Wednesday, April 27, 2016

London Ontario Endorses Poverty Plan

 (This post originally appeared at www.hamiltonjustice.ca) 


Earlier this month Last night City Council in London Ontario gave unanimous support to a report called London for All – A Roadmap to End Poverty.

An eight member panel including former Hamilton Deputy Medical Officer of Health Chris Mackie (pictured to the right) produced the report after six months of consultation. It contains 112 recommendations.  

Remarkably, many of these recommendations are intended to be acted upon within twelve months.


Here is a sampling of the recommendations.

Eight Recommendations from the (London Ontario) Mayor’s Advisory Panel on Poverty that Impressed Us

**Increase the number of organizations providing Indigenous Cultural Safety training.
**Become a Basic Income Guarantee pilot site.
**Engage landlords in keeping more people housed.
**Allow children under 12 to ride public transit free.
**Leverage funding and invest in the regeneration of existing London and Middlesex Housing   Corporation (LMHC) properties.
**Increase the number of licensed childcare spaces.
**Reduce the wait time to receive childcare subsidy
**Engage people with lived experience in democratic processes and institutions.


You can read the full report at https://www.london.ca/city-hall/mayors-office/Documents/London-for-All-final-report.pdf

Wednesday, April 06, 2016

Local Leaders Talking about Reducing Poverty


It is encouraging to see that the Tamarack Institute is running a conference in Edmonton this week dedicated to looking at how municipal governments can and should make poverty reduction a major priority. http://events.tamarackcommunity.ca/cities-summit2016

The Event is called Cities Reducing Poverty: When Mayors Lead.  Organizers are billing the conference is as a milestone event. I’m watching it from afar on twitter (#MayorsPovertySummit) and can say that the billing seems on the mark. It began yesterday and wraps up tomorrow (April 7th).


Pam McConnell
Participants in the Conference include Mayors of major cities like Don Iveson of Edmonton, Brian Bowman, Winnipeg’s first Aboriginal Mayor, Fred Eisenberger of Hamilton and others. 

Pam McConnell, Deputy Mayor of Toronto who leads Toronto's Poverty Reduction Strategy, is a presenter.

I’m hoping the conference will get the wheels turning faster to tackle problems like the impacts on gentrification on communities (and particularly on people with lower incomes) and also look at human rights issues.  We’ve written about the Right to an Adequate Standard of Living before http://whenthemayorsmiles.blogspot.ca/2016/02/the-right-to-adequate-standard-of.html.  Municipalities undoubtedly have a role to play here.


Calgary's Mayor Nenshi
The Calgary Herald ran a story yesterday talking about Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s involvement in the conference and his call for a guaranteed annual income.  You can read that story at http://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/nenshi-pushes-guaranteed-income-as-canadian-mayors-gather-for-poverty-summit

Following this event on twitter yesterday it was encouraging that when speaking about poverty participants were going beyond the idea of reduction and actually talking about the “elimination” of poverty.  Good to see.