In a two-minute clip of the CBC’s The Current podcast on health and wealth, a refugee claimant living in Toronto talks about how immigration, homelessness and poverty have all negatively impacted his physical and mental health. Our health is much more than visits to the doctor and filling prescriptions. Multiple socio-economic factors affect our health […]
Archives for November 2013
What Next For Housing and Homelessness Supports?
Everybody deserves to have a place to call home. The Community Start-Up and Maintenance Benefit (CSUMB) was a benefit that helped people receiving social assistance to pay for large or unexpected housing-related costs, supporting them to become and remain housed. In its 2013 budget, the province eliminated CSUMB and allocated 50 percent of its funding […]
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Backsliding 2014 Operating Budget Leaves Toronto At A Loss
There will be a lot of attention on the increase in tax rates in this budget. Should it be the 2.5 percent increase in the staff recommended budget, or the 1.75 percent proposed by the Mayor? However, that conversation, in isolation, will miss what matters most in the budget discussions, the public services that the […]
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National Housing Day 2013
November 22 is marked as National Housing Day across Canada – commemorating the day in 1998 when then-Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman and the mayors of Canada’s biggest cities adopted a Declaration from the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee to declare homelessness a national disaster. The mayors, invoking their power to declare a state of emergency, called […]
Poverty in Toronto: Moving Toward Elimination
Almost a quarter of Torontonians live in poverty, and an even larger share of recent immigrants and youth. Poverty creates real problems at the municipal level. David Hulchanski’s Three Cities Within Toronto report showed that poverty is creating an unequal and divided city. Ontario has had a Poverty Reduction Strategy in place since 2008 and […]
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Moving Beyond Ford, Investing In A Healthier Toronto
It is time to move beyond the controversy surrounding Mayor Ford and return the focus to policy. Next week, the 2014 budget will be launched. It will be the Ford administration’s final budget of this term. Our new report Investing In A Healthy Toronto compares Mayor Ford’s capital budgets over the last three years with […]
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Food Banks are a Symptom of Poverty. Let’s Fight the Disease
833,098 Canadians used food banks in March of 2013. Half of food bank users reported social assistance as their primary source of income, a quarter were single parent families, 11 percent were First Nations, Métis or Inuit, and 11 percent were recent immigrants. These Canadians come from a broad range of backgrounds, but they all […]
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Toronto Exec okays plan to negotiate affordable homes in waterfront condos
Toronto City Council’s Executive Committee has adopted a proposal to negotiate an inclusionary zoning deal with a private developer that could lead to 71 affordable rental homes in a waterfront condominium project. The only dissenting voice on Executive was Mayor Rob Ford, who was quoted in a media report as saying “you don’t use your waterfront […]
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Shadow Economies: Infographic
Shadow Economies Infographic