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Ontario’s poor need to make some noise
Monday, September 3rd, 2012
Mar 02 2012
History shows us that poor people’s silence will be met with government inaction. As American academics Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward put it in their classic book Regulating the Poor, “A placid poor get nothing, but a turbulent poor sometimes get something.” The Drummond report tells poor people they must wait. Now it is up to the poor to reply: “We will not.”
Tags: budget, economy, ideology, poverty, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Unsung heroes of the Third City
Saturday, December 24th, 2011
Dec 22 2011
The Third City – is made up of Toronto’s low-income neighbourhoods, with their high concentrations of racialized poverty… [where] incomes… have declined 20 per cent or more since 1970… 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… 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.
Tags: multiculturalism, participation, poverty, rights, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion History | No Comments »
Life in ‘Third City’: Nasty, brutish and short
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Jun 07 2011
… since the late 1980s we’ve embarked on a path that would make manifest in our urban fabric the social problems of inner-city America. We cut the social safety net; we’ve neglected the built environment of poor neighbourhoods; we’ve failed to regulate precarious employment and create “good jobs”; we’ve yet to solve high dropout rates and youth unemployment, disproportionately impacting racialized youth; and we’ve rolled back equity initiatives that acknowledged the ways socio-economic outcomes continue to be shaped by race.
Tags: crime prevention, ideology, multiculturalism, poverty, standard of living
Posted in Inclusion Debates | No Comments »
Welfare isn’t broken so it won’t be fixed
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
Mar 24 2010
…why is the government unlikely to overhaul social assistance any time soon, if ever, despite its apparent commitment to an anti-poverty agenda?… chiefly because from the perspective of government and the business community, welfare is not broken…
So while anti-poverty advocates are right to claim that welfare is broken, in the eyes of the province and the business community, welfare is working just fine.
Tags: featured, poverty
Posted in Social Security Debates | No Comments »
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