Two People Who Got the Election Right : Part One
Two people, a capitalist and a communist did tell the truth about the just recently finished 2019 federal election.
The capitalist or businessman if you prefer, Kevin O' Leary told the truth after all the ballots were counted. O'Leary who has been a star of a t.v. show and a very successful entrepreneur made the comment that if Conservative leader Andrew Scheer had gone to the various Pride parades around the country, he'd now be the new Prime Minister of Canada. I think O'Leary was right but I'm glad that Scheer didn't attend the various Pride Parades. Had he done so I'm sure he would have won the election.
Of course the Conservatives did win 22 more seats than they'd won in the 2015 election. They also won more votes than the Liberals. Yet that didn't translate into more seats than the Liberals. So Justin Trudeau squeaked back into power and now heads up a minority government.
I still think that Mr. Scheer would have had to explain a little more his stands on abortion and same sex marriage that he personally was against. Yet there's no doubt that his non appearance at Pride Parades cost him a lot of votes - which was good. And this brings me to the communist side of the story.
Liz Rowley heads up the miniscule Communist Party of Canada. I've never voted for the communists and don't plan to do so in the future. Yet Ms. Rowley held a meeting in Vancouver long before the election of 2019 was underway. A friend of mine went to the meeting and came away terrified at the prospect of a Conservative victory.
"She said that if Scheer won he'd take Canada back to 1945," he said. "The Conservatives would make savage cuts to every social program they could." Now I tend to feel that communists can be very alarmist. Yet this time I think M. Rowley was right.
Long before the election started in earnest I wrote Mr. Sheer a letter. "Are you planning to scrap the universality of the Old Age Security Payment?" I asked Mr. Scheer. I also asked him if the would make cuts to the Guaranteed Income Supplement and also raise the age if retirement from 65 to 67. I waited a few weeks and received no reply to my letter. Then I sent Mr. Scheer another letter with the same questions. Again no reply came my way. I then sent another letter to the Conservative leader on this issue and once again he sent me nothing back.
While I waited for a reply to my letters on payments to seniors I did receive a letter from Mr. Scheer which replied to my concerns about the Conservative policies on the environment. All this lack of answers about cuts to payments to seniors confirmed my belief that the Conservatives were planning big cuts to social programs. Yet thankfully the Conservatives didn't win the election.
Right now the Liberals aren't planning any big cuts in social programs. This doesn't mean they won't make any in the future. After all, the Chretien Liberal government tore big holes in Canada's social programs in the 1990's. So who knows what Prime Minster Justin Trudeau will do in the future? Yet right now most of the federal programs won't be cut.
In any case Mr. O'Leary and Ms. Rowley were right. Two people at opposite ends of the political spectrum told the truth. In the end,Andrew Scheer lost the 2019 federal election and I'm so glad he did.
Friday 29 November 2019
Friday 22 November 2019
No Space In A Hosing Co-op by Dave Jaffe: Part One
No Space In A Housing Co-op: Part One.
Meetings can drive me up a wall. I hate sitting in them and that's one of the reasons I left political parties. Yet there's one meeting I do enjoy going to and that's the orientation meetings at my co-op. Here, often a dozen or so people show up who want to join and live in our co-op. Yet there's a problem we face as a co-op. We usually have to turn away nearly all the people who show up because we only have one spare apartment in our 42 unit co-op building.
At the orientation meeting I and about seven or so others interview our prospective co-op members. But in the end, after the interviews and maybe another hour of discussion after the prospective applicants have left, we have to e-mail most of the people who showed up. The text message usually says "Sorry but you have been refused. We will keep your application on our waiting list for the next year."
At our last orientation meeting which stretched out over four hours our choices boiled down to two people: a young indigenous male and a an older retired woman. Both candidates were excellent choices to move into our co-op. In the end we chose the senior. Yet all of us felt the indigenous applicant was a good choice too. And there were at least four or five other applicants who could have also fitted into our place .
So who is to blame for this often agonizing situation I and others find ourselves in? I blame the federal government in Ottawa that hasn't developed social housing in decades. Look at the stats. In 2011 which is the last year I could get reliable figures on, there were about 14 million residences or apartments and houses in Canada. Less than 600,000 or about 4 to 5 per cent of that total were social housing units. This is a very small figure compared to other countries like Singapore or Germany.
"Nobody's building any social housing these days," one housing activist told me a few years ago.
This was true. The N.D.P. government of John Horgan's in British Columbia has launched a program to build social housing. Yet this is the only government across Canada that's doing this on any scale. Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has pledged to house the homeless and build social housing and we'll see if the Liberals live up to their campaign promises.
In the just recent 2019 federal election N.D.P. leader Jagmeet Singh vowed that if he were elected Prime Minister of Canada, his government would build 500,000 units of social housing. Yet Singh's New Democratic Party finished in fourth place and at this time has no chance of forming a federal government.
After the last three orientation meetings I've ben to, I write letters to the Prime Minister of Canada and urge him to build more social housing. So far my letters haven't had much of an impact. Still, I'm forever hopeful. Anyway who knows? Maybe one day Canadians will elect a government that will build hundreds of thousands of units of social housing. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that blessed day.
Meetings can drive me up a wall. I hate sitting in them and that's one of the reasons I left political parties. Yet there's one meeting I do enjoy going to and that's the orientation meetings at my co-op. Here, often a dozen or so people show up who want to join and live in our co-op. Yet there's a problem we face as a co-op. We usually have to turn away nearly all the people who show up because we only have one spare apartment in our 42 unit co-op building.
At the orientation meeting I and about seven or so others interview our prospective co-op members. But in the end, after the interviews and maybe another hour of discussion after the prospective applicants have left, we have to e-mail most of the people who showed up. The text message usually says "Sorry but you have been refused. We will keep your application on our waiting list for the next year."
At our last orientation meeting which stretched out over four hours our choices boiled down to two people: a young indigenous male and a an older retired woman. Both candidates were excellent choices to move into our co-op. In the end we chose the senior. Yet all of us felt the indigenous applicant was a good choice too. And there were at least four or five other applicants who could have also fitted into our place .
So who is to blame for this often agonizing situation I and others find ourselves in? I blame the federal government in Ottawa that hasn't developed social housing in decades. Look at the stats. In 2011 which is the last year I could get reliable figures on, there were about 14 million residences or apartments and houses in Canada. Less than 600,000 or about 4 to 5 per cent of that total were social housing units. This is a very small figure compared to other countries like Singapore or Germany.
"Nobody's building any social housing these days," one housing activist told me a few years ago.
This was true. The N.D.P. government of John Horgan's in British Columbia has launched a program to build social housing. Yet this is the only government across Canada that's doing this on any scale. Justin Trudeau's Liberal government has pledged to house the homeless and build social housing and we'll see if the Liberals live up to their campaign promises.
In the just recent 2019 federal election N.D.P. leader Jagmeet Singh vowed that if he were elected Prime Minister of Canada, his government would build 500,000 units of social housing. Yet Singh's New Democratic Party finished in fourth place and at this time has no chance of forming a federal government.
After the last three orientation meetings I've ben to, I write letters to the Prime Minister of Canada and urge him to build more social housing. So far my letters haven't had much of an impact. Still, I'm forever hopeful. Anyway who knows? Maybe one day Canadians will elect a government that will build hundreds of thousands of units of social housing. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for that blessed day.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)