Sharing my piece of a few days ago again as this De Blasio idea seems to be catching on! ;) Despite absurd and rather self-justifying and manifestly false notions among some on the left that Toronto is home only to wine swilling elites, social workers, academics and so forth, the reality is that the city has very real and pronounced issues around poverty, inequality and injustice, and not just in its suburbs. As the Toronto Star noted this past Wednesday: Child poverty in Toronto has reached epidemic levels with 29 per cent of children -- almost 149,000 -- living in low-income families, according to new data being released Wednesday by a coalition of community activists and social agencies. Among Canadas 13 major cities, Toronto is tied with Saint John, N.B., as having the highest child poverty rate, the coalition says. Across Toronto, almost 40 per cent of the citys 140 neighbourhoods have child poverty rates of 30 per cent or more, according to the coalitions analysis of Statistics Canadas recently released 2012 tax filer data. This is a shocking and shameful situation. It is one that is true both in downtown Toronto and in parts of Etobicoke and Scarborough. It is spread across the metropolis. These are conditions of injustice that allowed a very similar type of politician to Chow ideologically, Bill de Blasio, to win a landslide in New York on a campaign explicitly addressing exactly these issues. Yet in Toronto the ideological cousins to de Blasio in the Chow campaign and in most other municipal campaigns seem to think, as limited as his campaign was, even this cannot be done. While elements of the American left, especially municipally, have sought to mobilize and inspire in the wake of 2008 and social movements like Occupy, the Canadian left outside of Quebec has very largely not. In Ontario when we pretend that only wine-swilling elitists want to see policies and ideas that will fight inequality and poverty, the social democratic left abandons its historic constituency and very reason for existence which grew out of fighting for social justice issues that were centered on those living in poverty and the working class. On these issues the Big Tent only goes so far. You cannot actually do anything meaningful to confront and fight inequality or poverty without angering and alienating business, the wealthy and some sections of the middle class. That is simply a fact.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Sep 2014 20:44:31 +0000
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