Where Did We Come From?
Health and Strength Action Group – HSAG – where did we come from?
Poverty is Making Us Sick forum – community event where people did a budget for a month. Many learned that what you get on welfare is much much lower than what anyone thinks you need to live on. The government sets the welfare rates. They do not have any rational process for this. Mike Harris cut welfare by 22% in 1995 and froze the rates. And prices have just kept going up. So people are made and kept poor because of government decisions about welfare rates and how the system is run. The government had enough money to bail out car companies and give over 4 billion in tax cuts to large corporations. The message from the forum was that hunger and poverty is created and we can do something about it.
So a group of people living and working in the neighbourhood, most of them having to live on OW or ODSP themselves, came together because we want to do something about this situation. We just started in October, 2009. The group has decided that we want to focus on two issues – social assistance rates and public transportation.
And what are we doing? We are part of a cross-the-province movement demanding the provincial government add a $100 Healthy Food Supplement to all social assistance cheques. And that the government come up with a rational and clear process for setting the rates based on the real cost of living. We have met with the MPP’s in this area to get them to do the math and to tell us if they think the rates are too low. We are using their replies to show that everyone thinks they are too low. We also filled a bus with people to go to Hamilton and meet with other people working on the Put Food in the Budget campaign. Got lots of ideas and inspiration from the progress other groups like ours are making in other places across the province. Now we are collecting people’s opinions and putting it in a report to the Standing Committee on Finance. This committee is ‘consulting’ with Ontarians about what should be in the budget. We know they will probably not recommend the $100 this time but we keep hitting them with the message.
Remember in December when we found out the TTC was going to get even more expensive. HSAG quickly put together a petition, got a board member from SRCHC to do a deputation to the city against the hikes. There is now a coalition (TTC Fair Fare) forming in the city to work on the issue of making sure public transit is seen as a critical service and is affordable for people.
Those are our two main issues. But our goals are Progress and Power. We want to make some wins, get a reduced TTC pass, eventually free transit, get the extra $100 and eventually a better social assistance system. We want to make progress on the issues. And we also want to build the power of the community.
