Ward 43 Residents Raise 240 pounds of food for Foodpoll 2010!
John Laforet with Ward 43′s proceeds to Foodpoll 2010
Below is a news release regarding the success of foodpoll 2010′s challenge to all City Council candidates. I was proud to participate and wish the others running in Ward 43 had gotten involved to make it more interesting. I want to thank everyone who dropped by to donate non parishable food to the foodbank and have to say I was personally amazed by the amount of food donated.
240 Pounds of Help For Scarborough’s Food Bank Collected in Ward 43
SCARBOROUGH, Mon. Sept 20, 2010 – Residents of Ward 43 donated 240 pounds of soup, flour, pasta and other non-perishable food items to local food banks this past weekend as part of the city-wide Toronto Food Poll 2010. This food drive was organized as a challenge to all city councillor candidates in the upcoming October 25th municipal election.
The motto for this year’s Food Poll was “Politics doesn’t matter if you’re hungry…. Everyone needs to eat.” John Laforet was the only councillor candidate in Scarborough’s Ward 43 to participate in this community food drive.
“Helping out our neighbours is a tradition in Scarborough. I want to thank all the Ward 43 residents who dropped off groceries this weekend. I was amazed by residents’ generosity in just two days,” said Laforet.
He congratulated the food drive organizers for taking a creative approach to link urban poverty with the current municipal election. Laforet said food drives are important to many people in Ward 43. The ward includes some of Scarborough’s poorest neighbourhoods. He added that city officials estimate about 3,000 families in the ward’s area depend on local food banks.
“In addition to its low-income residents, Ward 43 continues to lack many of the city services that other parts of Toronto take for granted,” Laforet said. “We have no subway service. Some of the worst roads in Ontario are in this ward. And only one library is now operating in this whole ward.”
All the food collected by the John Laforet campaign in Ward 43 will be delivered to Toronto Daily Bread Food Bank, which supplies food to Scarborough’s volunteer-run food banks. About 40 councillor candidates across Toronto took part in the Food Poll. The final city-wide results of this drive will be announced by the Toronto Food Poll 2010 later this week. More information about this initiative is available at www.foodpoll2010.com
City of Toronto CUPE 79 and 416 Strike – Day 29 – Impact on Children in Ward 43
‘Kids make bad political footballs’ - John Laforet
I’ve written about child poverty in Ward 43 before. Listening to resident’s stories during and after the campaign made this the kind of issue for me that it is difficult to see as anything but a social justice issue. Ward 43 has the highest rate of child poverty in Scarborough. Low income Ward 43 residents who are eligible for a child care subsidy have lost access to 97 of those spaces or approximately 10% of child care subsides available to residents since the 2006 election and without any consideration to the impact of the economic crisis that has seen unemployment skyrocket in Toronto to 9.6%.
I am definitely not your average child care advocate. I am male, young, single and without children. But – as someone who has run for public office, and been involved in politics in a community with the highest rate of child poverty anywhere in Scarborough; it’s an issue I’ve come to learn a lot about. Linking the availability of child care to a parents ability to provide a life outside of poverty for a child is a challenge I believe needs to be taken up if we are to unravel some of barriers to employment faced by especially single parents.
Because of this strike, of the 935 families that were able to keep their subsidies after the City of Toronto cut roughly 10% of the subsidies allocated to eligible Ward 43 residents, 25% of those families have found themselves without access to their subsidized child care spot for 29 days and counting. Because the City directly operates 226 spaces in Ward 43 that are available to families eligible for subsidy, and because those day cares are run by unionized workers, 226 low income families have 226 children without access to much needed, affordable day care.
If the other impacts of the strike wasn’t bad enough, these families are now forced to find unsubsidized options of childcare to ensure that they are able to continue going to work to maintain employment. Child care is not a service the City provides to enhance the lives of residents, it is one the City provides that is essential to allow low income earners to remain in the work force, provide for their families and have affordable, safe and accessible childcare for their children. The strike is now depriving them of that.
Kids make bad political footballs. While garbage may be the most noticeable impact of the current labour disruption, the City shuttering its day cares and providing no alternative to parents whose children were receiving subsidized daycare in the public system is probably the most serious.
Somebody needs to start thinking about the impacts this strike is having on Toronto’s lowest income earners, their children and our future. Children without access to licensed, safe and affordable childcare are at risk. With each day this strike carries out, the 3000 or so kids whose subsidized care has been provided directly by the City are at greater risk. Their families financial situations further tightened, not to mention the tens of thousands of parent’s who rely on parks and recreation programming to provide summer time daycare through the summer camp programming run by the City of Toronto.
My hope is prior to any future labour disruptions, the City can reach an agreement with the unions to ensure that childcare and more importantly child safety isn’t compromised by a future strike. Better yet, the City could end this strike by removing the unnecessary and controversial issue of sick leave pay from the negotiating table, strike an agreement and strive to prevent a future strike by maintaining good relations with union officials and starting negotiations well in advance of the expiration of an existing collective agreement.
No Comments »REPOST: Bed Bugs – From Stories I’d Like to Share
Stories that have shaped my views and have continued to fuel my passion was the primary reason for launching www.laforet.ca this past June. A single father provided me one of those experiences when I ran for Toronto City Council in Scarborough’s Ward 43. While Councillor Paul Ainslie was elected, the race certainly had a lasting impact on me. This man’s story has been impossible to forget, and has served as a reminder to me of the real needs constituents have and the importance of an elected official to address those needs. It is with this, I would like to once again draw attention to a story I want to share. I originally posted it on July 17th 2008.
Bed Bugs
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.
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