2011 will be remembered as the year when inequality moved from the margins to the mainstream of public discourse. No longer just the purview of anti-poverty activists, progressive economists and the political left, this year figures as unlikely as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney felt pushed to publicly acknowledge the widening gap between the rich and the rest, or as the Occupy movement has put it: the 1 per cent and the 99.

In Ontario, the loss of high-paying manufacturing jobs, the growth of precarious employment, the dismantling of the social safety net, and the weakening of a trade union movement that once was a strong force for a more egalitarian society have allowed inequality and poverty to grow relatively unchecked for close to three decades. The idea that free markets and globalization deliver prosperity for all has been thoroughly debunked by the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Prosperity has been concentrated in the hands of too few at the expense of too many.

And as report after report has concluded, our city has not been immune from these socio-economic trends. As researchers at the University of Toronto’s Cities Centre have documented, over the last 30 years Toronto has become a greatly unequal place, segregated by income into three distinct cities:

City #1 consists of the richer and whiter downtown core and the well-heeled neighbourhoods that abut the city’s subway lines.

Toronto’s middle-income neighbourhoods make up City #2, shrinking in size as we become a more socially and economically polarized metropolis. The number of high-poverty neighbourhoods in Toronto has more than quadrupled since 1980.

City #3 — or the Third City — is made up of Toronto’s low-income neighbourhoods, with their high concentrations of racialized poverty. Generally found in the northeastern and northwestern parts of Toronto, incomes in these “inner” suburbs have declined 20 per cent or more since 1970.

While we have become accustomed to thinking of Toronto’s Third City geographically, as particular areas and neighbourhoods, the Third City can also be understood as an urban condition: a set of experiences that together amount to exclusion from the full political, economic and cultural life of our city. For instance, living in the Third City means not having enough money to take your children to the zoo or museum; it is having to choose between feeding the kids and paying the rent; it is commuting two hours to work on inadequate public transit; it is being denied a job because of your accent, the colour of your skin, or your postal code; it is being charged exorbitant interest rates by payday lenders; it is being denied access to channels of political influence for lack of resources and excluded from civic debates.

Cuts to public transit, child care, recreation centres, libraries and community grants stand to exacerbate this exclusion. People living on low incomes cannot afford to purchase equivalent goods and services on the market — things like private child care or nursery school, owning and operating a car, fitness club memberships or summer camps for kids.

No Toronto neighbourhood has become more associated with the Third City than Jane-Finch. But behind the negative media headlines and dire poverty statistics, there are people working hard to stitch together a social fabric torn by decades of rising poverty and inequality. They are the unsung heroes of the Third City, the people and organizations we hear little about.

Women like Stephanie Payne, the indefatigable matriarch of Jane-Finch who heads up theSan Romanoway Revitalization Association (SRRA). The association’s work has led to the renewal of an apartment complex long stigmatized for its association with crime and poor living conditions. Payne and the staff at the SRRA provide programs for isolated seniors, recreation for community youth, and gang-prevention initiatives.

While she is haunted by the deaths of too many of the community’s young men, Payne carries on her work emboldened by positive results as reports find crime in the complex has declined and residents’ quality of life has improved. “This is a dynamic community and people come together when good things are happening,” Payne reflects. “But when I look at the budgets and see this program and that program have to be discontinued, I think what am I going to do with the youngsters out there, are they going to be back on the corner? If they don’t have our supports, they will be back out there. That’s what I worry about.”

Organizations such as Lost Lyrics face the same uncertainty. Lost Lyrics is an alternative education program that uses hip hop culture to reach students who struggle in the mainstream education system and are often labelled as having behavioural issues. Working out of a Jane-Finch community centre, the organization has successfully bridged the streets and the classroom, empowering young people to change their lives and critically engage the world around them. But as Lost Lyrics co-founder Amanda Parris puts it: “under this mayor, our access to resources is steadily shrinking. Our programs are in a precarious position and our capacity to sustain them is riddled with question marks.”

Christopher Penrose runs another highly successful Jane-Finch program, Success Beyond Limits, which provides summer programs, peer tutoring, and co-op opportunities for local youth. He has seen the city’s budget plans and warns: “As things are right now, pre-cuts, there’s not enough. Not enough for programming, to address all the issues our youth face. . . .

“We’ve been to funerals, we deal with youth who have lost people, we deal with young people who come to school hungry. We see the effects of poverty on a daily basis. It’s traumatic. Now we are being re-traumatized by politicians who negate our experiences, making decisions that are going to lead to more poverty, more hardship. It is more than just frustrating; it is hurtful to see the direction this city is going.”

Jade Lee Hoy, an outreach coordinator with community arts organization Manifesto, another Jane-Finch mainstay, echoes Penrose’s frustrations, “When you cut these programs, we are losing talent, opportunity and energies that could be vital to our city.” Lee Hoy notes that neighbourhoods like Jane-Finch are vibrant and resilient places with a strong sense of community despite the many challenges they face.

The likes of Payne, Parris, Lee Hoy and Penrose are people whose intelligence, drive and ingenuity could earn them the big bucks on Bay Street. But they don’t migrate to corporate Canada. Instead, they work daily to cobble together grant applications, counsel the vulnerable and uplift a community. They work to mitigate the effects of poverty and marginalization. And they do so with meagre budgets, little compensation, and an abiding frustration with governments’ lack of commitment to social justice and progressive change.

Of course they reap rewards as well: the joy experienced when a troubled youth turns their life around, the deep sense of fulfillment gained when mentees grow to become mentors, the satisfaction earned watching the transformation of those deemed “at-risk” into those understood by community, peers and parents alike to be empowered. They do this work out of love; love for their community and ultimately love for our city.

As philosopher Cornel West has said, “Justice is what love looks like in public.” With cuts to city services and social programs looming on the political horizon, we are about to see just how much love our city has for neighbourhoods like Jane-Finch.

Simon Black is a researcher in urban social policy at the City Institute at York University.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1105662–unsung-heroes-of-the-third-city >

Starting in 1578, when British explorer Martin Frobisher celebrated a thanksgiving meal in Newfoundland for a safe but unsuccessful search for the Northwest Passage, a day of Thanksgiving has been a feature of the Canadian social fabric.

While the rationale behind Thanksgiving has changed over the centuries, it has always entailed gratitude for some feature of the undulating Canadian mosaic.

This Thanksgiving, we have two reasons to be especially grateful — 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the Massey Lecture series, and the 75th anniversary of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

As CBC Ideas producer Bernie Lucht, the wise midwife to many Massey Lectures, noted during the Massey Lecture kickoff reception in Toronto last week, the CBC was founded in 1932 by the Conservative government of R.B. Bennett, ripening into a Crown corporation three years later.

In establishing the CBC, the prime minister claimed that “the country must be assured of complete Canadian control of broadcasting from Canadian sources. Without such control, broadcasting can never be the agency by which national consciousness may be fostered.”

A more pithy description was provided by Graham Spry, co-founder of the Canadian Radio League: “The state, or the United States.”

Commissioned by the CBC in 1961, the Massey Lectures were named for governor general Vincent Massey, who in 1949 headed a comprehensive royal commission survey of science, literature, the arts and broadcasting in Canada. The ensuing lecture series aimed to invite a well-known scholar to undertake an original research project, distill it into a series of half-hour radio broadcasts, and render it digestible for the general public.

Over the past five decades, the series has featured some of the most fertile minds and spirits north of the 49th parallel and beyond, including Northrup Frye, Margaret Atwood, L’Arche founder Jean Vanier, technology scholar Ursula Franklin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and theologian (and, happily, my thesis supervisor) Gregory Baum. (In celebration of its 50th birthday, all of the Massey Lectures, save one, are being made available for audio on-demand streaming: http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/masseys/)

Today, the CBC Massey Lectures represent the premier collective intellectual event in Canada, the collaborative fruit of CBC Radio, the House of Anansi Press and Massey College in the University of Toronto. The lectures are sprinkled across university campuses in five cities across Canada, broadcast on CBC Radio One, and simultaneously published by House of Anansi. (This year’s lectures, entitled Winter: Five Windows on the Season, are provided by celebrated New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik.)

When speaking to colleagues in the United States about the Massey Lectures, they often marvel at such a nation-wide intellectual undertaking, reminding me that nothing like this exists south of the border. The Massey Lectures, along with the CBC which commissioned them, are a unique treasure, the harvest of a venerable and, sadly, threatened tradition of intelligent, civil discourse within a national, rather than a primarily commercial, context.

Both the CBC, with its historically insightful documentaries and series programming, such asIdeas and Tapestry, and the Massey Lecture series, with its commitment to publicly accessible scholarship, are not ancillary, but central, to a vibrant Canadian democracy.

As Jurgen Habermas, the famed social theorist linking public discourse and democracy, has argued, if we allow our lives to be “colonized” solely by economic interests, technological concerns and a managerial mindset, we lose the suppleness of spirit and the breadth of thinking to allow the conversation of democracy to continue.

During the current media moment, especially in the U.S., such respectful discourse has become constrained. The rise of a belligerent, deeply partisan Fox network, and the phenomena of “hate radio,” which unabashedly celebrates disdain for people who disagree with the “shock jock,” pose not simply a problem for the media. They present a serious problem for democracy.

That is why this Thanksgiving I give thanks for the long and rich legacies of both the CBC and the Massey Lectures. They remind us that democracy, civility, thoughtfulness, and national identity are not only cousins, but rare and precious guests, who should all be accorded a place of honour at our Thanksgiving feast.

Please pass the mashed potatoes and turn up the CBC; I believe winter is coming on.

Stephen Bede Scharper, a senior fellow of Massey College, is co-editor of The Natural City, forthcoming from University of Toronto Press.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1066915–giving-thanks-for-civil-discourse >

Social conservatives “have become a spent political force in [Canadian] national politics,” according to Queen’s University political-science scholar James Farney. “We’re now just seen as eccentric,” suggested Link Byfield, a prominent Canadian “so-con” himself. On the front page of the April 5 National Post, a story by reporter Charles Lewis was headlined “Social conservatives watch campaign from sidelines.”

Wikipedia tells us that social conservatives “believe that government has a role in encouraging or enforcing what they consider traditional values or behaviours.” But Wikipedia also offers this important caveat: “the accepted meaning of traditional morality often differs from group to group.” Not all social conservatives are the same. It’s worth emphasizing that the term “social conservative” is spelled with a lower case “c,” not the upper case “C” of the Conservative Party. Social conservatism is much broader than any one political party.

If social conservatives were interested only in an active debate about abortion or gay marriage, then it is true, as noted by Lewis, that we would be disappointed by the current campaign: No major party has distinguished itself on these issues. But that doesn’t mean these issues are not in play.

In the last Parliament, there were more MPs in the non-partisan Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus than in either the Bloc Québécois or the NDP. Yet, neither the death of the Bloc nor the NDP has been proclaimed irrelevant.

Moreover, social conservatives are interested in a wider variety of public-policy issues than abortion and gay marriage.

Take a good look at the activists and politicians who are involved in policy concerning the protection of children. Read over the list of witnesses before Commons and Senate committees in regard to raising the age of consent to sexual activity with an adult from age 14 to 16 in 2008 and you’ll see so-cons. Consider those advocating for the law that now requires internet service providers to report child porn being transmitted or hosted on their platforms and you’ll see so-cons.

While these initiatives took place under the Conservative government of the last five years, so-con influence extends back further. The 1993 introduction of child-pornography crimes into the Criminal Code and the 2004 introduction of laws against human trafficking crimes both were sparked by so-cons.

Cut across party lines and examine the faces standing with Senators and MPs in support of all-party reports about poverty in Canada, issued in 2009 and 2010 respectively, and you’ll see the presence of so-cons again. Poverty and homelessness aren’t typically identified as socially conservative issues in the media. But we don’t let the media define us.

For some commentators, the term so-cons isn’t adequately marginalizing. So instead, they call us “theo-cons” -theological conservatives -who are guided in our policy and political efforts by our religious beliefs. Theo-cons have been presented by some as strange and scary. Yet Statistics Canada informs that in 2001 (the last long-form census) 84% of Canadians self-identified as having a personal religious affiliation, with 77% self-identifying as Christian and 12% as Evangelical. And it would be foolish to think that the views of these people aren’t, in some way, guided by their religious convictions. Check your neighbour to your left and your right, because we “theo-cons” walk among you.

Along with Rick Hiemstra, director of research and media relations at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, I recently wrote a report on evangelical voting trends in Canada between 1996 and 2008. The paper drew a lot of attention on Parliament Hill because it revealed the fluidity of the evangelical vote as it shifted from predominately Liberal support in 1996 to the Conservative Party in 2008. What many found particularly surprising was the increase in the vote that went to the NDP during that 12year period. The supposedly theo-coniest of the theo-cons appear to exhibit voting patterns not too different from the rest of Canadians.

As the evangelist John Wesley lay on his deathbed in 1791, he sent a note to British MP William Wilberforce, who was then leading the political battle to end the slave trade. Wesley, with an Evangelical eye to the long game (the Slave Trade Act didn’t pass until 1807 and the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act passed in 1833 as Wilberforce lay in his own deathbed) wrote simply, and inspirationally, about the significance of standing contra mundum, “against the world.” Sometimes it is necessary for the benefit of those around you to stand seemingly against everyone else, for the world’s sake. What is good is not always immediately obvious or popular.

By the way, William Wilberforce, the abolitionist, was a theo-con. And, like Wilberforce, contemporary theo-cons are committed, not eccentric. And we’re not a spent force yet.

* Don Hutchinson is vice-president of The Evangelical Fellowship of Canada and director of the Centre for Faith and Public Life located in Ottawa.

< http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/dismiss+cons/4579562/story.html >

Let me share a recent experience that may illuminate the youth role in the coming elections. In a course I teach each spring on media in the Canadian Studies program at University College, U of T, I had Jesse Hirsh as a guest.

Jesse took the same course about 15 years ago. He was brash, brazenly anarchist, stringy-haired, and something of a star as the youngest member of the (now largely dormant) Marshall McLuhan Centre. He’s aged well; he’s married, in his 30s, has a decent haircut and wardrobe, two small consulting firms, a website and a weekly gig on tech for CBC radio. Yet he retains the air of a somehow savvy anarchist dreamer. He guested last year too.

He began by telling them to view what he did as a performance meant to provoke. I thought they’d be put off. Students are quick to detect pretense in their elders. But they loved his shtick. I think it had to do with a sympathy he expressed for their plight as the Internet generation (my clunky term, not his). They possess sophisticated skills, make fast connections, express themselves elegantly — yet have no clear way to ever earn enough from all that to move out of their parents’ basements unless they also go to law or business school.

This year he began by saying we’re all F.U.C.T., which he said stood for, Fully Under the Control of Technology. Meaning above all the Internet. He said it amounts to their religion; it surrounds their lives with meanings, as Catholicism did in the Middle Ages. It is their spiritual reality, which is a virtual one.

Yet nothing in the adult world, especially politically, reflects this as their source of connection and identity. There is no minister for the Internet, though smaller constituencies are served by government departments. In policy debates, there is no option for a free Internet; the cost will stay the same or rise. No wonder politics makes little sense to many of them, he said. They know other issues matter but the central reality of their own lives goes unrecognized.

It made me think of the late historian Tony Judt’s last book, Ill Fares the Land. Judt said that for most of history, politics was irrelevant to most people. It was the realm of the elite, foreign wars and high ritual or symbolism. Then for a brief remarkable period last century, between the 1930s and 1980s, it sought to enter and alter normal life: reducing inequality, generating decent jobs, housing, education — even making art and culture widely accessible.

Governments began to backtrack in the late 20th century, though, and younger generations now hardly understand how politics could matter. Even universal health care, in most cases, hasn’t affected them yet. So voting declines generally and especially among youth who see governments talk about cutting budgets and downgrading or eliminating what they already do far less of. It’s a perfect recipe for alienation from the political process. I could see heads nodding in class.

At the end, as I tried to rise from my seat (impeded, literally, by a bad leg) and offer de rigueur thanks, a student in the back row beat me to it, saying, “On behalf of the class I want to thank you for coming and talking to us.” I’ve never seen that. It was utterly spontaneous, as if he wanted to voice the collective mind. I’m not sure what it sprang from. Maybe he (and they) were grateful for Jesse’s understanding of their shaky economic status, or their “spiritual” base in virtual reality or the alienation they feel from the political process — but done in a way that was compassionate and non-judgmental — as if Jesse knew they regret the barriers that distance them from politics. It’s hard to say.

I felt like Mr. Jones. Something was happening, but I didn’t quite know what it was.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/952161–prisoners-of-the-web >

As of late 2009, the English language contained 1 million words, and new words are being added every day. With such abundance in the language, we tend to forget how powerful words can be, and that the names we give to ideas can shape our world view.

Consider a word that we take for granted, but that has far-reaching implications. The word is “homelessness.”

A search of the New York Times historical database covering 1851 to 2005 reveals that it was used in 4,755 articles, but 4,148 of them (87 per cent) were published in the 20 years between 1985 and 2005. Before the 1980s, it is rare to find “homelessness” used to designate a social problem. What happened in that decade that made the difference?

In 1981, the United Nations announced that 1987 would be the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. The United Nations wanted to focus on the fact that so many people in less developed countries were unhoused. There was no mention of developed countries like Canada in that 1981 UN resolution.

Moreover, the 1981 UN General Assembly resolution did not use the word “homelessness” because the term as the name of a social problem was not in common use at the time. The 1981 UN resolution was intended to draw attention to the fact that many millions of households in developing countries had no housing. They were unhoused, homeless. They needed adequate housing.

But by 1987, the focus of the International Year had shifted to include homeless people in the developed nations of the world, including Canada. In that year, several academic and professional conferences focused on the growing number of unhoused people in Canada, not those in developing countries.

Before the 1980s, people in developed countries did not know what it was like to be unhoused. They had housing, even if that housing was in poor condition. Some transient single men in cities were referred to at times as “homeless.” But the term had a different meaning then.

For example, in 1960, a report by the Social Planning Council of Metro Toronto called Homeless and Transient Men, defined a “homeless man” as one with few or no ties to a family group, who was thus without the economic or social support a family home provides. The men were homeless, not unhoused. They had housing, albeit poor-quality housing — rooming houses or accommodation provided by charities. But they had no home.

Canada at that time thus had homeless individuals, but no problem called “homelessness.”

The word “homelessness” came into common use in developed countries in the early and mid-1980s to refer to the problem of dehousing — the fact that an increasing number of people who were once housed in these wealthy countries were no longer housed.

Before the 1980s, Canadian urban planners, public health officials, social workers and related professionals had focused on rehousing people into better housing and neighbourhoods.

During the Depression and World War II, very little new housing was built and many people were living in poor-quality, aging and overcrowded housing. After the war, Canadians revived the housing market, created a functioning mortgage system with government mortgage insurance, built social housing and subsidized private-sector rental housing. About 20,000 social housing units were created every year following the 1973 amendments to the National Housing Act.

In introducing the 1973 housing legislation, the minister of urban affairs — a federal ministry we no longer have today but which existed during most of the 1970s — asserted that our society has an obligation to see that all people are adequately housed.

The minister, Ron Basford, said, “When we talk . . . about the subject of housing, we are talking about an elemental human need — the need for shelter, for physical and emotional comfort in that shelter. When we talk about people’s basic needs — the requirements for survival — society and the government obviously have an obligation to assure that these basic needs of shelter are met.”

Undoubtedly we would not have the social problem of homelessness today if this philosophy had continued through the 1980s and 1990s to the present day. By the 1980s, however, Canada had a social problem that was and has ever since been called “homelessness.”

The cutbacks in social housing and related programs began in 1984. In 1993, all federal spending on the construction of new social housing was terminated and in 1996 the federal government further removed itself from low-income housing supply by transferring responsibility for most existing federal social housing to the provinces.

Over the past two decades, we relied on an increasingly deregulated society in which the “genius of market forces” would meet our needs, in which tax cuts, made possible by cuts to programs that largely benefited poor and average-income people, were supposed to “trickle down” to benefit those in need. The competitive economy required, we were told, wage suppression and part-time jobs with no benefits.

By the early 1980s, countries like Canada needed a new term for a new social problem. The word “homelessness” filled the gap. Adding the suffix “-ness” turns the adjective “homeless” into an abstract noun. As such, it allows readers and listeners to imagine whatever they want. It tosses all sorts of problems into one handy term.

In short, we have not used the word “homelessness” for very long. It is a catch-all term for a host of serious social and economic policy failures.

Its widespread usage reflects what has happened to Canadian society — the way we organize who gets what, and our failure to have in place systems for meeting basic human needs in a universal, inclusive fashion.

David Hulchanski is co-editor of an electronic book on homelessness, Finding Home, available on the Homeless Hub, www.homelesshub.ca/FindingHome

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/862434–the-invention-of-homelessness >

TheGlobeandMail.com – Life/Deaths – The first Ukrainian to win election in Ontario, Yaremko championed ethnic communities and presided over social services expansion
September 2, 2010.   Frank B. Edwards,  Special to The Globe and Mail

As successful as he was, John Yaremko never forgot the stigma of being a poor immigrant kid. Shortly after he became Ontario’s Minister of Public Welfare in 1967, he dropped the word “welfare” from the ministry’s lexicon.

A few years later, when invited to address an Empire Club luncheon at the Royal York Hotel as a last-minute substitute for a tardy guest speaker, he challenged the roomful of privileged diners to reconsider their notion of welfare recipients.

“Our experience does not support the view that anyone outside the labour force who receives social assistance is either lazy, a failure or in some sense inferior,” he told his captive audience. Yaremko then explained that he was about to launch a program that would inform citizens of their “right” to social assistance.

Former Ontario premier William Davis, recalling his cabinet colleague, says, “He recognized that in any civilized society, those who are more fortunate have some obligation to help those who have less.”

John Yaremko died in his sleep of heart failure on Aug. 12 at Toronto’s Ukrainian Canadian Care Centre, which he helped establish in 2008.

Born in Welland, Ont., in the summer of 1918, Yaremko was the oldest son of Ukrainian immigrants who arrived in the Niagara region shortly before the First World War. His parents, Mary Boyetzko and George Yaremko, had both grown up near the village of Rakovetz, but met in Canada. They had 11 children spread over 19 years. The family moved to Hamilton when the senior Yaremko took a job with the Steel Company of Canada (Stelco) in 1927.

At age 14, John Yaremko and his high-school friend Charles Ziminski won seats on the Junior Board of Trade’s “city council” and experienced civic politics up close. Given the choice of three city institutions to visit on Citizens Day, Yaremko chose the hospital, the jail and the waterworks.

In a 2005 interview with social services consultant John Stapleton, he marvelled, “There must have been some sort of a seed that even at the age of 14, the boy was conscious of important institutions.”

A quiet, serious student with a ready smile, Yaremko graduated from high school with more scholarships than he was able to use in eight years at the University of Toronto and Osgoode Hall. He spent his summers working on local farms and at Stelco.

He was called to the bar in 1946, a year after he married Mary Materyn, a registered nurse from Montreal whom he met at church. He was offered a position at a prestigious Bay Street law firm if he would anglicize his name, but he refused.

“He told me that story,” says his niece Hélène Jarvis-Yaremko, also a lawyer, “but he would never tell me which firm turned him down. He would never say anything bad about anyone.”

The newlyweds lived frugally and eventually bought a simple brick house near Spadina Road and St. Clair Avenue in Toronto, across the street from a mansion that had been converted into a rehabilitation hospital. Talking to the patients, Yaremko learned that injured veterans received pensions but civilian accident victims did not. It was an inequity that he later helped change.

In 1951, he turned his Ukrainian heritage into an asset when he ran for Ontario’s Progressive Conservatives in Bellwoods, a working-class riding with a large immigrant population that was several blocks from his own residence.

Four years later, when city alderman Allan Grossman, the son of Russian immigrants, ran for the Tories in the neighbouring ward of St. Andrew, the two men refined their political machines to turn the ethnic vote into a new political force. They carefully kept track of the immigrant communities in their ridings and went out of their way to establish contact with new Canadians of all kinds.

In his first campaign, Yaremko unseated incumbent Albert Alexander MacLeod of the communist Labour Progressive Party, who had held the seat for eight years. It was a tough campaign, won by a narrow margin, and he never forgot the people who helped him.

In a note of condolence, current federal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj noted that his Ukrainian grandmother had flowers personally delivered every Easter for the rest of her life after she allowed Yaremko to hang campaign signs on her fence.

“… A group of hooligans knocked down the fence along with the Yaremko signs,” he recalled. “John came to my grandmother to apologize, offering to fix the fence. She refused and told him to leave the fence lying on the ground for the duration of the campaign.”

Yaremko was the first Ukrainian to win an election in Ontario, and he held the seat until he retired in 1975.

He had a reputation for following his conscience, even if it meant wandering into other political jurisdictions. After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 displaced 200,000 people, he flew to Budapest and then to Ottawa to argue the case for action. Eventually, Canada accepted 38,000 refugees and Yaremko won the hearts of Hungarian Canadians for life. In 2007, the Hungarian government awarded him its Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit.

By 1958, Yaremko was promoted to minister without portfolio. He then moved on to transport from 1958 to 1960. In 1960, Premier John Robarts made him senior member of cabinet with a promotion to provincial secretary and registrar.

Yaremko moved to the Public Welfare Ministry in 1966, transforming it into Social Family Services. In 1971, he became the province’s last provincial secretary while also heading the newly minted Citizenship Ministry. He finished his career as Ontario’s first solicitor-general from 1972 to 1974.

Aware of politicians’ negative image, Yaremko explained that he was in “the elective public service” and told constituents that his goal was “to make life better in Ontario for everyone.”

He told John Stapleton, “I had the opportunity to do things and have things done which would change the lives of many … I was proud to be progressive. I was never on the right. I don’t know what it means to be on the right. I’ve been hungry in my time. I know what it is to be hungry.”

Former premier Davis says, “It was obvious that he was trying to help and not to try to make political points. He was just a really decent person.”

As a cabinet minister, Yaremko brought his own experience of poverty to the policy table. He advocated for provincial scholarships, health care and a measure of independent living for the disabled through pensions and subsidized housing.

In 1965, he was instrumental in convincing the City of Toronto to donate land for the construction of Bellwoods Park House, a 61-room home for adults with cerebral palsy, and maintained a personal interest in its residents from the opening day in 1967. It was considered the first independent residence for adults with physical disabilities in North America, and Yaremko became its honorary chairman up to his death. In 1983, the centre was expanded into self-contained apartments and renamed the John Yaremko Centre for Community Living. Yaremko visited often, dispensing chocolates at Christmas and on Valentine’s Day.

During Yaremko’s time in cabinet, Ontario experienced tremendous population growth. Under Premier Robarts, hundreds of new schools were built, health care was introduced and social programs expanded. Social assistance recipients almost doubled from 80,000 to 150,000 through the 1960s. As Social Services Minister, Yaremko claimed the welfare system was “under the greatest strain since the Depression,” but he never apologized for its ballooning budget. He fought for federal funding and got it in 1967 through the Canada Assistance Plan, which brought dollars and national standards to provincial welfare programs.

“When I was growing up in Hamilton, a steel town where people lived from paycheque to paycheque,” he told Stapleton, “… if something happened to the breadwinner and he missed one cheque, then life became very different for many.”

Yaremko was welcomed as an ally of every ethnic community he encountered, and Davis remembers how that turned into votes: “He was close to the Ukrainian community but also many others in the city. His riding was one of the most diverse, I would think, in Toronto at that time … He broadened the base of the party.”

One of Yaremko’s proudest accomplishments was helping to establish ethnocentric nursing homes across the province so that seniors could enjoy living with their own traditions and foods. An early project was a private rooming house aimed at Ukrainian residents.

“I felt very strongly there could be no discrimination,” he recalled in 2005. “It had to be available [to everyone]. But anybody who was going there knew that they were going into a facility whose culture (and food) was going to be Ukrainian …”

Chinese, Greek, Polish and Italian groups quickly followed with homes for their own seniors.

One unexpected benefit of Yaremko’s popularity was the acceptance and recognition of his distinctly Ukrainian name. His niece Hélène Yaremko-Jarvis, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Ethics and Corporate Policy, moved to Toronto following law school in 1979, having grown up in Quebec, where her surname caused endless trouble for non-Ukrainians.

“I had spent my whole life in Quebec City spelling Yaremko … ,” she says. “But in Toronto everyone knew it … Croatians and Italians … It was unbelievable. He held great respect in the ethnic communities way beyond the Ukrainian. He spent his life cutting ribbons for all sorts of ethnic events.”

Yaremko-Jarvis recalls her uncle fondly, describing his and his wife’s thriftiness. Her aunt Mary shopped at Holt Renfrew but only on sale days, and downtown meals usually involved department-store lunch counters or fast-food burgers.

The couple often drove a rental car around the province in search of Upper Canadian antique furniture and glassware, insisting on paying market value to farm families who didn’t realize the value of the old stuff they were selling. In 2007, the Royal Ontario Museum added part of the Yaremko collection of pressed and cut glass to its Canadiana gallery.

Following his 1975 retirement from politics, Yaremko served as chairman of Ontario’s appeals tribunal for commercial liquor licences until 1985, after which he and his wife pursued philanthropic work for the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Opera Company and the ROM, as well as special needs and multicultural communities. There were always awards to be received, scholarships to give, donations to be made and ribbons to cut.

Yaremko worked to introduce Ukrainian studies into universities, and brought Ukrainian students to Canada to study democratic institutions. This year, he had a chair in Ukrainian studies named in his honour at the University of Toronto.

After his wife died in 2005, he continued to live in the simple home they had shared since the 1940s, with its single bathroom and unfinished basement full of filing cabinets. When he finally moved to the Ukrainian Canadian Care Centre after a heart attack, he maintained his room as though it were an office, full of newspapers and correspondence, enlisting anyone near at hand to assist with the stream of greeting cards and letters he sent out regularly to the people who had helped him along the way.

John Yaremko leaves four sisters, two brothers and many nieces and nephews.

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TheGlobeandMail.com – Life/Deaths – Eli Comay envisioned Toronto as an integrated, affordable centre, but was often thwarted by political realities
August 17, 2010.   Ron Csillag, Special to The Globe and Mail

Eli Comay was an idealistic, visionary city planner and social housing advocate in Toronto who won some and lost some, and mostly managed to keep his frustrations in check when his ideas collided with political realities, developers and bean counters.

An urban planner in Toronto in the booming fifties and sixties, Comay played a key role in shaping the city – in land use, housing, parklands, and the envisioning of heavier traffic patterns.

After he left the public sector, his championing of social housing led to the creation of Ontario’s housing ministry. But brute economic forces sometimes eclipsed his victories.

Comay, who died in Toronto on Aug. 2 at the age of 90, was a lifelong leftist whose vision of cities some might call quixotic: His urban spaces, which were committed to the idea of equal access to all services, were modern, socially just and fully egalitarian. Mass transit was cheap and mass housing available. Living downtown was not just for the rich.

“And he believed all that was attainable,” said his daughter, Rebecca Comay, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto. “He believed that the key to everything was planning, and if it didn’t work, the fault was poor planning.”

Eli Comay joined the Metro Toronto Planning Board in 1955, and served as planning commissioner from 1962 to 1966. Metro Toronto had been created by the province in 1953 as a senior level of municipal government to deal with unprecedented postwar growth.

It was a time when investment was heavy with numerous infrastructure projects, including the first subway line, as well as water and sewage treatment plants, rental housing for the aged, public transit, and a network of highways and arterial roads.

Working alongside the legendary city planner Hans Blumenfeld, Comay helped craft Metro’s first official plan – a massive undertaking for a territory that encompassed 13 individual municipalities.

“He was heavily involved in creating the Metro plan for 1959 [the year it was submitted to council],” recalled John Sewell, who served as Toronto’s reformist mayor from 1978 to 1980.

Comay envisioned a fully integrated, compact city. “It was just an extraordinary plan – visionary, absolutely brilliant,” Sewell enthused. And it served as the basis for a Toronto blueprint a decade later that prophetically warned of unstructured sprawl.

However, “the great problem with [Comay's plan] was that it was never really implemented,” Sewell noted dryly, partly because “politicians don’t like to have their decision-making ability fettered by a plan.”

Comay himself cited decisions in the fifties and sixties to develop Toronto as the economic base for Metro. “But the next step,” he rued, uncharacteristically, in 1988, “was never taken – to make Metro the centre of the whole region.” He was too diplomatic to say why.

Though he was not a big fan of cars, Comay had become one of the chief proponents of the $80-million Crosstown Expressway, planned as an east-west thoroughfare through central Toronto in the early 1960s.

It was consistently opposed by the City of Toronto. He publicly rebuked Toronto council for allowing an apartment complex to proceed in the path of a future Crosstown, and was himself rebuked by Toronto controller and future mayor William Dennison for trying to set Metro policy by himself.

The Crosstown was finally killed off in 1971 – the same year the ill-fated Spadina Expressway was cancelled.

But that was well after Comay had left the planning board to become a private consultant and to teach environmental studies from 1969 to 1992 at York University, where he was regarded as a dedicated and caring teacher.

A reserved, intensely private man, he kept his feelings about political forces that quashed or warped his ideas to himself. “Oh, he would come home fuming sometimes,” his daughter recalled, “but he would quickly move on to something else.”

Eli Comay was born Feb. 21, 1920, in Detroit to Nellie Schorr and Joseph Comay, Russian-Jewish immigrants who escaped the pogroms of their homeland. The whole family was ardently communist and secular, and spoke Yiddish at home. Joseph Comay was a Yiddish scholar.

After graduating from Wayne State University in sociology, Eli served as a telegraph operator during the Second World War. He was stationed in England, where he saw the complete devastation of cities, and imagined ways of redesigning them.

After the war, he returned to Britain to study so-called new towns, planned communities where all services were completely integrated.

He became a fan of the architects Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school with whom Comay studied at Harvard University, where he earned a master’s degree in city planning in 1949.

Comay worked briefly for the Chicago Land Clearance Commission before his politics caught up with him, despite having quit the Communist Party over Stalin’s excesses.

The McCarthy witch hunt was at its zenith. Midnight knocks at the door and constant harassment drove Comay, his wife and their infant daughter to Montreal, where he worked briefly as a marketing consultant. From there they went to Toronto.

Comay did not receive adequate credit for a far-reaching but abandoned plan for the development of Toronto’s waterfront, recounted John Bousfield, a longtime friend and colleague.

Bousfield recalls the time a group of planners were surveying what in Toronto was regarded as a slum. “[Comay] looked at us and said, ‘Do you guys know what a slum is?’ He came from Detroit!

“But he was also a great believer in popular will,” Bousfield said. “Even when something like the Spadina Expressway was cancelled, he’d say, ‘Well, who’s to say [the cancellation] wasn’t good?’”

Another Comay effort that never came to fruition was a series of four reports recommending the building of a tunnel or bridge to the Toronto Island airport, still a hot-button issue.

“I figure he was 20 years ahead of his time, and that’s why he was so frustrated,” said Robert Lehman, a city planner and former student of Comay’s.

Asked whether Comay ever voiced any frustration, Lehman paused. “It happens to many planners late in their careers that they get a little cynical because of the degree to which their work is either ignored or altered by the political process,” he said.

Lehman recalls a dinner he once had with Comay and some others. “One guest asked Eli something about the planning of the Toronto waterfront. Within minutes, the spoons were aligned to represent the Toronto islands, the knives the railway lines, the forks Yonge Street; the saltcellars were ferry boats and a variety of dishes a variety of land uses. At that moment the waiter arrived with our dinner and looked with utter dismay at the table.”

Free of the public sector’s encumbrances, Comay made lasting marks as a private consultant on planning and social housing in Ontario, and helped with numerous planning studies in Alberta, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

It was the report of the Ontario Advisory Task Force on Housing Policy, which he chaired, that led to the creation of the province’s housing ministry in 1973. He also helped form and was the first director of the Ontario Housing Action Program, designed to accelerate affordable residential development in areas outside the core of Metro Toronto.

In 1977, a report Comay authored made 62 recommendations and suggested more than 100 changes to Ontario’s dense Planning Act, which incorporated some of his ideas in a revision five years later.

It all boiled down to one idea: that the Minister of Housing must take direct responsibility for housing at the municipal level. Housing was “a matter of direct and urgent provincial interest.”

He wanted Queen’s Park to give municipalities the power to control the delivery and even set the price of housing for low- to moderate-income residents. He wanted the government to force developers to deliver affordable housing. And he wanted the province to use its power to allow people to create flats and basement apartments in their homes.

“The way the process works, we are not serving the main target,” Comay said in 1983, noting that there was an increasing number of single-parent families applying for public housing. “Whenever we develop in the central core, we have to charge very high rents. We could make better use of our resources.”

From 1981 to 1988, Comay directed Toronto’s Non-Profit Housing Corporation and served as chairman of Cityhome, the city’s housing company.

Another Comay study presented to then premier David Peterson renewed calls for more provincial muscle. If cities and towns could show they were playing an active role, Queen’s Park would leave them alone. But if they were blocking low-income housing, the province could compel them to relax their zoning.

He made no public pronouncements when Ontario’s NDP government allocated more money to social housing, or in 2000, when the province downloaded social housing to municipalities.

Simply, Comay and like-minded planners “were trying to democratize the city,” said onetime urban affairs columnist David Lewis Stein. “And in that sense, they failed.” Comay, said Stein, was “the resigned planner – the guy who knew he was saying what had to be done, and also knew that, given the political realities, it probably wasn’t going to happen.”

Eli Comay leaves his wife, Hélène (du Bouchet), whose Jewish family fled Nazi-occupied France; daughters Julie and Rebecca; four grandchildren; and a sister, Chana.

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• 1983: Justin Clark, 20, who has cerebral palsy, moves from the institution in which he has lived for 18 years to a house in Ottawa. The groundwork for the was laid the year before, after disability rights were included in the Constitution, when Clark won an important court battle allowing him to make his own decisions.

• 1985: Rick Hansen embarks on his epic Man In Motion 40,000-kilometre journey around the world, changing the way Canadians look at people in wheelchairs.

• 1987: Ontario promises to develop community living supports, saying it plans to close all large institutions for people with developmental disabilities in 25 years. (Twenty years later, with community resources still lacking, relatively young adults find themselves moved not to the community but to other institutions, such as nursing homes.)

• 1990: Gary Malkowsk becomes the first deaf person to address the Ontario Legislature as an elected MPP.

• 1993: At age 12, Tracy Latimer, who has cerebral palsy, is killed by her father. After a number of trials and appeals, Robert Latimer is convicted of murder. He begins his sentence in 2001 and is granted day parole in 2008.

• February 1994: Toronto’s Metro Hall becomes home to the Terry Fox Hall of Fame, honouring people with physical disabilities who have made a difference.

• September 1994: Ontario premier Bob Rae’s government passes employment equity legislation, fulfilling a prominent plank in the platform that catapulted his New Democratic Party to a surprise victory in the 1990 election.

• 1995: The Conservative government of premier Mike Harris repeals the Employment Equity Act.

• 1997: The Supreme Court Of Canada rules that all hospitals must provide free sign language interpretation services to deaf patients.

• 2001: The Ontario Human Rights Commission orders Famous Players to make three landmark theatres in Toronto wheelchair accessible. The ruling finds the lack of full access violates the rights of the complainants, including Toronto Star reporter Barbara Turnbull.

• 2003: 29 Ontario families launch a $100 million lawsuit against the province because their autistic children are being denied costly intensive behaviour therapy after age 6.

• June 2004: Winnipeg Conservative Steven Fletcher becomes the first quadriplegic to win a seat in the House of Commons.

• April 2005: The Ontario Superior Court rules the province violated the rights of children with autism by denying them intensive behaviour therapy on the basis of age. The province appeals the decision and wins in 2006.

• May 2005: The Ontario Court of Appeal strikes down part of a law that allows employers to deny severance packages to disabled workers who can no longer continue in their jobs. The court says the legislation violates the Charter rights of people with disabilities.

• June 2005: After a decade-long battle by blind lawyer David Lepofsky, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal rules the TTC must order drivers to call out all stops on streetcars and buses. (It will be another two years before Lepofsky wins the same for subway stops.)

• June 2005: Queen’s Park passes legislation ordering equal access for people with disabilities and promising tougher standards to make Ontario barrier-free in 20 years.

• November 2005: Sam Sullivan, a quadriplegic after a skiing accident, is elected mayor of Vancouver. (The next year he will capture world attention in Turin when he takes the flag for Vancouver’s 2010 Olympics for a spin in his wheelchair.)

• November 2006: A proposed $700 million class-action lawsuit on behalf of thousands of families with severely disabled children collapses when a court rules Ontario has no legal duty to provide special funding for their treatment. The families allege they are forced to hand their children over to Children’s Aid Societies to get the care and treatment they need.

• November 2006: More than 300 people from disability groups across the country gather on Parliament Hill to discuss a national action plan for building an inclusive and accessible Canada. The EndExclusion movement is born.

• December 2006: The provincial government uses closure to pass a bill that overhauls the Ontario Human Rights Commission. Starting in July 2008, those with human rights complaints must go directly to an adjudication tribunal rather than first taking their complaint to the commission to investigate.

• December 2006: Canada is among countries signing a landmark United Nations agreement protecting the rights of people with disabilities. It is expected to take effect this year.

• March 2007: The federal budget introduces a registered disability savings plan to help families plan for the future of children with disabilities.

• March 2007: After an epic seven-year battle, the Supreme Court orders VIA Rail to make passenger cars wheelchair accessible, underscoring the Charter rights of people with disabilities to barrier-free transportation.

• August 2007: Ontario pledges $12 million to provide special treatment and support for autistic children and their families.

• September 2007: David Onley, a former Citytv journalist, who had polio as a child and uses an electric scooter, becomes Lieutenant- Governor of Ontario.

• January 2008: The Canadian Transportation Agency rules that Canadians with severe disabilities who need to travel with a caregiver or require more than one seat on a plane will no longer face the charge of an extra fare from domestic airlines.

- With files from the Star library

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< http://www.healthzone.ca/health/illnesses%20amp;%20issues/disabilities/article/339404–disabled-leave-the-shadows-and-their-mark >.

Before 1915 — People in Canada from the U.K. and Commonwealth countries were British subjects. Others had to live here for five years and be of “good character” to be naturalized.

1921 — A separate status of “Canadian national” was created under the Canadian Nationals Act.

1946 — Canada passed the Canadian Citizenship Act and became the first Commonwealth country to establish its own nationality.

1947 — On Jan. 3, 26 individuals were presented Canadian citizenship certificates, including then-prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who received certificate 0001.

1977 — A second Citizenship Act was passed, allowing Canadians to maintain dual or multiple citizenship. The residency requirement was reduced to three years.

1982 — Charter of Rights and Freedoms became part of the Constitution, outlining the fundamental freedoms, rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizens.

1987 — The First National Citizenship Week was declared.

1991 — The Department of Multiculturalism and Citizenship was established.

1998-2002 — Three bills were introduced to reinforce the responsibilities and stronger commitment to Canada associated with being Canadian; none were enacted.

Source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada

COULD YOU PASS THE TEST? TRY A FEW SAMPLE QUESTIONS

1. What are the three main groups of Aboriginal peoples?
2. From where did the first European settlers in Canada come?
3. What important trade did the Hudson Bay Company control?
4. What year was Confederation?
5. What part of the Constitution legally protects the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians?
6. List four Canadian rights.
7. What province is the only one that is officially bilingual?
8. Which animal is an official symbol of Canada?
9. What is the capital of Canada?
10. One third of all Canadians live in which province?

Answers:

1. First Nations, Inuit and Metis
2. France
3. The fur trade
4. 1867
5. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms
6. The rights to vote and be a candidate in elections, to hold a Canadian passport and return freely from abroad and to be educated in either official language
7. New Brunswick
8. Beaver
9. Ottawa
10. Ontario

Source: Citizenship and Immigration Canada