City of Hamilton Moves Forward with Poverty Initiative

Earlier this month Hamilton City Council supported Mayor Fred Eisenberger’s motion to commit $50M towards poverty reduction.  Eisenberger (right) had brought the motion to the City's General Issues Committee in April.

Among other things Council approved:

• A $20 million allocation to increase affordable housing and improve the state of good repair of housing.
• $3 million a year over 10 years for poverty reduction with the funds coming from the merger of Horizon Utilities Corporation and several other local utilities.
• Engagement with partners to help develop a strategy.                                                                                 
• Leveraging of funding commitments. Loans and grants from senior levels of government, school boards, and foundations as well as other potential contributors from the private sector will be sought.

City staff have been directed to develop a detailed 10-year integrated poverty reduction plan by October.

Mayor Eisenberger attended a conference in Edmonton recently. The conference, called Cities Reducing Poverty - When Mayors Lead, obviously inspired Eisenberger to do just that.

(Here are some reflections from Danielle Klooster of the Central Alberta Poverty Reduction Alliance on the conference http://vibrantcanada.ca/blogs/capra/cities-reducing-poverty-when-mayors-lead-reflection)

Back to Hamilton, where there was some opposition in the community and from two members of Council to the city taking some leadership.  Predictably, such opposition is based on myths and misunderstanding and/or just plan ignorance about poverty.

You’ve heard them.

These problems are the responsibility of senior governments.

You are encouraging more generational welfare and poverty by making more money available.

It will duplicate services.

 Howard Elliott did a fine job of addressing these myths and others in an editorial in the Hamilton Spectator.

You can read it at

http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/6530935-the-spectator-s-view-exploding-myths-around-the-poverty-battle/

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

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.

 

What to do about Predatory Lending?

(Payday loans are the Lay’s Potato chips of finance.  You can’t have just one and they are terrible for you… John Oliver https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDylgzybWAw)


I was asked on Thursday how I felt about the Ontario’s new legislation that deals with alternative financial services.

My answer was that I'm quite disappointed.

It is hard to believe it has taken 2 years of consultation and this is all we get.

Consumer advocate Mel Fruitman put it better.

“I hate it when government does that. It says 'we're going to do something but it's going to be a year before we do something and we can't tell you anything until we do it,'" he told the CBC. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/ontario-subprime-lenders-1.3359460

I was involved in some consultation by the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services this past July.  This was part of lengthy process that included a 2014 “panel of volunteers with expertise in matters related to payday lending.”  That panel had concluded, not surprisingly since there were lenders involved, that everything was pretty much OK.  Some tightening of regulations and a little more education for consumers was all that was needed.

To the government’s credit, they realized more had to be done.  It seemed to me that the staff leading that 2015 consultation that I had attended knew how badly people were being exploited by the payday loan predators and other private sector operations that “help” people with money problems.  I believed that they were going to do something significant about it given the political realities that they had to work with.

What happened, then?  

To be fair, there are good things in Bill 156 – An Act to amend various Acts with respect to financial services.

ACORN Canada has done a lot of advocacy in this area.  Their spokesperson, Donna Borden, had this to say:

“This announcement is a great first step.  There are still countless ways the banking system could be made fair for low-to-middle income Canadians.” 

I read the Bill yesterday.  Bill 156 amends various other pieces of legislation. Specifically:

The Collection and Debt Settlement Services Act
The Courts of justice Act
Budget Measures Act 2009
The Consumer Protection Act
and more, I think.

So, to do a thorough analysis of it one would have to look at all those acts and see how each amendment changed it.  That is a lot of work. I’ll reference Mel Fruitman again:  

“It is very difficult to comment on an announcement about an announcement about an announcement." 

Indeed.

Provincial governments have largely remained on the sidelines or brought in regulations that were as weak as the ninth batter in a National League lineup. Some municipal governments have stepped up. But it appears that no new powers will be given to municipalities to deal with the problem as Howard Elliott noted in the Hamilton Spectator. http://www.thespec.com/opinion-story/6168980-the-spectator-s-view-payday-loan-changes-don-t-go-far-enough/

This “industry” hurts communities. Peter Kucherepa, an Ottawa lawyer, has researched the payday loans and argues that  enabling cash transactions (the mainstay of how this industry functions) can contribute to the proliferation of the drug industry and other criminal activity in neighbourhoods.

There are health issue too. Kucherepa cites research from St. Michael’s Hospital in 2014. That study “clearly shows that the proliferation of cash based money lenders lowers community life expectancy and increases pre-mature deaths.” 

You can read Kucherepa’s paper at https://www.dropbox.com/s/y5tq9frrd18g6at/Pay%20day%20Loan%20Paper%20V7(CONSULTATION)%20(4).pdf?dl=0

Kucherepa also compares interest rates for the two week loans that are legally permitted in each province. For example, if you borrow $300 in Nova Scotia, the payday loan company could legally recover $2,106 from you.  In Quebec that $300 loan could result in a maximum repayment of $405.

If provinces won’t act and municipalities can’t,  perhaps the solution lies with making a change to the Criminal Code of Canada.  About ten years ago an exemption from criminal prosecution was made for Payday Loans so that they could exceed a 60% interest per annum. (Criminal code of Canada 347.1)

Recent example of advertising  used by the "Industry"

That should change. 

My Oxford English Dictionary  says “a crime is something disgraceful or very unfair.”

That ought to make these lending practices criminal.