COVID-19 has hit the very poor in Nova Scotia hard and left many of those living with mental health issues in a very precarious place. That was the urgent message delivered by staff members of the Nova Scotia division of the Canadian Mental Health Association to the Community Services Standing Committee.
The Nova Scotia government is asking for public feedback by January 8 on 65 pages of regulations which will dictate how roads should be used by the public, and also potentially allow for some safer controls and infrastructure for vulnerable road users. Martyn Williams has some excellent suggestions.
Martyn Williams: 2020 has been yet another year marked and marred by vulnerable road user fatalities, all of them seniors. An urban or suburban community that can’t support people to move around safely without a car cannot function. People with disabilities, children and seniors in particular are placed in the unwilling position of performing dangerous stunts, using crosswalks that do not meet their unique needs and abilities.
Olivia Katz on the challenges she and other poor people faced long before we even heard of Covid. “These are not recent discoveries, Stephen McNeil knows all of this, he just doesn’t care. These outcomes are a matter of policy, his policy.”
J-T: “I would like you to witness a day in the life of an inmate during COVID-19. In the beginning nobody took it seriously. It wasn’t a big deal until numbers began to rise quickly. We panicked. We were going to break out, we’d plan it all out, work as a team, and I’m talking about the majority of us. We weren’t going to just sit here and die”
PSA: Equity Watch webinar, 15 December 4:30 pm Atlantic: People with disabilities fight segregation and demand inclusion
Press release from Wellness Within: That the RCMP would charge a victim of gendered violence- a victim who herself survived the massacre through luck, resilience, and persistence- in one of their first public actions in response to the massacre is glaring evidence of the institution’s inability to consider sex and gender in their work.
Judy Haiven: “While many in the mainstream media called Lepine a madman (but interesting, never a terrorist, as they might have done today), Canadian feminists saw that something more sinister and more systemic had happened.”
When COVID-19 hit, Nova Scotia’s provincial prisoner population was reduced by 41 percent in just a few months. The women’s unit at Central Nova was down to just seven prisoners. Now all that work has been undone, write Ashley Avery and Emma Halpern.
““We need to advise you that the people who complained are not feeling comfortable with your behaviour.” Another story by Kendall Worth on the uncalled for harassment by security guards and police of people with mental health issues.