eat the rich---shelters
I guess i can't help but want to scream. It seams its allways one step forward 2 steps back. It doesn't matter how much you try, its getting harder and harder for someone to get out of the street here in Canada. No one seems to take control of this issue. Yeah there's little groups here and there that try to be heard but really no one gives a fuck. Now i wonder what its going to take or what needs to happen before people actually do something to be heard. How many people need to suffer and die like you and i before we stand up. I'm heading back to the streets soon, and this time i'm pissed.
What i'm getting at is all the money is out there to help us out but to many people are cashing it in before it reaches us. No one should be making money off the poor. Its not a fucken busness, its my and your life. So when you fuckers getting rich off of me see me and wonder why i'm an asshole now you know.....
My biggest question is why are these fucken agency's not building affordable housing. They can get the financing and the rooms would pay for themself---Yeah but i guess its better to build shelters---yeah thats year after year they get a paycheck to run these shitty places and keep us down.......so when you cash in your paycheck remember that the money was there to help us not to make you richer.....
You're right to be outraged freerick. It's what you do with that outrage that will make the difference.
It costs $80 or more per day to keep someone in a shelter and less than $30 per day to HOUSE them in subsidized housing.
That's a $50 per day difference or $7,300 per year MORE to put you in a shelter than pay for your housing. Lotta big poverty pimping bucks going into that business.
The average Executive Director of a shelter makes $120,000 per year. The average worker makes $30,000 per year. You can hire 4 full-time workers for the cost of one ED.
Other than maintenence staff and maintence costs[which you also need for a shelter] and administrative costs [which you also need for a shelter] there's no daily worker costs for housing and one manager can effectively administrate quite a number of them simulataneously.
Shelters are merely prisons with the doors open and a different title.
Your crime, my friend, is being poor.
Hi freericks
I have been doing this business for years (bitching at governments at all levels regarding housing), I have noticed one thing, they all are liars when they try to tell people before an election that they care about our poors and homeless.
Once they are in power, it's the same old story, they just don't give a damned,they will help their friends as much as they can and some, but they do not care if you die homeless or destitute, if you die this way, they will bury you in a whole without even a marker acknoledging who the hell you are.
The Conservative government at the Federal level and the previous Liberal government are very good example of what I am saying.
They only care about their rich friends, it's the same thing at the Provincial level, the Liberals in B.C. And Ontario are the same way, in Alberta we are stuck with a Conservative government that has been abusing the poor and the low income workers for years and those three provinces are suppose to be some of the richest in our country.
Calgary is suppose to be the richest city in our country but yet we have currently a very serious situation with homelessness that is reminding me of Toronto a few years ago when I began my fight for our homeless.
Yesterday, we lost an homeless man who died in a park near where I live, they talked about him on the news for a couple of minutes just to say that he was known by the Calgary Police Service because he was a well known panhandler in the area nothing more.
Shelters are a business that is supported by our governments, just look at all the millions of dollards that has been sunked into the Calgary drop in Center from all three levels of Governments, all that money could have been used to build new social housing in the East Village or in the Victoria Park area.
Ralph Klein has allowed his friends at the Calgary Stampede Corporation to expropriate every single houses in the Victoria Park area so that they could expand their territory and build new monster condos for the rich and powerfull. The result of this is devastating as we all know now and the only one's that ever benefited from this are the Calgary Stampede Corporation of course and the local shelters by getting more millions to house those who were displaced.
I lost a friend to the streets when I was living in Ottawa in 1999 and I decided to do something about it, I made a commitment to speak out for our Brothers & Sisters, this is what we need to do in this country, we need to make our governments realise that this country belong to us the poor just as much as it belong to the rich & powerfull.
We can't just bitch about it in private, we need to be in their face and tell them enough is enough with the abuse of our less fortunate.
This is why I co-founded the Alberta Coalition Against Poverty with the Calgary & District Labor Council in 2001. This is why I founded the Albertans Against Poverty Organization in Edmonton in 2003 and this why our organization has merged with another in Laval Qc to form the National Coalition Against Poverty.
How many more of our homeless need to die needlessly before our less fortunate wake up and band toghether and start the real bitching? This is the million dollar question brother.
The only way we will win this battle is to do what the workers did when they started trade unions, we need to join toghether from coast to coast and tell these rich people that we are going to take our country back.
Please visit our website to find out more about NCAP-CNCP And decide for yourself if you want to take your anger a step further and join us and help form a strong voice for the voiceless in Canada.
In solidarity
Daniel
You're right Daniel; The government does NOT care.
The real trick of the trade is understanding that in order to get votes they must LOOK like they care. Very different.
Bitching gets you nowhere with people who don't care.
*Embarrassment* gets you far places with those who have to LOOK like they care.
Take a look at what happened in Tent City Toronto. Nobody really cared. But they housed us anyway. Why? Because it was a GLOBAL humiliation and against the NATO agreement to turf 100 people out of their homes. It is against the accord to evict more than 30 people without providing an alternative and without proper notice. Mel the Moose was *embarrassed* when the whole world looked at him and the City Of Toronto as tyrants.
The trick would be to get *many* 30 person squats and tent cities going and to use the NATO Accord to embarrass the governments into acting.
Whether anyone likes it or not, contracts and laws can be the best friends of the poor. Overturn camping bans and you can build tent cities. Build tent cities and they will be embarrassed into housing. Also, tent cities and shantytowns are highly visible reminders of poverty and such communities by physical approximaty tend to have a closeness and trust that activist activities do not.
Push through a LAW that says all shelter residents MUST be offered rent-geared-income-housing within 60 days and watch the buildings go up!
Push through "use it or lose it" laws and watch the rents go DOWN as landlords stop getting tax write-offs for empty buildings and know they stand to lose their investment if the buildings are not in use and watch the poor folks MOVING IN!
Activists need to stop wasting their time preventing the closing of foodbanks and other "essential" services and put their time into positive SOLUTIONS not band-aids. Upping the rates is a GOOD place to go.
First off, one must go for the positive. It's easier to get support behind what a group WANTS rather than what they DON'T WANT.
Secondly, change takes sacrifice. Period. NO happy ending there.
People go to a protest and they want to be home by dinner. Don't want to sacrifice, don't want to give something up to get something communally bigger. The fact is, sit your asses down in front of a government office and refuse to move UNTIL the rates are increased. As long as it takes.
When someone really gets a group together to do those things, I will be happy to lend my expertise. Until then, I don't want to waste what little time I have left on this planet, anymore.
To our borthers & sisters out there:
I just wanted to make things clear for those who may think that I may not be on the right track with what I am and have been doing to address homelessness in our country.
I have gone beyond bitching a long time ago, the problem is not myself or the actions I have taken in the past.
As some of you may remember, as the organizer of the Alberta Coalition Against Poverty, I organized two sleep outs for our homeless in Calgary, one in 2002 at Central Memorial Park and the other in another less known park.
These were actions that the city or even the province wasn't use to see, I quit the organizing with ACAP Due to the fact that the organization was going into a different direction then what our brothers & sisters wanted.
The first sleep out, produced enough attention that other people in Lethbridge, Medicine Hat and Edmonton wanted to have chapters established in their city.
The second sleep out produced enough support for some other organizations in Canada to support us with an action of their own on the same night, Halifax was an example, our brothers and sisters there supported our action by staging a sleep out as well, 100 people participated and stayed all night even though it was raining most of the night, it was the same in Calgary except for the fact that it wasn't raining.
I have tried to get ACAP to do what our brothers & sisters on the street here wanted them to do. I did propose some actions such as doind a camp out in Victoria Park where as I mentioned people were being thrown out of their houses and appartments to make room for a rich corporation and their rich friends but they wouldn't go for it.
ACAP Has turned into an organization that is satisfied of sitting in a meeting month after month and bitch and do nothing about it, I quit going to their meetings after I got shut down a couple of time because of my views on how to do things.
After I quit ACAP, A large number of the members decided to follow me and quit going to the meetings, the chapter in Lethbridge shut down and the Edmonton chapter also shut down and our members in that city asked me to restart the organization under a new name which is now AAPO.
The Medicine Hat chapter is now operating under a new name as well, it has been as a matter of fact almost since it started.
Even today, I am still being blamed by ACAP for loosing some of their members, but the fact is that the group is not doing what our brothers & sisters want them to do and they just won't do it.
Even though AAPO Was started in Edmonton,the majority of our brothers & sisters living on the streets in Calgary and even some workers at the Mustard Seed Shelter would rather support AAPO and Our coalition instead of going to attend meeting after meeting and have nothing done as a result.
My health has been degrading over the years, but has I mentioned before I made a commitment to see the eradication of homelessness and poverty in Canada and I am sticking to this.
When people out there are ready to stop bitching in private and decide to help build a strong movement from coast to coast, I will be there to do whatever is neccessary to make it happen.
I believed in 1999 when I began,that we will have our voices heard by building a movement that our brothers & sisters will want to join and support from coast to coast and I still believe in that principle.
Such a movement cannot be build if people don't join in and help out organize meaningfull actions that will make a difference.
In solidarity
Daniel
P.S. Metis rebel is on the right with his thinking regarding actions that should be taken, I am all for it but I will not asked our members to break the laws of our country to make a point unless we do have a strong movement from coast to coast.
You have some good points.
I despise meetings unless there is an actionable goal as the planning result. It's why I won't do them anymore. I have no patience for the "co-ordinating class" as Noam Chomsky called it.
If you're going to "wipe out homelessness in this lifetime" *smile* I hope you live a long, long time because it's been around since the dawn of greed. If you wanna increase social housing or make squatting legal--that I can see you getting in one lifetime*chuckle*
As for breaking the law however, if you're waiting for massive support to do it--it will never come. In no movement has there ever been a majoritiy of people willing to go against an armed government to break the law.
I believe in breaking unjust laws. I have, and will. Every night that someone sleeps out in a city that has a camping ban they are forced to break an unjust law with no support. I broke the law many times as a harm reduction worker when I felt the law had no moral fibre.
When I threw International Tent City and Alternative Housing Day Picnic Celebration with squats across the globe we all REFUSED to get permits since it should be the right of the citizens [of which we are some] to have an event without begging anyone's permission or paying for permits to use the parks.
When I squatted in Tent City, I deliberately broke the law as did all my compatriots.
Gandhi broke the law when he harvested salt. Martin Luther King broke the law when he started the march [no permit] after Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to move to the back of the bus. AIM and the other Native movements doing blockades and takeovers break the law continuously.
The law is not a moral compass. It is the hammer of justice. And sometimes the hammer is rusted with corruption and self-interest.
Sometimes the most effective means is breaking unjust laws.
Generally speaking, people join movements when the movement has media and success. And when they care enough to start saying "No" to repression and "Yes" to a better idea. Per example: The water protests in South America.
Indescriminate breaking of the law is not powerful nor useful. Judicious breaking of unjust laws is the most powerful statement a group of people can make.
Something to think about.