Tag: Poverty

In “Ineligible: Single Mothers Under Welfare Surveillance,” Krys Maki shows how technological advancements have created a new frontier in monitoring and criminalizing the poor.

New Freedom of Information documents show the City of Toronto’s efforts to control the media narrative around encampment evictions last summer – inflating the number of fires in encampments and using media exclusion zones.

Canada’s predatory lending crisis is no accident.

In Niagara Falls, Ontario, low-income seniors are left with no choice but to move into an uninhabitable motel: the Happiness Inn.

As the logic of capitalism infiltrates our social movements, we must choose between being paid for our activism and building a strong culture of social struggle.

In a world without prisons, we could break the vicious cycle of generational poverty, trauma, and incarceration.

In Saskatchewan, disabled people on income assistance live off barely half of what the feds’ COVID-19 benefit promises, an amount below the provincial poverty line.

Today, Tamil people are Toronto’s working class as well as, increasingly, its elite – but behind the Canadian Tamil community’s historic struggles and resistance lies the fact that most of us arrived in Toronto fleeing a genocide

In every sense that matters, poverty is a 2S-LGBTQ issue. So why aren’t mainstream Canadian 2S-LGBTQ organizations treating it as such? And who’s picking up their slack?

The Ministry of Social Services says that “approximately 4,000 cases were closed between December 1, 2017 and May 31, 2018.” Unless those 4,000 people who had been cut off appealed the decision before July 1, they would never be eligible to receive the supplement again.

Saskatchewan has the second-lowest minimum wage in the country – but there’s hope in a fledgling fight for a living wage.

The homeless shelter system in Canada’s largest city is in crisis – but anti-poverty and housing activists are fighting the systemic abandonment of homeless people, and they’re winning important gains.

Harm reduction workers are building the infrastructure to respond to the opioid crisis.

If the drug war is a tool of social and territorial control and capital accumulation, it’s not enough to simply accuse Harper’s Conservatives of pursuing a misguided strategy.

Our northern communities are rich because they know their languages. They are rich because they have strong connections to their land. They are rich because at least some of their lands exist in a natural state.

With the country’s largest reserves of oil, natural gas, uranium, and potash, much of which is found on Indigenous land, the Prairies will continue to be at the front lines of capitalist expansion for years to come, and are poised to become a hub of resistance. It’s time for us to imagine the West as a different kind of “land of opportunity.”

In the face of drastic social service cutbacks, community organizers and volunteers are stepping up to fill the void. For the optimistic, this represents opportunity for building the capacity of communities to become more independent of the state. Others critique the impact this offloading has on longer term organizing for social change.

In Canada and around the world, the health of the poorest people is far worse than the health of the richest – and new evidence suggests we all suffer as a result. In order to address the fundamental unfairness of this situation, we need to completely rethink not just how we do health care, but how we do politics.

Two downtown neighbourhoods in Hamilton, Ontario – James St. North and Landsdale – have recently been the site of several skirmishes in a gentrification war waged in the media, art galleries and on the streets themselves.