By Josh Brandon
Budget 2016 provides some welcome news for nearly 600,000 Canadian families who depend on social housing. The budget allocates $2.3 billion dollars over two years for housing initiatives. While this announcement falls short of the amount housing activists have said is needed, and lacks many important clarifying details, it will provide relief for up to 100,000 families experiencing homelessness or at risk from unaffordable housing.
By Tina Keeper and Shauna MacKinnon
Winnipeg Free Press columnist Gordon Sinclair’s depiction of Wab Kinew is offensive with damaging implications that reach beyond the election (WFP March 12th and 26th, 2016). Sinclair uses his privileged position as a columnist to portray Kinew as a violent man who can’t be trusted; a person with ulterior motives and someone to be feared. It’s shocking that Sinclair, a powerful and intimidating man himself, describes feeling physically threatened by Kinew stating that he offered to shake Kinew’s hand at a recent press conference because “walking up and offering my hand to him first was a good idea, because you know what they say. A man can’t hit you when you’re shaking his hand.”
Having attended that event, we were taken aback by Sinclair’s representation of events, especially in the context of a city and province struggling to deal with deep-rooted racism.
While there is no excuse for the misogynistic, homophobic words Kinew communicated in past years, there is a broader conversation that needs to take place and longer term implications to be considered.
By Greg MacPherson and Molly McCracken
The province has invested widely in community development and “place-based” approaches to renewal and poverty reduction, with many positive results. Place-based approaches such as these are now being adopted in communities across the country as research shows that residents overwhelmed by poverty need complementary supports and resources close to home. Innovative, grassroots, community-led initiatives make a difference and are a wise public investment. Take the West Broadway neighbourhood as an example.
By Lynne Fernandez
Winnipeg’s public transit system is in great need of improvement if it is to meet the needs of those who rely on it – seniors, low-income people, youth and persons with disabilities who cannot drive. By allowing people to get to work regardless of their schedules, an efficient transit system is one of the best ways to fight poverty and inequality in our city. Affordable transit also gives lower-income families the ability to participate in recreation and education, get to appointments, and to socialize.
Book Launch
Thursday, April 7
7 pm
McNally Robinson Grant Park
All are welcome
In Solving Poverty, Jim Silver, a vetran scholar actively engaged in anti-poverty efforts in Winnipeg’s inner city for decades, offers an on-the-ground analysis of this form of poverty. Silver focuses particularly on the urban Aboriginal experience, and describes a variety of creative and effective urban Aboriginal community development initiatives, as well as other anti-poverty initiatives that have been successul in Winnipeg’s inner city. In the concluding chapter Silver offers a comprehensive pan-Canadian strategy to dramatically reduce the incidence of urban poverty in Canada.
By Lynne Fernandez
Although the 137 page fiscal update is much shorter on detail than a full budget would be, there are enough broad strokes to give us a bit of an economic picture. And that picture generated no shortage of criticism.
No government should be immune from criticism and the checks and balances imposed by opposition parties. But society is not served by uninformed, knee-jerk criticism that is clearly meant to bolster the fortunes of partisan politics or the already wealthy. The reaction of the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce gives us a case in point. Let’s unpack a couple of its executive vice-president Loren Remillard’s quotes that appeared in the Free Press.
Follow us!