We have been following the fight of Lucasville residents against a smelly horse farm in this historic Black community for several years. Here is the latest update. With HRM seemingly powerless, a review by the the Nova Scotia Farm Practices Board is the community’s next (and likely final) option. A public meeting is scheduled for Wednesday July 19.
Earlier Kendall Worth wrote about how even a short hospitalization and surgery can throw a poor person’s live into a stressful chaos. Who’s going to drive you home if you have nobody? How are you going to get to the Food Bank if you need to stay in bed for weeks? How are you going to keep your apartment clean and tidy? And what about the social isolation? Well, turns out that in this case at least lots of people are willing to step up to the plate.
Basic Income, it sounds good, but does an Ontario pilot project deliver? And what are its implications for Nova Scotia poverty activists? The notion of Basic Income raises fair and urgent questions, and poverty activists in Nova Scotia need to decide where to focus their energies in terms of a political agenda. Expect much more NS Advocate coverage of Basic Income in the coming months.
After the defeat of Joanne Bernard we now have a new minister of Community Services in Kelly Regan. Kendall Worth, frequent contributor and chair of the Benefits Reform Action Group, wrote this open letter to tell her what’s wrong with the department in terms of income assistance, and how to fix it.
Frequent contributor Alex Kronstein continues his series on the social determinants of health, all the things that can make you sick that aren’t strictly speaking medical in nature, things like poverty, bad housing, your job, and more. Today Alex looks at social exclusion.
A new minister for Community Services, but we predict that nothing will change. Low key and polite advocacy hasn’t been able to stop the decades-long downward slide of income assistance rates. Time to try something else.
Homelessness, housing in bad repair and malnutrition can make you sick, both physically and mentally. Yet when we talk about healthcare we rarely talk about addressing root causes and mostly focus on things like wait lists and doctor shortages. Although tremendously important issues, we should not forget about these social determinants of health, says regular contributor Alex Kronstein.
In a recent talk at a community meeting on welfare, Fiona Traynor, a community legal worker at Dalhousie Legal Aid raised the alarm about the state of income assistance in Nova Scotia. Cuts to allowances and an increase in poor bashing have her worried.
In that speech Traynor also called for a strategic push back against the Community Services welfare transformation initiative, something we are told will change the way income assistance is delivered, but that has otherwise been low on details. We talked with Traynor late last week to further explore these issues.
Last night’s screening of Jackie Torrens’ terrific My Week on Welfare was a great success. Lots of people, and more importantly, lots of new faces. It is wonderful to witness people on welfare realize that yes, things are terrible, but there are others like them who aren’t going to take it anymore. We have lots of pictures, and the talk by regular contributor Tim Blades on being on welfare in general, and the extra struggles faced by single mothers who receive child support.
I am still getting used to the idea that Joanne Bernard is now the former Minister of Community Services, soundly beaten in Dartmouth North by NDP candidate Susan Leblanc. Her awful record on welfare issues played a large part in her defeat. So for poor people, what’s next in the fight for a life in dignity?