News brief: Heating bill relief for low-income renters
Hopefully some news you can use if you are low income, renting and pay high heating bills.
Poverty
Food banks: We cannot feed our way out of this crisis, but maybe couponing will help.
MLAs have lots of helpful suggestions for Feed Nova Scotia. “Let me tell you, couponing gets you a lot of stuff for very little money,” Liberal MLA Joyce Treen told Feed Nova Scotia’s executive director. Meanwhile, government is giving the organization that distributes 7,000 kilograms of food all cross Nova Scotia daily all of $12,000.
Pigeonholed by Community Services? Kendall Worth on work-readiness assessments
Assessed for job readiness by Community Services? Kendall Worth is worried, and he knows what he is talking about because he has been assessed countless times, right from Grade 5 to the present. “If Community Services really wanted to hire a first voice person to design this assessment, I could create this assessment with my own two hands,” says Kendall.
Op-ed: Help end exploitative phone charges in Nova Scotia provincial jails
People imprisoned in provincial jails are asking you to sign a petition telling the province to stop a private company from charging prohibitive rates for phone calls.
Access to high speed internet a basic right, says premier McNeil. What about access to a phone?
If high speed internet access in rural Nova Scotia is a “basic right,” what about access to a phone? Oh wait, no votes there…
Massive caseloads make child support orders difficult to enforce, former employee charges
Workers at the provincial Maintenance Enforcement Program, the people who make sure court-ordered child support payments are not being dodged, are too busy to do a good job, a former employee charges.
Appeal to add Charter considerations to case of family cut off from social assistance
When the head of a family is cut off from social assistance for punitive reasons the entire family suffers. LEAF, a national organization that promotes equality rights for women and girls hopes to change that through the Nova Scotia judicial system.
How dare you! Brenda Thompson on welfare activism in the eighties
Brenda Thompson was a welfare activist in Halifax in the eighties. Being a single mom who spoke her mind rather than know her place, she became the target of vicious attacks by the then minister of social services Edmund Morris. But Morris went too far, she took him to court, and won. We talk to Thompson about an especially vibrant period in Nova Scotia welfare activism, the strong support of the feminist movement, Alexa, journalism, slut shaming, and lots more.
Kendall Worth on solving the puzzle that is Kendall Worth
Kendall Worth on wanting to help people who live in poverty. If only he could make all the pieces of the puzzle fit together.
Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission tells welfare recipients to scurry
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission has denied five welfare recipients the opportunity to argue that insufficient funding for special diets amounts to discrimination.