Archive for July, 2008
Twice in Five Days in Mornelle Court…
My stomach sank reading the morning paper today “We’re Canada’s safest city” the headline read, but about two thirds of the way down the left column it also read “…But not safe enough. Improved crime statistics don’t mean much on Mornelle Crt. in Toronto’s northeast, where a young man was shot to death yesterday, just five days after another young man was shot and critically wounded in virtually the same spot.”
Unbelievable.
Before I say any more on this, a small group of us have decided to move more quickly than we anticipated and call a community meeting in Mornelle Court. The meeting was originally intended to initially address poverty specifically in this pocket of our community in Scarborough, but will now serve as an open forum in light of the last few days. While the date has not been set, and flyers have not gone out, I expect it will be held on Friday August 1st in the neighbourhood.
Twice in five days within fifty meters of each other two youth were shot both during daylight. One lay dead, the other in critical condition. Something is happening here that is bigger than before. This is not the Scarborough I know, and I’m sure for a lot of people, it will take a lot of time to understand just what is happening. Yesterday a young man, believed to be 17 years old, was gunned down on a stairwell that connects Mornelle Court to Military Trail Rd. He became Toronto’s 31st homicide victim. But he was more than that. A mother has lost her only child, a son who has been described to the media as being a good kid. One neighbour referred to him as “a good little kid” and said he had watched his kids for him a couple of times, and the worst thing he’d done in life was smoking pot.
It is hard to assume anyone in Mornelle Court not being filled with fear. If the streets aren’t safe even when the sun is up, when do children play outside? How do neighbours socialize and meet each other and on what ground can you build a community that cares for one another and does what it can to stand together throughout struggle? Something needs to be done, and has needed to be done for years in this area. One thing that struck me early on when talking to people in Mornelle, was how cynical they were about grand plans and ideas for their community.
Right now there is a small, but diverse group of individuals from in and around Scarborough, who have come together out of common purpose and with the same recognition for a need to address some of the issues facing our community now. In the coming days we’ll begin preparing a flyer for residents of the community for a meeting to be held in Mornelle Court to create an avenue to discuss what can be done to help residents within this community and the community as a whole. The hope is together with residents we can begin to create some positive news for members of the community and begin to see a real difference. The date is still tentative but I anticipate Friday August 1st will likely be selected.
My appeal to you: If you’ve got even just an hour or two and would like to help us by coming out and either dropping flyers, handing out handbills, or making phone calls to members of the community about the meeting, please contact me.
No Comments »First Time Voters
One of the most touching parts of any campaign is the personal interaction with your neighbours. While canvassing in a lower income part of the ward, I met a man who had been a citizen for just three weeks. He was very excited about the upcoming election, and so happy that I had come to see him to introduce myself. I was the first candidate he’d met in Canada. I thought that was pretty cool, and I think he did too. We spoke at length and at the end of our conversation, after telling me about his own very impressive involvement in India he promised me his first vote in Canada would be for me.
A feeling nearly as gratifying as speaking to a first time voter, is speaking to someone who has given up on politicians, but was refreshed by my style and the fact I don’t fit the “mould”. I met many people like this while campaigning. I often got frustrated and extremely frank with my views on their approach to civic involvement. In some cases it would be enough to convince them.
I met three people in a community housing building on a hot day in the summer. They were sitting in a small apartment, having a refreshment when I knocked on their door. I was invited in, at first I think just for a laugh, but as we spoke, the conversation changed to their reasons for not voting instead of why I was to be the solver of all things bad, I touched one of them. He had not voted in over a decade, and articulated his disappointment with politicians in a way that was hard to argue with. I told him the race would be close, and it would be votes like his that could be the deciding factor. I added that should I break my word to him or not do a good enough job for him, he could go back to not voting next time and say “told ya so”.
He told me that if he was left to vote on his own, he wouldn’t, but if we came and got him and took him to the polls he would gladly cast a ballot. So we did. On the first day of the in ward advanced poll, I showed up at his door and went upstairs to bring him down, and together we went to the polling station and talked about the other positions he’d be asked to vote for as well. He gave me the energy to go on for hours that day, pulling others and sharing his story as a reason why they too should vote.
You may need to experience theses conversations from the prospective of a candidate to really understand, I don’t know. What felt really good about it, at least for me, was knowing that the issues I was determined to tackle touched somebody else enough to get out and vote. I have something in common with the man I met who’d been a citizen for three weeks, we care about the same things, and voted for the same candidate in the 2006 municipal election, when each of us was eligible to vote municipally for the first time. (Yes, I did in fact run for Toronto City Council at the first legal opportunity.) To me at least, finding someone who would place their confidence in you, particularly when they were not a seasoned voter was a strong statement, better than any endorsement from any organization, because it came from the kind of people who should matter most in politics. While some reporters were fascinated with “Laforet, 20″ as a way to describe me, it really did not seem to matter to many of the previously apathetic and perhaps that is what also helped me develop a bond with people who have similar stories as those who I met and saw vote for the first time in either a long time, or ever.
1 Comment »Bed Bugs
I was planning on starting with a story about new voters, but a Toronto Sun article I read on the topic of community housing standards, and a recent conversation I’ve had with a friend has brought this one back to top of mind. I had no intention of providing any identifying information about the family I met, but as a result of my previous post on Mornelle Court, I did want to point out that they call it home.
When running for office, you meet a lot of people. Many stories touch you, but often stories have an ability to make you see an issue through the lens of another, and sometimes, change your own views. Often times, it is anecdotes and the stories of others that give one a far better lens to view an issue through. I met a single father and his eight-year-old boy who did just that. Together they showed me their modest apartment, the plaster less living room wall, the drywall falling into their bathtub and the holes in the baseboard that allow cockroaches to migrate into their apartment. The dad informed me of an eight-month-old maintenance request that has gone unanswered, how his son’s school was implementing a uniform policy and he did not know how he was going to pay for it. What really got me was something each of us ought to be ashamed of; bed bugs infesting community-housing buildings in our city.
Every few months, the father was forced to throw out their furniture, go to the furniture bank and arrange for new mattresses for him and his son. As it was, they had no couch, just a single large chair in the living room, a basic coffee table and a small TV resting on pieces of wood. His son told me about waking up in the night, being bitten by bed bugs, and bleeding for the sores because it was hard not to scratch. As he told me his story, he began jumping up and down, and frantically rubbing his arms and body to show me what it is like for him.
I was shocked that in a city like Toronto, we would allow conditions this bad to exist for our most vulnerable citizens. Simply put, it is not right, and particularly a government run entity should not be forcing people to live in conditions like this. Why should a boy go through his childhood fearing his bed and waiting for the next time it needs to be replaced? I thought back to my childhood, and can only recall having two beds while living with my parents and once since. I simply could not imagine such a frequent need for a new one. The amount of worries this single father had to deal with were daunting enough without having to teach his son life lessons like putting the cereal in the fridge to keep cockroaches from crawling into the box, or worrying about the next time the bed bug infestation would get so bad a new mattress could be the only solution. This day changed me. It showed me something that I could not forget, nor wanted to. It gave me something to fight for and something to want to change.
As the days and weeks went on after meeting this family, I shared the story of a father and a boy living in Toronto Community Housing and going through all they had to. I told people if elected I would fight community housing on things like this, and bring light to the backlog of maintenance requests publicly, even in the Council Chamber if I had to. I met a lawyer who told me each year he devotes two weeks of his time to helping low income tenants with landlord issues for free, and that if I were serious about this, he would help and ask some of his colleagues to help too.
I consider the time I spent in that apartment hearing their story and talking and thinking about it in the days and weeks that followed central to changing my thinking around social justice. It really opened my eyes to people not being served by their government and the need for activism within government as well. More than that though it showed me that we as a society cannot turn a blind eye to those who are less fortunate and struggling to get by. While we may feel that this family having affordable housing is a blessing, we need to also think more about the conditions of that housing and the impact it has on both father and son in this case.
