borne - such as dysentery or cholera.
- Richard Brennan

Social Activist Uzma Shakir

2007-12-05T13:54:00.000-08:00

This article is about social activist, Uzma Shakir, who was recently awarded the Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship. From the Wednesday, November 21, 2007, Greater Toronto section of the Toronto Star, page A7:

Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship
ADVOCATE CHALLENGES STATUS QUO

Award helps Muslim immigrant expand work as community leader on diversity, social inclusion

Isabel Teotonio
Staff Reporter

Nearly 20 years ago, Uzma Shakir receive a phone call that would change her life. And, ultimately, the lives of countless others.

The caller was a recent immigrant from Pakistan whose husband was drunk and being verbally abusive. Not knowing where to turn, she phoned Shakir's husband, a well-known lawyer in Toronto's South Asian community from whom many had sought personal advice.

"My husband asked me to look up information on settlement agencies where they spoke Urdu," recalled Shakir yesterday, adding few immigrant women knew what support was available or how to access it.

"Irrespective of education, class and background, most (newly immigrant) women found themselves dependent on their spouses and if they didn't speak (English) it added to further feelings of alienation."

Fighting these feelings is something she dedicated herself to, becoming a community leader on issues of immigration, diversity and social inclusion - a dedication that has earned her the Atkinson Economic Justice Fellowship, which will be awarded on Friday.

Unlike some grassroots activists, the 50-year-old has a deep understanding of where that alienation is rooted - in large part, because she can identify with the experience of many newcomers.

Shakir herself gave up diplomatic dreams of working in the foreign service, abandoned her PhD studies and left her family and home country of Pakistan to join her new husband in Canada.

"I remember sitting in Scarborough with a new baby," she recalled of those early days in 1989. "I was isolated, I had no friends - except my husband's - and I'd become Mrs. So-and -So overnight ... It was very depressing. I'd lived a very independent life before and suddenly I was an appendage to someone else.

But then came the fateful phone call.

"That was the turning point because it forced me to think beyond, "I'm an immigrant women stuck in Scarberia.'

"It made me give up my self pity and I started thinking maybe I could make a difference."

And what a difference she's made say those who applaud her advocacy work, particularly on issues such as poverty, legal educational services and access to professions and trades.

Over the years Shakir has advised members of government, foundations and community groups and been involved in organizations such as the Coalition for Accessing Professional Engineering, the National Anti-Racism Council and the Riverdale Immigrant Women's Centre. She is now executive director of Toronto's South Asian Legal Clinic - a position she plans to leave next month.

And the applsuse will surely resonate when Shakir is awarded the Fellowship at Toronto's Drake Hotel on Queen St. W.

The award will provide up to $100,000 for annual stipend and expenses for three years, enabling Shakir to focus on writing, speaking and working with a wide variety of grassroots organizations.

Applications aren't accepted, rather the board selects someone doing exceptional work in social justice who could benefit from on-going, no-strings-attached support. Past recipients are progressive economist Armine Yalnizyan, former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow and housing activist Cathy Crowe.

"We just found Uzma to be everything we would want in an Atkinson fellow," said Peter A. Armstrong president and board chair of the Atkinson Charitable Foundation, which promotes social and economic justice in the tradition of its founder and former Star publisher Joseph E. Atkinson.

"She's an immigrant herslf, a Muslim woman in a post 9/11 world, she's spent her career seeking justice and fairness, and seeking a seat at the table for the many, many increasing numbers of people who are disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

"And, she will challenge those who love to protect the status quo."

Selling Foreign Aid

2007-12-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

This article about a unique way to market foreign aid is from the Ideas section of the Toronto Star, Friday, November 16, 2007, page AA8:

NEW WAY TO MARKET FOREIGN AID

Conrad McCallum

Some poor countries need clean water more than laptops. That's one of the strange arguments that has been directed at the ambitious One Laptop Per Child charity, which aims to supply laptops worth about $200 to schoolchildren in the developing world.

It's a true statement, but to whom is it addressed? OLPC isn't Engineers Without Borders; it's a spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. It's like telling a charitable toothpaste provider - operating in an oral hygiene-challenged village - that dandruff is a much bigger worry for some of the residents.

It's early yet for any evidence supporting various predictions, including the dire ones: that laptops can't support the hoped-for educational purpose; or, even if they could, they won't remain in the youngsters' hands for long.

So critics have recently set their sights on GOGO.

The Delaware-based project will use a "Give One, Get One" program to open sales of the XO laptops to people in the U.S. and Canada next month. Boasting built-in wireless technology and a child-friendly user interface, the machines are rechargeable by hand with a pulley or crank and can be read in full sunlight.

From Nov. 12 to 26 only, buyers are invited to purchase two for $400 - one for a child in a poor country and one for little Ashley or Andrew at home. The promotion is designed to create a surge in donated laptops that OLPC hopes will stimulate demand in countries hesitant to join the program.

But to some, "Give One, Get One" is a kind of foreign aid version of the retail industry's "Buy One, Get One Free." Campaigns too focused on "getting" are dangerous because they condition donors to give generously only when there's a tangible reward, they argue.

Certainly, those who participate in "Give One, Get One" will not only receive a trendy new laptop, they'll also enjoy a rarefied cachet from their act of ethical consumption - and such rewards supposedly erode efforts to promote more altruistic kinds of giving.

The truth is we commonly expect to receive something enjoyable back from our giving (see charity runs, walks, galas and auctions). Donors are motivated to give for a variety of personal reasons, such as fame, peer pressure or posterity.

The reasons don't taint donations, which are what matter in the end. (Conversely, reasons for not giving are of great interest to charities but they largely remain private, not giving on its own doesn't signal anything in particular.)

Whatever its impact, "Give One, Get One" is certainly an intriguing new way to market a specific type of foreign aid to Westerners - and along with it, a particular set of values and ideas about development.

Addressing the claim that this type of ethical consumption robs from "pure" charitable giving really comes down to how individual "Give One, Get One" laptop buyers will view the transaction.

There will be those who feel like they're donating. (And they might prefer to simply donate to OLPC, anytime.) There will be consumers enticed by a new and inexpensive laptop. (A bargain at $188, but less so in India, which has reportedly rejected OLPC's offer and turned to developing at $10 laptop for schoolchildren.)

Many others will consider "Give One, Get One" part consumption, part charity, and some of them will be introspective. Am I shopping with a conscience or shopping without a conscience? Is this the most sensible donation I've made this year, or a case of "me generation" philanthropy?

The transaction complete, such labels have zero impact on the end product: that's the ethical shopper's afterthought, a feeling that's as empty as it is consoling.

Conrad McCallum is a Toronto writer.

National Plan for Affordable Housing

2007-11-29T06:33:00.000-08:00

An article from the Sunday, October 28, 2007, Toronto Star, Comment section, page 22, provides a plan to tackle poverty by solving the housing crisis in Canada:

A 3-POINT STRATEGY FOR BETTER HOUSING
War on poverty: Housing: One of an ongoing series of articles and editorials about poverty in Canada and how to combat it.

Canadians really didn't need a United Nations envoy to tour the country and announce that Canada urgently needs to tackle its affordable housing crisis. The signs of it are everywhere, from homeless beggars on the streets of Canada's major cities to overcrowded shelters and rotting public housing buildings.

But the visit last week by Miloon Kothari, the UN's special rapporteur on adequate housing, did shine a spotlight on the shocking lack of affordable housing in a country as rich as Canada. Successive federal and provincial governments have pledged to address the problem, but all have fallen far short of meeting the growing demand for reasonably priced housing for low-income families and individuals.

What is lacking is a co-ordinated federal-provincial housing strategy, in effect a national plan that would ensure every Canadian has a decent place to call home.

Such a blueprint must take a three-pronged approach: new construction of affordable homes, rent subsidies and renovation of existing homes.

The three areas need to be tackled together, not in isolation or in any prescribed order. Rather, a holistic approach is best suited to addressing the problem.

As a key leg of the three-pronged strategy, it is imperative that Ottawa kick-start a renewed national housing program with a goal of building up to 200,000 affordable and co-operative housing units over the next 10 years. The homes are needed in cities, rural areas and native reserves.

Ottawa effectively got out of the affordable housing sector when it downloaded the area to the provinces. Because of that, only a few major programs have been funded. The result is that in the past decade, fewer than one new affordable rental unit has been built for every 100 new homes. And overall rental construction is lagging. Across Ontario, up to 12,000 new rental apartments are needed annually, three times what has been built each year between 2000 and 2005.

The consequences are felt most acutely in the Greater Toronto Area where only 2,000 new affordable rental units have been built in the past five years, while more than 67,000 people remain on waiting lists.

The second leg of the strategy should be a greatly expanded rent supplement program. Obviously, new affordable housing cannot be built fast enough to meet existing demand. That's why paying subsidies to put low-income residents into vacant rental units is necessary. While some housing advocates view rent supplements as a short-term measure that does not solve the overall problem, such subsidies do provide temporary support and needed housing for those in desperate need.

Currently, a family of four receives a shelter allowance of only $544 to cover rent. However, the average market rent in Toronto has risen to $1,052 for a two-bedroom apartment. During the recent election campaign, Premier Dalton McGuinty promised a new $100-a-month rent supplemennt program to help 27,000 Ontario families. That is a welcome first step, but it should only be an initial step. More assistance will be needed because McGuinty's plan will still leave thousands of families scrambling for help to pay their rent.

The third part of the strategy would be a major commitment to renovate public housing that is aging and falling into disrepair. In Toronto alone, the city's 58,000 units of public housing require an estimated $300 million in repairs. Many of those buildings are now more than 50 years old, with plumbing that leaks and ceilings that are cracked.

The preferred way to deal with this issue is for Queen's Park to upload the cost of renovations. When the Conservative government under Mike Harris downloaded the cost of social housing to municipalities in 2001, it refused to give the cities the money needed to deal with repairs. McGuinty should make reversing this policy the first priority of his re-elected government.

Together, these measures would form the basis of a federal-provincial affordable housing strategy that would go a long way toward helping the neediest among us - those who cannot work, single parents and the working poor - have a better life.

Consumerism Versus Community and Democracy

2007-11-28T13:30:00.000-08:00

From Alternet, November 28, 2007, an article by Terrence McNally about the destructive nature of unrestrained consumerism:

CONSUMER-DRIVEN ECONOMY IS KILLING OUR DEMOCRACY

By Terrence McNally, Alternet. Posted November 28, 2007.

Americans are split between wanting low prices and opposing the corporate behaviors that make them possible.

Here's a quick quiz. Do you love bargains? Do you enjoy the power and convenience of shopping online for the best deals on electronics or travel or anything else? Do you favor cutthroat corporate competition that devours small, local businesses? Do you applaud the sweatshop labor it takes to produce your sweatpants for less?

Feeling schizophrenic, yet?

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich believes we are all suffering from this split agenda -- as consumers we want low prices, while as citizens we may oppose corporate behaviors that make them possible. And he believes -- at least on a national scale --our citizen selves are losing.

Shoppers are elbowing citizens out of the public arena. The last three decades have seen the emergence of a supercharged capitalism fueled by open markets and cutthroat competitiveness. According to Reich, "supercapitalism" is overwhelming government with lobbyists and money, while citizens are dazzled by the promise of previously unimaginable riches and consumer choices.

In his new book, Supercapitalism, Reich tackles the big question: Can democracy survive in this environment?

Professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, Reich served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton. He is co-founding editor of the American Prospect, and his weekly commentaries on public radio's "Marketplace" are heard by nearly 5 million people. He is the author of eleven books, including The Work of Nations, The Future of Success and his latest, Supercapitalism.

Terrence McNally: In Supercapitalism, you describe the almost golden age of the '50s and '60s. What are some things you value from that period that your sons will never experience?

Robert Reich: Well, stable jobs. My father was a retail merchant. He had a little store that catered to factory workers and their families, and those factory jobs were pretty stable. People typically stayed with the same company for 40 years. I'm not sure we should or can go back to those days, but job stability was a value that people held very dear. These days nobody knows whether they're going to be working for the same company next week, next year or tomorrow.

There's the issue of inequality. In the '50s and '60s, the "almost golden age," we had less inequality of income and wealth than at any time before or since. I'm not saying everybody's income necessarily has to be the same, but inequality is bad for society and bad for democracy.

TM: You're not in any way saying that we can return to that age?

RR: No, and I don't think we should. I call it "the not quite golden age," because a lot of things were wrong with our society. African-Americans were still relegated to second-class citizenship. We passed a civil rights act and a voting rights act, but we still had a long way to go. Women were blocked from most professional careers. The environment was more polluted. We passed the Environmental Protection Act of 1975 and made progress on that. Joe McCarthy and the communist witch hunt of the 1950s scarred American politics. The CIA was up to no good abroad. I don't want to paint this era as a wonderful place we should necessarily go back to, but it's important to understand that our democracy, although far from perfect, was trying to grapple with all of those problems.

When people were asked in opinion polls, "Do you think that our system is working in your interest and in the interest of things you believe in?" the vast majority of Americans between 1945 and 1975, said "Yes." These days it's just the reverse. In most polls, when asked that same question, "Do you think that the democratic system is working in the interests of average Americans like you?" anywhere from 68 to 75 percent of Americans say, "No, it's working for the big guys."

TM: In his recent book, Deep Economy, Bill McKibben looks at whether our gains in material possessions since the '50s and '60s have made us happier. According to polling, people are not as happy now as they were then, and he believes it's because they've paid too high a price in the loss of community.

RR: As consumers and investors, we've made great progress over the last 30 years -- if you put quotation marks around the word "progress." We have access to a much greater range of choices. We get better products, more gadgets, more bells and whistles. We comparison shop like mad on the internet. We're getting great deals, and those great deals have become progressively better. But as citizens, we are doing arguably worse and worse, because we have fewer and fewer ways of expressing the values and goals we share with other people.

TM: There were two surprises for me in this book. First, despite the title, it seemed to me the subject of this book is democracy. Second, you seem to say that campaigning for social and environmental responsibility from corporations is either a distraction or a failed strategy.

RR: Yes on both counts. Let me explain briefly.

I don't think we can separate capitalism from democracy. If capitalism is working well and democracy is working poorly, democracy is working poorly in part because capitalism is working so vibrantly. Capitalism has overrun democracy. In the 1940s, '50s and '60s, we talked about "democratic capitalism" with a small "d." We talked about it very proudly -- to ourselves and to the world -- as the alternative to Soviet communism.

Secondly, your point about corporate social responsibility -- a very important theme in the book is that corporations are not people. They are just contracts, they are just pieces of paper. And it's a fallacy to treat them as people, whether it's giving them constitutional rights or the right to engage in our political process, or treating them as people in terms of requiring or assuming that they can be moral.

It's kind of an anthropomorphic fallacy, and it's very dangerous. Corporate social responsibility is a nice idea, but corporations will not be socially responsible, if by socially responsible we are suggesting that they sacrifice consumer deals and investor returns. They won't.

TM: Though they may do things that can be described as socially or environmentally responsible, we should not expect them to do these things unless they are also profitable ...

RR: Exactly. It's a distraction from politics to push companies to be socially responsible when it runs counter to their bottom line.

For example, I dislike Wal-Mart's hiring practices very strongly, and I dislike that Wal-Mart pays rock bottom wages. I could go on against Wal-Mart for a long period of time.

I'm sympathetic with people who are climbing on the anti-Wal-Mart bandwagon, but it seems to me the one productive thing we can do is to make things so hot for Wal-Mart that they have to recognize a union.

Don't expect Wal-Mart to suddenly become more moral. Wal-Mart is a piece of paper, it's a contract. Wal-Mart has consumers who love the good deals they can get, and it has investors who want the highest possible return. Wal-Mart is not going to do anything that hurts its bottom line.

TM: It seems to me we're talking about two big problems in this book. One is the power and influence of corporate money on politics. The other is the social and environmental consequences of corporate behavior. It looks to me like we can't hope to solve the second till we solve the first.

RR: People may disagree on what the problem is. I've talked to a lot of conservatives who say the biggest problem we face with our market economy is the coarsening of our culture, the spewing forth of sex and violence from the media. I don't want to get into a debate about what is the biggest problem. Let's just all agree that companies are not going to change their ways because we are yelling at them to do so. They spew out sex and violence because there are consumers who love sex and violence, and investors make a high return on sex and violence. So the real issue is, what kind of laws and regulations do we have to constrain the market?

In the first decades of the 20th century, we enacted laws against child labor and laws that said the 40-hour work week will be the norm and above that is overtime. We've since enacted laws with regard to workers' safety, laws against discrimination at work. So if we're unhappy about the social consequences of our current supercapitalist economy, then we've got to work through politics and pass legislation. To do that, we've got to rescue democracy from the supercapitalism that is now overwhelming it.

TM: How are we going to pass needed regulations when the corporate dominance of democracy makes passing such legislation harder than ever?

RR: We need to wall off democracy. We say highly competitive supercapitalism, that's fine for the private sector where we're going to be consumers and investors. We recognize the cognitive dissonance between the part of our heads that's a consumer and an investor and the part that may be a citizen. We're going to wall all of that off -- in order to address the trade-offs and have a democracy that is not going to be engulfed by the lobbyists and money coming from supercapitalism.

How are we going to ever get to that point and rescue democracy? The system is not going to reform itself from the inside.

Stop trying to get corporations to be socially responsible. Stop trying to achieve any particular social objective like global warming or a national healthcare system ... Put all of our efforts into a citizen's movement for democracy. That would include the public financing of campaigns and would require any network, any broadcaster using the public airwaves to provide advertising for all candidates.

We have a long list of what we all know democracy needs in order to be shielded from supercapitalism. I actually offer one additional idea to that list that I think is important and useful.

Each candidate sets up a blind trust that receives all political contributions, so that no candidate can ever know who contributed what. Once all political contributions become anonymous, I would predict a substantial drop in contributions, because there can no longer be any quid pro quo.

TM: You may still be inclined to give a candidate money based on past record or on current promises, but the candidate won't know it, so no strict quid pro quo would happen.

You say corporations are just pieces of paper, that you can't expect them to serve anyone but shareholders. Is this as true in other cultures?

I've heard that in Germany, for instance, the customer is rated higher than in America and that in some of the European countries, the employee's rated higher. Is that true, and is it becoming less true?

RR: It used to be true. In large companies Germany still has a separate board that's supposed to represent other stakeholders, including employees. Japan has until quite recently had a fairly egalitarian pay structure, but that's being eroded by the power of American supercapitalism.

Money is now global. Investors are now demanding high returns wherever they are around the world. These days if a company in Germany wants to sacrifice shareholder returns for the sake of employee benefits, global capitalists say, "No, you can't do that." There's an irony here -- there are people inside our pension plans trying to get the highest return for us by putting pressure on Germany and other countries to reduce the extent to which those companies cater to employees or other stakeholders.

TM: In the U.S., has the shareholder always been in the paramount position with any other stakeholder a distant second?

RR: Yes, but look again at what I talk about as the not quite golden age, the period 1945 to 1975, when 35 percent of Americans were unionized in the work force -- you had industrywide bargaining, you had pluralist interest groups and regulatory agencies. You had political parties that were not just sump pumps for campaign financing but were political organizations that reached down to the community level. In those days corporate investors were not kings, consumers were not kings. The power was divided in a way that gave us much more say as citizens.

TM: At the time, even if a corporation wanted to focus on shareholder return, they couldn't ignore the power of the unions.

RR: Exactly.

TM: I've been saying since the 2004 election that we need a Restore Democracy Trifecta: media reform for a more informed democracy -- stop (and reverse if possible) media consolidation, offer less false balance (i.e., global warming skeptics are equal to global warming scientists) and more statements of fact. Campaign reform -- public financing, free TV time. Election reform -- transparent, accurate, inclusive and verifiable.

If all progressives got together, campaigned for those three things and succeeded to a meaningful extent, only then would they have a realistic chance to get environmental, healthcare, education, civil liberties or whatever legislation passed. Is that basically in sync with what you're saying?

RR: Absolutely. I keep telling progressives who have particular issues they want to advance [that] nothing is going to happen on your issue or any other progressive issue unless you get together with everybody else who wants change and rescue democracy first.

TM: In some sense you're saying we could nibble at the problem, we could hit a few singles, steal a base, sacrifice -- or we could go for the home run. The home run is to restore democracy, and let the chips fall where they may.

How is that going to happen? In working on this book, you must have talked to Public Campaign, Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, etc. Do you feel there is the energy, the interest, the passion in an election year for people to actually go there?

RR: There are three steps.

Step No. 1: Buy my book.

Step No. 2: Don't be cynical. I think cynicism about politics and our democracy is one of the most corrosive things that we have to deal with. A lot of people use cynicism as an excuse for not taking action. They say nothing will change, the big guys are in charge, I'm not going to get into politics, I'm going to look at my own little community and work there. That's fine. I respect that. But if people are motivated by cynicism to not roll up their sleeves and do something that rescues democracy, then we are all in deep trouble.

Step No. 3: This is the most important. We have had in America social movements that have produced tremendous change. I'm thinking of the suffragettes and others in the first decades of the 20th century, all the way through civil rights and the environmental movement. The anti-war movement during Vietnam. These were successful movements. Now why can we not have a citizens' movement to rescue democracy?

TM: It seems to me when people look at Katrina, when they look at the healthcare issue, when they look at education ... I'm talking about everyone in America who has an impulse to take action -- Boy Scouts, PTAs, seniors ... Why not take this on with no regard for the particular partisan policy that might follow, but just go for democracy?

RR: And the beauty of this is, it transcends ideological lines. I mean, we all believe in democracy. Regardless of what we want democracy to accomplish, we want democracy to work.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

Businesses Could Do More to Stop Child Labour

2007-11-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

Here is an article from the Kielburger brothers in the Monday, November 5, 2007, issue of Toronto Star, World section, page AA2, about the issue of child labour:

Firms could do more on child labour

Craig and Marc Kielburger
Global Voices

With allegations of child labour making world headlines last week, Gap has found itself in a familiar spot - doing damage control.

Executives are hitting the airwaves in full force, expressing shock and anger over a British newspaper investigation that found Indian children as young as 10 working in brutal conditions to make Gap clothing.

Blaming an unethical subcontractor, Gap has promised to fix the problem, saying it will ensure that all its suppliers adhere to its employee rights' policies, and firing those who don't.

But while the company's PR machine has been working overtime to minimize damage to its image, they've failed to realize that their response will actually do nothing to help the very children they are pledging to protect.

By singling out and punishing individual subcontractors, Gap is pushing child labour further underground. The factor owners involved will simply fire their child workers - forcing them to find work elsewhere. Desperate for money, they will likely become easy targets for exploitation at much more dangerous jobs.

Child labour is rampant in India. Kids as young as 4 work in industries from brick manufacturing to fireworks production.

The UN says there are as many as 55 million child labourers in India, most working in hazardous conditions for pennies a day.

They are there because of chronic poverty in rural raeas, where parents are often forced to sell one of their children into slavery to keep the rest alive. Many are working to repay family debts.

It's a vicious cycle, and until we tackle the root causes of child labour - from a lack of education to the world's insatiable demand for cheap goods - children will continue ending up in the workforce.

With its response over the past week, Gap is missing an opportunity to prove to the world that it is truly serious about contributing to a systematic solution to child labour.

Why not help the children in its factory get an education? Or hire their parents at a fair wage? With second-quarters sales of nearly $4 billion this year alone, the company could easily ensure these child workers are well taken care of.

Reebok was rocked by similar allegations last decade, and they did just that. The children working in their soccer ball production factories were sent to school and their parents were given employment training. Reebok was celebrated for showing a long-term commitment to its former young workers.

Gap has been in this position before. In 2000, a BBC documentary showed young girls in Cambodia making clothing for them, causing a huge public backlash.

The company responded by implementing strict policies forbiding the use of child labour. With these new allegations, Gap pointed out that it cut ties with 23 of its factories last year alone with incidences of child labour were discovered.

Executives also said that Gap has 90 full-time inspectors who make unannounced visits to the company's suppliers worldwide, looking for rights violations.

But that is not enough.

The company can instead become a truly responsible corporation by ensuring these child labourers - and any future ones - are not simply rehired somewhere else by providing them and their families with an opportunity to find their way out of poverty.

Now that would be great PR.

Craig and Marc Kielburger co-founded Free The Children, which is active in the developing world. Online:Craig and Marc Kielburger discuss global issues every Monday in the World & Comment section. Take part in the discussion online at thestar.com/globalvoices.

Elderly and Ill Caregivers Looking After Elderly Ill Family Members

2007-11-16T17:06:00.000-08:00

This is a tragic story about an elderly and ill caregiver, looking after an elderly and ill family member, and whether social services failed the two people, from the Friday, September 21, 1007, Toronto Star, Greater Toronto, Social Services, page A6:

WHY DIDN'T ANYBODY SEE FAMILY'S DESPERATION?
Murder-suicide raises questions about services for sick and isolated

Theresa Boyle
Staff Reporter

The day after the murder-suicide of a terminally ill man and his ailing mother, questions are being raised about the availability of support services for seniors, especially those who are sick and isolated.

Gerri Badcock of Neighbourhood Link Support Services, formerly known as Seniorlink, wonders how the family ended up in such a desperate place in their lives.

"How come nobody saw that they might need help?" asked Badcock, a director of the organization.

Pery Grupstein, who used the last name Stein, took his own life and that of his mother, Sarah in her 80s, on Wednesday. Percy, in his 60s, shot his mother and then turned the gun on himself in their apartment at College and Yonge Sts.

Family members, who are also elderly, said yesterday they were "mixed up" about the grim situation and too distraught to talk about it. They spent the day shuffling between the coroner's office and a funeral home. Sarah and Percy will be buried today in Pardes Shalom Cemetery, on Dufferin St.

Percy suffered from terminal stomach cancer and had only months to live. He had previously had quadruple bypass surgery and had survived breast cancer.

His mother used a wheelchair and was completely dependent upon her son, who got her out of bed, bathed her and dressed her. She suffered from diabetes and heart disease.

"How could that person go through a quadruple bypass surgery, breast cancer, stomach cancer and not have somebody notice that he's a caregiver for his om?" Badcock asked.

While heath-care and social service officials interviewed knew nothing of the Grupsteins' personal circumstances, they all said there is an array of services they could have tapped into. At the same time, these officials agreed there are not enough services and said it's not unheard of for isolated seniors to fall through the cracks.

"Your heart just aches for the terrible place that the family had come to in their decision-making, but I don't know what informed their decision-making, but I don't know what informed their decision-making," remarked Frances Lankin, president of the United Way of Greater Toronto.

"I do know that if people don't know how to get access to services that might help them that they can call 211," she added.

The phone service, provided by the United Way and Information Toronto, helps callers access health and social services in the GTA. For example, it can put them in touch with 47 agencies that offer programs for seniors. These services include Alzheimer's day programs, transportation and respite care.

"Whether seniors are physically frail or mentally frail, there are additional supports and services that are necessary to be in place in the community in order to enable them to live at home, with dignity, in as good health as possible for as long as possible. We know that our resources are stretched," Lankin said.

Badcock said it's a sure thing that there are other seniors in the city living in isolation and in need of health and social services.

"This is maybe a wakeup call," she said.

She said it's possible the Grupsteins were worried Sarah would be sent to a nursing home after Percy died.

"A lot of people don't want to even hear that," Badcock continued, noting that they can be stuck in rooms with up to three other residents unless they can afford a private room.

Camille Orridge, executive director of the Toronto Community Care Access Centre, said there are many ways seniors can hook into services available for them. Family physicians and hospitals often refer patients to CCACs, which in turn can assess an individual's needs and hook them up with services as in-home nursing, personnel support and social work.

She pointed out some people choose not [to] use the services.

"It's not always about the system having failed someone," she said.

With files from Michele Henry

Affordable Community Housing

2007-11-16T16:18:00.001-08:00

Here is an article in the Friday, September 21, 2007, Greater Toronto, Social Services, Toronto Star, page A6, involving an interview with the head of Toronto's community housing corporation (TCHC):

Derek Ballantyne, the head of the Toronto Community Housing Corporation - you may think of him as the civil service landlord - sat on a park bench and talked about his job.

He knows me as an occasional critic. I know him to be a thoughtful guy.

But I also know that some of those in public housing live in dreadful conditions, and he's the boss. I referred to a recently notorious renter of St. James Town who kept pigions in his apartment; so many pigions, for so long, that the man's rooms were crusted with years of crap, and under the crust was a carpet of roaches.

No one from TCHC sought to gain entry and clean up, at least not until public health got involved; apparently, the right of Pigeon Man to privacy trumped the right of his neighbours to live in healthy surroundings. Or perhaps TCHC staff lacked the will or the initiative to get involved.

Ballantyne was abashed, and quickly to accept responsibility.

"The pigeon story was stupid management. Somebody should have figured it out quicker."

If Pigeon Man was a problem, he offered another: "There is an 84-year-old woman; we've worked with her for two years. She's a hoarder in the extreme. You could barely enter her unit. We spent two years trying to get her to understand that she had to get rid of her things. You couldn't walk in there. It was a health issue, a fire hazard.

"After two years, we moved to evict her. . .for the good of all. We'll rehouse her if she can manage her illness, but she hasn't acknowledged that she has an illness.

"You can say we're heartless SOBs, or you can say we did what we could."

Before I could choose, he added this kicker: "Were it not for the housing we provide, I don't know where a lot of people would live."

Fair point.

"I don't take pride in walking into some of our communities and seeing the state they're in. I get angry. You have to remember, we bring benefit to the city."

His critics pound him on the cost of those benefits; after all, his annual budget is half a billion dollars. "I don't believe there's a more efficient way," he said. "We've compared. We work on clim margins.

"What would be the cost if the support we provide was not there? We house people who earn low wages. Who benefits? The service industry.

The services industry?

He said if you subtract those with are retired, and those who are on disability, the majority of social housing tenants - some 70 per cent - work for a living, and the majority of those are employed in the service industry.

Think about that the next time you go to bankquest or hail a cab.

"European countries are coming to the notion that affordable housing is critical to a healthy society. I lose patience with people who criticize the system without thinking their way through. We have hotels, we have cabs, but what sort of conditions are the workers living in?

Whether conditions in TCHC are good or not, tenants do have some say in the management of their homes: the TCHC board consists of four city councillors, seven citizens and two tenants, and there are tenant reps in each building.

He is not opposed to having more tenants on the board.

He also said, proudly that tenants control 20 per cent of the annual budget, and are closly involved in deciding how much money is spent in their buildings.

A good system?

We'll hear from the tenants next week.

Joe Fiorito usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him by email at: jflorito@thestar.ca .

United Nations Day for the Eradication of Poverty

2007-11-13T16:05:00.000-08:00

An editorial about the eradication of poverty in the Wednesday, October 17, 2007, Toronto Star, Comments section, page AA6:

ACTION NEEDED ON POVERTY

Around the globe today, millions of people will join rallies as part of the United Nations' International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. Across Canada, there will be more than 300 events, including a major rally in Toronto at Metro Hall where social activists, union members and others will urge federal, provincial and municipal politicians to do more to eliminate unacceptable poverty levels in our midst.

Many of the participants are members of the 25 in 5 Network, a coalition of community representatives from a cross-section of Ontario society who, like the Star, are urging the provincial government to commit to reducing poverty by 25 per cent in five years.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has promised to develop a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy within a year, complete with indicators and measures to address child poverty. The pledge is welcome, but needs to be fleshed out with specific targets. And such a plan must contain measures that will help the poorest among us, such as by raising social assistance rates and building more affordable housing.

One of the first steps that McGuinty should take is to decide how his government will develop the strategy. Among the key questions:

How will the process of consultations be handled? Will there be a special commission set up to oversee the work? Will an existing ministry be in charge? Who within cabinet should be leading the effort?

At the same time, McGuinty should press Ottawa to reform the Employment Insurance system so more workers who lose their jobs qualify for benefits. Currently, only 26 per cent of unemployed Torontonians can collect benefits, down from 80 per cent some 25 years ago.

Some measures are urgently needed in Ontario where 1.3 million people are living without the basics for a decent life, namely healthy food, quality housing and living wages. Regrettably, a disproportionate number of those living in poverty are single parents, the disabled who cannot work, aboriginals and new immigrants.

At the federal level, much remains to be done. One of the major priorities should be for Ottawa to work with the provinces to adopt an affordable national child-care program to replace the one scrapped by the Conservative government when it came to power.

The federal government should also look to increase its foreign aid commitment to help fight poverty worldwide.

The time for piecemeal solutions to poverty problems is past. What is needed is a comprehensive plan of action, backed with an adequate budget, that brings together all of the promises, policies and programs that are needed to put an end to this poverty disgrace.

Hate Crime: Gay Man Assaulted by Canadian Soldiers

2007-11-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

It seems unbelievable that people are still being attacked for their sexual orientation and even more so when the attackers were Canadian soldiers in Amsterdam. Amsterdam is not a third world city, and Canada is not a third world country.

The only consolation is that the two men were jailed, but I'm sure the person who was attacked would have preferred that it had never happened in the first place.

From the World section of the Wednesday, October 17, 2007, Toronto Star, page AA4:

Netherlands
CANADIAN SOLDIERS GUILTY IN ATTACK ON GAY MAN

A Dutch court yesterday jailed two Canadian soldiers due to be posted to Afghanistan for an assault on a gay man in Amsterdam.

Eric Wright was sentenced to five months in jail and ordered to pay 6,000 euros ($8,300) in damages and Ryan Dowie was given 45 days in jail. The two men, both aged 22 at the time of the incident, were arrested following a brawl in May in which a 28-year-old man was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Racism and Hate Crimes in the U.S.

2007-11-13T09:28:00.000-08:00

From page AA and AA4 of the World & Comment section of the Toronto Star, Wednesday, October 17, 2007, an article about the racist noose incidents in the U.S.:

NOOSE INCIDENTS SPARK OUTRAGE
African Americans blast U.S. congressional hearing over lack of action on discrimination, hate crimes

Tim Harper
Washington Bureau

Washington - Generations of racial hatred, injustice and outrage over the historic treatment of black Americans spilled onto the floor of a Congressional committee hearing room here yesterday.

Emotions were stripped bare as Democratic legislators probed the inequities of the justice system in the tiny Louisiana town of Jena and African Americans spoke of the sordid history of the noose, one of the most potent symbols of hate in this country.

Although the hearing was convened to deal with the expansion of hate laws in the U.S., it centred on the treatment of black defendants in Louisiana known as the "Jena Six" and a sudden proliferation of incidents involving the noose, symbol of the more than 3,000 lynchings of blacks in this nation from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

"Nooses were used for one thing and one thing only," said Charles Ogletree, the director of Harvard Law School's Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

"In the history of this country, (they were) used ... to lynch black women and men. I hope we don't bury the history that comes with what this symbolizes. This is one of the most destructive, mean-spirited, racist examples of individual behaviour."

Racial tensions began rising in Jena more than a year ago after a black student sat under a "white tree" and three white students later hung two nooses from the tree.

The white students were suspended form the school, but six black students were later charged under the state's justice system following a fight sparked by the noose incident the following December.

One student, Mychal Bell, was unexpectedly sent back to prison last week during what he expected to be a routine hearing after a judge determined he had violated the terms of his probation for a previous conviction.

Since 20,000 civil rights activists descended on the town last month to protest what they believe to be two systems of justice in Louisiana, a spate of noose incidents have been reported.

One was dragged from the back of a truck in Jena the night of the demonstration, another was placed near the site of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York, another at a Long Island police detachment and one was found dangling form the office door of a Columbia University professor.

Still more incidents have been reported in North Carolina, Maryland, Connecticut and California.

Nooses "don't just hurt the three or five or seven black children under the tree," Ogletree said. "It hurts all of us, every single one of us."

Much of the anger from witnesses and black Democrats was a lack of a response to the situation in Jena from the Bush administration and the failure of the federal justice department to right the wrongs of he Louisiana system.

One black Democratic legislator assailed a black U.S. attorney for inaction on the case, drawing shouts and applause from the room, and a Republican accused civil rights leader Al Sharpton of sowing racial disharmony in the United States.

Some spectators began chanting for the House judiciary committee to subpoena the prosecutor in the case, Reed Walters.

Sharpton told the committee there are Jenas everywhere in the United States.

"We have not heard one federal response," he said. "It is almost like the national government is not watching the country while we're watching nooses on the news every night, while we're watching hate crimes.

"The justice department, at the behest of this committee, needs to step into Jena and the Jenas of this country and establish that the federal government is still in charge and the states did not win the Civil War."

Sharpton and others said hate laws should be expanded to include juveniles. The white students in Jena were not prosecuted because they were under 18.

Before Sharpton belatedly appeared - his flight from New York was delayed - North Carolina Republican Howard Coble took a shot at the civil rights leader in absentia. "If I were compiling a group of witnesses to encourage the diminishing of racial disharmony, I don't know that Mr. Sharpton would have made my cut," Coble said

Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Democrat from Texas, lashed out at federal officials for not intervening and restoring justice in Jena.

"Shame on you, she said, reserving most of her venom for Donald Washington, the black U.S. attorney for the Jena district.

"As a parent, I'm on the verge of tears," she said.

"Why didn't you intervene? These broken lives could have been prevented if you had taken the symbolic responsibility that you have, being the first African-American appointed to the (Louisiana) western district.

"I don't know what else to say. I am outraged."

Washington defended himself, saying he did intervene, but is restricted by the law.

"I, too, am an African-American and I was very offended by what I heard (in Jena)," he said.

"I am a child of the '60s, of the desegregation era. My mother marched, I'm sure like your parents did, in the 1960s when Martin Luther King was urging African-Americans to get out and march for their rights."

Deb Matthews: A Poverty Warrier

2007-11-11T13:47:00.000-08:00

From the Wednesday, October 31, 2007, Toronto Star, Canada section, page A14, is an article about the new Children and Youth Services Minister, Deb Matthews:

A NEW WARRIOR TO FIGHT AGAINST POVERTY
Matthews heads group that will carry out election promise to introduce poverty-reduction targets

Kerry Gillespie
Queen's Park Bureau

She has her own ministry, but Deb Matthews, children and youth services minister, will be spending much of her time bending other ministries to her will to get what she needs.

There are more than a million Ontarians living in poverty and nothing less than the co-operation of a variety of government departments will be enough to cut that number, said Matthews, who heads a new anti-poverty committee.

"We do have a problem with poverty in this province," Matthews said yesterday. "We've got a challenge, there's no question about it, but we're up to it."

The first job of the cabinet committee on poverty reduction will be to carry out Premier Dalton McGuinty's election promise to introduce firm poverty-reduction targets - within a year - so the government can be measured on its progress.

Poverty reduction "involves education, it involves health, it involves community and social services, it's (children and youth services), it's housing, it's very multi-dimensional. The solutions are going to require co-operation," she said.

Matthews, former president of the Ontario Liberal Party, said she's up to the task of wrangling the various ministers needed to do the job.

Poverty and community groups that have worked with her are equally confident.

"This is what she went into politics to do," said David Pecaut, chair of the Toronto City Summit Alliance, a coalition dedicated to improving life in the city. Matthews, first elected in 2003 in London North Centre, has a Ph.D. in social demography.

She led a series of province-wide consultations on income security and social assistance, was involved in a task force studying working adults living in poverty and McGuinty has credited her for coming up with the new Ontario Child Benefit, which provides assistance to all low-income families.

"She has seen the challenges of what it's going to take to put together an interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral program because you can't tackle poverty with only one instrument," Pecaut said.

Other committee members will be announced in the coming weeks.

Matthews is one of nine women in cabinet, a decision commended by Equal Voice, the non-partisan group that wants to increase the number of women in politics.

Still, the group noted that's the same number in his expanded 28-member cabinet as there were in the previous 27-minister cabinet.

"When you run more women, as the Liberal Party did this fall, you have more women to choose from," said Equal Voice co-founder Rosemary Speirs, a former Toronto Star political reporter.

Other women appointed are: Education Minister Kathleen Wynne; Revenue Minister Monique Smith, Culture Minister Aileen Carroll; Health Promotion Minister Margaret Best; Economic Development and Trade Minister Sandra Pupatello; Agriculture Minister Leona Dombrowsky; Community and Social Services Minister Madeline Meilleur and Natural Resources Minister Donna Cansfield.

With files from Robert Benzie and Rob Ferguson

Social Activism: Getting Children Involved

2007-11-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

From the Thursday, October 18, 2007, special Making a Difference>Me to We section of the Toronto Star, is an article about a child becoming involved in activism in her society:

Sowing the seeds of social activism

Bob Benvie
Me to We Volunteer

Catherine McCauley has seen how the smallest of acts can make a profound difference in the way a young person sees the world.

Not long ago, her family heard that city politicians had made a deal with a developer to renovate an old dance hall on the waterfront, where 6-year-old daughter Renee and husband David love to ride their bikes. To accommodate a parking lot next to the dance hall, several large, old willow trees would be chopped down. On one of their rides, Renee asked her father about a group of citizens who had set up tables and a petition at the site. David said politicians intended to cut down the trees and that people unhappy with this prospect were letting them know.

Renee insisted they show support, so David signed the petition. The city eventually backed down.

Catherine says Renee still talks with pride about how she helped save what she affectionately calls "our trees."

Seeing the effect of their actions inspires kids to social action. Research also shows socially active youth have better grades, higher academic aspirations and make informed choices about substance abuse.

Education and Poverty

2007-11-07T09:45:00.001-08:00

From World Vision's Winter 2007/08 Childview, The Magazine for Child Sponsors, pages 11-12, is a story about a young girl from Bangladesh and what her education, made possible by a sponsor from Manitoba, Canada, meant in her life and those she was able to reach through her education:

EDUCATION GAP
Poverty and gender disparity nearly kept Sheuli Som from getting an education. Today the former sponsored child in Bangladesh holds a university degree

By Heather Buchan

Sheuli Som
Netrokona District, Bangladesh

Sheuli Som recalls a terrifying night in 1988 as an eight-year-old; she and her sister and brother sat huddled together in the dark at the side of a rural highway in Bangladesh crying in fear. Earlier that day, a flash flood had engulfed their village in Netrokona District and Som's parents sent their three children in a neighbour's boat to higher ground where they would be safe.

"We didn't know where we would go or when we would meet our parents," she remembers. Eventually, Som and her siblings reunited with their parents, but her family lost everything in that flood, including her home. Her father also lost his job as an agricultural labourer -- the family's only source of income.

Although devastating, the floor was a temporary hurdle that Som and her family managed to get over. They relocated, constructed a new home and slowly rebuilt their lives. But the poverty the family continued to face made it challenging for Som to attend school and overcome Bangladesh's high illiteracy rates.

As of 2001, the United Nations reports 52.5 per cent of adults in Bangladesh are illiterate, with the majority being women. The gap in rural areas is even greater due to a lack of access to education.

But Som rose to the challenge and beat the odds. She is a 27-year-old assistant teacher who holds an arts degree and is currently completing a master's degree in philosophy. Her sheer dedication to become a teacher, along with her sponsorship through World Vision, have enabled her to realize her lifelong dream. "I had a dream to be higher educated," says Som, adding that she also wanted to become a teacher at an early age.

In Bangladesh, 36 per cent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, reports UNICEF. Many of Som's community members could barely make ends meet, much less pay for school fees. "Poor families could hardly feed their children, so they would never think of educating their children," she explains.

When Som became a sponsored child two years after the flood, World Vision helped pay for her school fees and provided her with a school uniform, notebooks and other school supplies. Once a month, World Vision staff members visited her home to check on her health and academic progress.

Without child sponsorship, Som says she would have likely been married at a very young age, because her father couldn't afford to send all three of his children to school. UNICEF reports that nearly two out of three Bangladeshi young women are married before the legal age of 18.

A dedicated student, Som studied both before and after school. Year after year, she ranked among the top 10 students in her class. After completing high school, she attended the National University of Bangladesh.

Som remembers receiving her first letter from her Canadian sponsor, Donna Janzen of The Pas, Manitoba, who encouraged her to continue with her education. "I received a photo of [Jensen] with her daughter. She wrote that I am like her daughter," Som says of her sponsor. "It touched me -- a woman who never saw me treated me as her own daughter and supported me. I will never forget her support."

World Vision's influence in Som's life went beyond education. She participated in cultural programs and birthday celebrations. Staff members also developed awareness campaigns about HIV and AIDS prevention and proper sanitation methods in her village.

A world away, in rural Manitoba, Janzen is pleased to know how well Som is doing. "Knowing that my sponsorship somehow made a difference is very gratifying," says Janzen, who appreciated the progress reports and letters she received from Som over the years. "It's nice to know that now that the sponsorship is over, she continues to do well."

What does Som find most rewarding about being a teacher? "It is an opportunity for me to give back to my community," says Som, who today is able to help young girls overcome the same hardships she faced growing up, "because I am contributing towards building a literate generation and nation."
--With files from Amito James Asension
For more information on child sponsorship, go to worldvision.ca

Rice's Excuse for An Apology Regarding Maher Arar

2007-11-07T08:52:00.000-08:00

From the Thursday, October 25, 2007, Toronto Star, Canada section, page A21, here is an article about the lack of an apology regarding the U.S. handing over a Canadian citizen to Syria where he was tortured:

WHAT RICE'S NON-APOLOGY DOESN'T COVER

Thomas Walkom

The most painful element of Condoleezza Rice's admission that the U.S. made mistakes handling the Maher Arar case is how grudging her non-apology is.

Rice, now U.S. President George W. Bush's secretary of state, acknowledged to a congressional committee yesterday that her government blew it when it arrested Arar in New York five years ago and bundled him off to Syria to be tortured for information.

But she didn't apologize for the substantive injustice done to Arar. She didn't apologize for deporting a Canadian citizen to Syria (a country he left as a teenager) rather than Canada. She didn't apologize for her government's role in mistakenly identifying Arar as an Al Quaeda terrorist. Nor did she apologize for the U.S. government's so-called extraordinary rendition program, of which the Arar case was but one example.

And in spite of a judicial inquiry in Canada that concluded Arar was tortured during his year-long imprisonment in a Syrian dungeon, she didn't apologize for that. Indeed, she didn't even acknowledge it, referring instead to "claims" of mistreatment. (This from someone whose own state department regularly publishes reports detailing Syria's use of torture.)

All she did was say that her government erred by not telling Ottawa ahead of time that it was deporting Arar to Syria.

"We do not think this case was handled as it should have been," she told the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee. "Our communication with the Canadian government about this was by no means perfect. In fact, it was quite imperfect."

Which, in itself, is somewhat of an understatement.

As Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the Arar affair found, the U.S. not only failed to tell Canada it was deporting Arar to Syria, it lied.

On the very day that the removal decision was being made in New York, FBI agents were still telling the RCMP that he would soon be returned to Canada.

In spite of repeated requests for information, the Amercans didn't tell Canada's foreign affairs department they had sent Arar anywhere until two days after he'd been wakened at 4 a.m., hustled into a small plane and flown to the Middle East. Even there, they refused to say where they had sent him.

So, yes, there were some "communications" problems.

But these pale beside the substance of what happened to the Canadian computer engineer courtesy of the Bush government (and, as Canada has acknowledge, the RCMP) -- the savage beatings, the nightmare of being locked up in a rat-infested grave-like dungeon for months on end, the whittling away of hope.

Arar is still recovering.

Yet, as British journalist Stephen Grey details in his book Ghost Plane, the Canadian's experience is not unique. Grey estimates hundreds around the world have been scooped up secretly by American agents as part of Bush's so-called war on terror and flown, without trial, to U.S. proxy states in the Middle East and Europe so they can be tortured for information.

What makes Arar so unusual is that he is one of the few to get out alive and tell his story.

Which, perhaps, is why the U.S. government still feels compelled to discredit him, still keeps him on a no-fly list, still leaks damaging stories about him to the media.

And which is perhaps why Rice's mea culpa yesterday was so grudging. For if Washington were to acknowleddge the full scale of its crimes against Maher Arar, it would have to lay open this whole shameful business.

Thoms Walkom's column appears Thursday and Sunday.