The Benefits Reform Action Group (BRAG), a coalition of welfare recipients and poverty advocates is not happy with last week’s provincial budget. “Good Grief!” writes the group in a press release. “While announcing tax cuts for the middle class and businesses it has not provided a single penny for the poorest of the poor in Nova Scotia—the people in need and reliant on social assistance.”
Kendall Worth argues that the liberal government has been a disappointment for people on welfare. They have done nothing to address the immediate needs of people living in deep poverty, and we know nothing of the welfare transformation except that it moves along with the speed of cold molasses.
After a successful community meeting in Dartmouth Nova Scotia ACORN is launching a province wide online survey on rental housing conditions and landlords. It needs the data to pressure municipalities on landlord licensing and the province on rent control.
People on welfare will have an even harder time making ends meet in the upcoming year, thanks to a provincial budget that ignores their plight.
This year’s budget may be balanced, but the a small group of people on social assistance and their allies who gathered in front of Province House wondered at what cost. Protesters hoped to talk about poverty in Nova Scotia with MLAs entering the House to take part in this afternoon’s budget discussions. Demonstrators were studiously ignored by Liberal and Conservative MLAs, while NDP MLAs stopped to chat.
Years after he got off social assistance Community Services intends to charge him with fraud for running a small business, even though the department had earlier approved the practice. Now the poor man fears he may end up losing his daughter. Brenda Thompson reports from the Annapolis Valley.
KJIPUKTUK (Halifax) – Placing the new QEII Community Outpatient Centre in Bayers Lake Industrial Park will create hurdles for many people…
It appears frequent contributor and poverty activist Kendall Worth is not a fan of Minister Joanne Bernard.
I had a great time at SMU last week, digging through box after box of newspaper clippings, minutes posters, and brochures related to well over forty years of civil rights, labour and social justice struggles here in Nova Scotia and beyond. Lynn Jones has scissors, and she isn’t afraid to use them. Eighteen boxes of documentation have found a home at the St Mary’s archives.
The politicians who make decisions about people on social assistance should try living on a social assistance budget just for a week, says actress and documentary maker Jackie Torrens. It would make them better politicians. “I don’t extend the challenge in an aggressive way, or an angry way. I sincerely want our MLAs to have a tiny glimpse of what people on social assistance in this province are dealing with on a daily basis,” says Torrens.