Housing & homelessness

A Modest Proposal

Jan 23, 2010
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At some point before long, Haiti is going to be rebuilt. It occurs to me that we in BC have available wood to help in the effort. Most things are built of concrete there because there simply isn’t any wood. Rebuilding out of concrete will be massively expensive and massively polluting. And, as Premier Campbell… View Article

Housing Solutions

Jan 2, 2010
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Just wanted to give our blog readers a plug for an excellent collection on housing solutions. Some of you have likely been following the Tyee’s excellent series of articles on housing and homelessness, written by Monte Paulsen. Now the Tyee has put that whole series together in a single pdf collection. You can find it… View Article

Poverty and BC’s high cost of housing

Dec 7, 2009
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BC Stats put out a release on poverty lines as they relate to BC, with an important finding: BC’s dubious position as having the highest poverty rates in Canada may in fact be worse than the statistics show. This finding is buried in the piece and the title, “Low Income Cut-Offs a Poor Measure of… View Article

Docs call for more attention to addiction

Apr 8, 2009
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The BC Medical Association released an important report at the end of March. The Vancouver Sun gave it good coverage, but overall it didn’t get the attention it deserved. Stepping Forward: Improving Addiction Care in BC raises a lot of issues worth talking about in an election. The report estimates there are 400,000 British Columbians… View Article

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words

Mar 27, 2009
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Or twenty thousand as the case may be. The CCPA published a number of major studies in recent years about BC’s unacceptably high levels of poverty and homelessness, as well as provincial welfare policies that contribute to hardship and homelessness. These issues are brought to life in a series of narrated slideshows created for the… View Article

Food as a right of citizenship

Mar 19, 2009
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I came across an interesting piece in YES! Magazine about a city in Brazil that took an innovative approach to poverty reduction and practically ended hunger by adopting a food-as-a-right policy. Belo Horizonte, the fourth largest city in Brazil, has a population of 2.5 million people, slightly larger than the Lower Mainland. The city grappled… View Article

Well, now that Alberta is doing it …

Mar 17, 2009
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You could say that BC is more than a little sweet on Alberta. We love their individualistic, tax-cutting, tar-sanding grit. Can’t get enough of it. We even signed a silly economic agreement called TILMA (the BC-Alberta Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement) so we could be more like them. If Alberta went and ran massive… View Article

UN raps our housing record

Mar 11, 2009
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In mid February, a report was released that received very little attention, but should have: The report of the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing’s Mission to Canada (hat tip to Jean Swanson for drawing the final report to my attention; it can be found here; just scroll down to the “Mission to Canada”.) The… View Article

Nailing down homeless targets

Mar 9, 2009
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Kudos to BC’s Auditor General for his report on homelessness last week. John Doyle’s report raised numerous concerns, including that the provincial government lacks solid numbers on how many homeless people there are in BC, who they are, and most importantly, he found that the province does not have a clear and comprehensive action plan,… View Article