Login / RegisterHousing protest surrounds Vancouver Olympic celebration site with message for Stephen Harper
For three hours on Saturday (February 27), red tarps encircled Vancouver's LiveCity Downtown celebration site, home of the Canada Pavilion for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
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The 142 tarps, erected by dozens of supporters of the Red Tent campaign, sent messages such as "Homes for All" and "We can do better than tents" to the Stephen Harper government.
As Olympic revellers lined up to enter the site, protesters added political graffiti to the tarps before blocking the entrance for one minute.
"It sucks being outside," protester Carly Louth, a 35-year-old East Vancouver resident, told the Straight while she painted a tarp along Beatty Street. "You're cold, you're miserable, and there's way too many people having to do it. So, that's why we're out here."
Carly Louth explains why protesters came out.
Just down the street, Nancy Bailey, a 61-year-old clown and storyteller who lives in Surrey, told the Straight she used to work in the Downtown Eastside and cares about the situation of homeless people in the city.
"What we need is a government housing program, so that we can get people into housing," Bailey said. "All the programs in the world to help the homeless won't do anything until they have four walls where they feel safe, they have an address, and they can start getting healing and get jobs and get off the street."
Nancy Bailey talks about why a national housing program is needed.
Protesters paint graffiti on the red tarps.
Coalition of Progressive Electors councillor Ellen Woodsworth, who came down to see the protest, told the Straight that Canada is the only G8 country without a national housing program and it hasn't had one since 1993.
Woodsworth noted that seven emergency shelters in Vancouver will close on April 30, throwing hundreds of people onto the streets.
"Shelters are not homes," the councillor said. "We need to spend the same kind of money and energy that we've spent on the Olympics on a national housing program that's supported by the province and the city government.
Woodsworth urged people to throw their support behind NDP MP Libby Davies' Bill C-304, which would see the federal government establish such a program.
Ellen Woodsworth describes the impact of the housing crisis.
Initiated by Pivot Legal Society, the Red Tent campaign previously held a “solidarity sleepover” on the night of February 19 at Creekside Park to draw attention to homelessness.
You can follow Stephen Hui on Twitter at twitter.com/stephenhui.
Photos: Vancouver activists encircle Canada's Olympic pavilion with call for action on homelessness
See also:
Rally for housing draws modest crowd in midst of Olympic revelry in downtown Vancouver
Photos & video: Vancouver protesters rally for national housing program during Winter Olympics
Downtown Eastside tent city highlights lack of housing in Vancouver
Photo gallery: Olympic Tent Village draws attention to housing issues in Vancouver
Video: Olympic Tent Village residents speak out on homelessness in Vancouver
Unbelievable Canada..!!
"In 1949, PIT [personal income tax] rates ranged from 15 to 84 percent and there were 17 brackets. In 1994, the range was 26.35 to 46.4 percent and there were 3 brackets." In 2009, there were four federal brackets: 15 percent, 22 percent, 26 percent, and 29 percent on an income over $126,264.
Throughout the ten year period from 2000 to 2010 there have been huge tax cuts, both personal and corporate ($100 billion over five years by Paul Martin -- and a further $100 billion, including GST, by the Harper government) there has been an aggressive rejection of any criticism of this gutting of the federal purse. Anyone talking about tax increases would expect to be immediately attacked and ridiculed.
In fact, it's a trend that began a quarter century ago and doesn't appear to be slowing down – especially for young men entering the workforce.
Across all age groups, median salaries for full-time workers have changed little in 25 years. Workers today make, on average, a mere $53 more than they did in 1980, when adjusted for inflation, according to the census.
That stagnation mainly afflicted the middle class. The top earners in Canada saw their wages increase 16.4 per cent since 1980, while the bottom rung saw a 20-per-cent decrease.
For the 25- to 29-year-old group, it's also a story of decreasing fortunes.
In 1980, median earnings for full-time male workers in that age group – the time when people are generally starting their careers – were the equivalent of $43,767 in 2005 wages. By the year 2000, they dipped to $38,110 and in 2005 they stood at $37,680.
http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/Census/article/420331
The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pumpanddump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29127316/the_great_american_b...
Well done, protestors! You found a creative way to get your message on poverty and homelessness across, and an incredibly important message it is indeed.
Human beings need a home, security, rights, nutritious food, education, health care, and that's about it! Give them even a rudimentary but adequate version of those simple and relatively inexpensive things, and voila - like magic - they generally take off. Because people are actually designed to enjoy being productive, happy members of society. Deprive people of any of these basic requirements of life, and people fall apart, subject to misery, discomfort, fear, sleep deprivation, stress, malnutrition, disease, etc. Under these circumstances, they often turn to drug abuse, prostitution and crime to try to ameliorate their misery.
The cost of all this drug abuse, crime, disease, mental illness and misery is huge - much higher than just providing all the citizens with their basic needs so that they have a necessary foundation for getting on with a happy and productive, fulfilling life.
It is bad economics not to provide every citizen in society with their fundamental requirements for health and personal development from the moment of conception.
And on top of this, it is not the loving, responsible, sane thing to do either, when our society could easily afford to end all this misery and provide joy to the lives of millions.
Our priorities are wrong. Our politicians are the wrong people. They represent the interests of the largest multinational corporations. This is very bad for the people of Canada. Canadians, please reflect on this for a minute. We need new politicians. We need you - normal, healthy, caring people to get involved in a political party and make it a better party. Or run as an independent candidate for office and speak up. Or support someone else who is running as an independent. Whatever in your analysis will be the most productive way to get involved in the political life of your country.
Are you proud of Canada because some Canadian athletes did well? Are you proud of Canada because our troops are willing to kill and die or be horribly injured to defend it? Then you should be willing to participate in the political life of your country. Find meaningful, independent sources of information like Agora, the Tyee, GlobalResearch.ca, etc. Try to develop informed opinions about a few topics. Then contribute your time, energy, enthusiasm, and ideas to making Canada a better place, a place with more happiness and fewer miserable, frustrated lives.
The current crop of politicians will never do this, because that is not what they are paid to do by their taskmasters - the big banking, armaments, oil, pharmaceuticals, agribusiness and mining interests. But please get involved. This is the only way the situation will change, so that we as Canadians can be proud of more than our athletes, but can also be proud of the true Olympic spirit that moves through us all - for the betterment of our entire society and the world.
the States, India, Pakistan, Somalia... but then again I wouldn't want to put that kind of burden on anyone else.
Take Baffin Island and move all the corporate welfare cases up there.... you do NOT deserve to live with self respecting Canadians
And who are you to say some people don't deserve to live where they choose? Would you say the same thing to an elderly woman in a wheelchair? A handicapped paraplegic who lost his legs on a job? A mentally disabled person tossed out of Riverview to fend for themselves?
Your comment I equate to this famous line from Dickens "A Christmas Carol" : Are there no Prison's? Are there no work houses; get your head out of the Dark Ages, and grow some compassion