www.flickr.com More of aletteke's photos tagged with potholes

These photos were taken within a two block radius from my own apartment. It is hard enough to walk and not trip let alone if you are having to use a walker or cane. wheeling it isn't much better, many corners have no sidewalk ramp and wheelchair users are forced to stay on the street.


Shameful, in a city which supposedly is the best in the world to live in. Perhaps the constant harpng on letting addicts have their drugs for free, and lovely places to shoot it too, and their consistently soft conviction on grow-ops is meant to have an ever more drugged and apathetic community who could care less about potholes, and for that matter decent healthcare. It really is shameful, and yet somehow in this very poor part of the city real estate has a single family dwelling set at a value of 600,000 dollar.

A couple of years ago when some big men came and dug up the water mains there was the perfect opportunity to repair the street which thanks to wear and tear now has soft shoulders and crumbling sidewalks. alas a truck came and soft, hot asphalt was tossed over the dirt covered pits and stamped down by big footed men and their shovels, and nothing since. I can imagine how hard it is for an ambulance stretcher to navigate the dirt rubble and loose asphalt. Thanks to the age, poverty and disability levels being terribly high here there are a lot of ambulances, and an even bigger need for decent roads and sidewalks. Of course no Porche owners and the like. My neighbour does have a Mercedes, but it's an older one. somehow I'm having a hard time caring that people in the neighbourhoods that house the "creme de la creme" are having their roads dug up for public transit, hah!

The politics of poverty makes for strange bedfellows.

A surreal air suffused Hamilton's council chambers yesterday morning as politicians from all three levels of government gathered to praise and applaud a man about to step onto an international stage and excoriate two of those same governments for failing to protect the rights of the poor.

Poverty lawyer Craig Foye is bound for Geneva, Switzerland, where on Monday he will address a United Nations committee and accuse the provincial and federal governments of violating international human rights covenants by failing to ensure an adequate standard of living for Hamilton's -- and all of Canada's -- poor.

During a sendoff yesterday morning, Foye reminded an appreciative audience that the Canadian government has signed an international covenant defining poverty as a human rights issue and called inadequate social assistance levels an "emergency" and "our great shame."

Our low levels of social assistance are "sending thousands and thousands of families spiralling ever deeper and deeper into poverty," Foye said.

His remarks were greeted with prolonged applause from the audience and the politicians gathered to see him off.

"I think it is so important to stand in solidarity (with Foye) here today," MPP Ted McMeekin announced from the podium. "Clearly governments aren't doing enough -- all governments aren't doing enough!"

Those critical comments were echoed or amplified by Mayor Larry Di Ianni, MPs David Christopherson and Wayne Marsden, and fellow MPP Andrea Horvath.

Foye's report -- sponsored by the Income Security Working Group's human rights subcommittee and co-authored by Chabriol Colebatch and Deirdre Pike -- uses census data and research from the Social Planning Research Council to document the dire straits many Hamiltonians find themselves in if they depend on government assistance.

The report also documents the way seniors, immigrants, children, aboriginals and single mothers are disproportionately affected by poverty in this city. The report argues that government policies lie at the root of much of our poverty problem.

"The right to an adequate standard of living is not being protected by either (senior) level of government ... social assistance rates remain arbitrary numbers, numbers not tied to any meaningful costs," Foye said yesterday.

"It's not that we don't know or can't figure out these costs ... it's that we ignore those costs."

Two months ago, the report received unanimous approval from city council and yesterday Di Ianni reminded his political colleagues and the audience that "we don't often get unanimity around this table.

"So many people are disadvantaged in this city, 100,000 or so who have to make the kinds of choices none of us here have to make. We have a very long way to go."

The incongruity of hearing politician after politician praise a report and author, who is so strongly condemning politicians and governments, was dealt with head on by Christopherson.

"Some might wonder why are we so excited by having this (report) put on the international stage," Christopherson said at the start of a short but loud and powerful speech.

"All of us, and I'm the most senior politician in this room, bear responsibility of not doing enough."

He looked around the council chambers and continued.

"We've allowed our social agenda to be hijacked by our economic agenda."

Poverty is an issue that can be tackled, if governments will summon the will, he said.

"Post 9/11, all you have to do is say the word 'security' and there's millions of dollars for whatever you want to do. There are things we can do."

Meanwhile in Ottawa, government officials declined to comment on Foye's report or discuss what Canadian officials would be telling the committee in Geneva next week.

"It's true that we will make a statement to the committee, but we cannot talk about the statement until it is tabled with the committee," said Rejean Beaulieu of the Foreign Affairs Department.

"I'll be happy to send you a copy once it is tabled."

bdunphy@thespec.com 905-526-3262

Craig Foye will be filing occasional dispatches from Geneva. You can find them at www.thespec.com and at www.hamiltonlegalclinics.ca

Local politicians fete lawyer heading to UN to slam Canada's failure to protect the needy.

Source URL: http://www.hamiltonspectator.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=hamilton/L ayout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1146261014012&call_pageid=1020420665036&co l=1014656511815

Canada fails to meet economic and social rights obligations, United Nations told

OTTAWA, April 28, 2006 - Canada is going backwards on its commitments to implement the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, a network of Canadian non-governmental organizations say in presentations they will make to a UN Committee on May 1.

Though Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the world with low unemployment and record Federal budget surpluses, too many people are being denied the human rights guaranteed by the Covenant, such as the rights to an adequate standard of living, to social security, to housing, to food, to health, and fair working conditions including fair wages. Disproportionate numbers of Aboriginal people, women, people with disabilities, people of colour, refugees and youth experience poverty and other rights violations in Canada today.

Over 25 representatives of non-governmental groups will be presenting their evidence to the Committee on economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which meets in Geneva beginning on May 1. The damning evidence includes: welfare rates that in some provinces are only 20% to 30% of the poverty line, those in dire need being denied welfare, minimum wages that fall thousands of dollars below the poverty line, even for a single person working full time, an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people who are homeless and over 800,000 needing to use food banks each month.

The Canadian government will appear before the Committee on May 5 and 8. The Committee is expected to issue its Concluding Observations including recommendations on what needs to be done to improve Canada's human rights compliance on or shortly after May 19.

The Canadian government's 4th and 5th Periodic Reports and the submissions of Canadian non-governmental organizations can be found on the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights web site at: http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/cescrs36.htm

Sara and Bill They were both AIDS positive. I had seen her only once before, he was a regular at the small free lunch cafe where I did my counselling sessions as they had lunch. Sara and Bill (not their real names) chatted closely the previous day, I marvelled how despite their obvious advanced illness and their desperate situations they flirted coyly with the same innocence as anyone else.

I'd not be able to say how old they were, after years of living homeless and addicted twenty five often looked like forty or fifty, most of them were barely past childhood when discarded by society and family. In each other they found interest and affection, the place was of no consequence and their troubles fell off. Instinctively we all gave them space, no one tried striking up a conversation or asking for anything. Bill cleared the table and brought Sara another coffee.

Afterwards each went their own way. There is a territoriality and work ethic in this population, begging or sex trade it is still work and attending clinics, hoop jumping for services and counselling, standing in line for methadone. It is foolish to think this does not require some self discipline. These were not things that could be done together.

They were both back. Sara had come first, she glanced around for him. She bit her lower lip, deep in thought, hoping, not eating. Finally, Bill turned up. His face flushed when he saw her. She stood up to wait in line beside him then they took a table outside. I had just sat outside to have a smoke and talk with another client. Bill asked me for my lighter. The triumphantly he took out the stump of a candle (origins unimportant). With great ceremony he arranged the table, and put away the trays. He placed the lit candle-stump on the table and they sat, holding hands, and eating lunch. For just a few moments, they were human, their lives mattered to each other.

for more in this vein: http:aletta.org/poorindex.shtml

I will be posting portraits, with names changed, of several people I came to know, the poorest among us, and whose stories need telling. This is the first of several his name is "Shoeshine".

Shoeshine He was slight, skin tightly wrapped around his bones. We stood eye to eye, but somehow he carried himself as a taller man. The others called him shoeshine, simply because that is what he did. He made his living shining shoes. He took great pride in his work. with great enthusiasm he would take away my shoes and shine them and he was disappointed if I cam in wearing sandals. Shoeshine himself was wearing an old shoe on one food tied with strips of cloth, his foot so swollen from and infection. It made him limp, but with some almost Gene Kelly-like smoothness he made the limp look like a cavalier swagger. Like most people too thin from illness he could not easily stay warm. Despite all this he had class and a unique style.

He earned his keep shining shoes, he did not take handouts. He had a daughter somewhere, and a ex-wife he was still deeply in love with. He'd blown it. Daddies should not be drug addicts if they want to be daddies. it was a lesson he learned just a bit late. His addiction was now terminal. He had already entered the full-blow AIDS stage and he was weary. He knew it. He resisted being put on the AIDS cocktail, it was too expensive, getting it subsidised was complicated by his not being in the system for it. Nonetheless we wore him down.

For a brief time, after the projectile vomiting stopped, he felt better. Old wounds from rat bites were starting to clear up without the prolonged eruptions. Yes, rat bites. he could only afford a room in a local hotel and they had rats. I believed it that he did not notice when he was still on drugs, but he was noticing now. This was not how and where he wanted to die. I explained hospice to him. He was delighted, said he had never heard of it before. He dedicated himself fully to earning enough to pay in advance for his hospice, so he could die in dignity on clean sheets.

Then quickly his health declined yet again. He was in and out of delusion. One afternoon we were sitting in the courtyard swapping stories of when we were "young". Out of nowhere he started to giggle, the laugh lines around his eyes crinkled. "What?", I asked. He explained that I had two really cute little pink squirrels playing on my shoulders. Pink ones, mind you. That told me he was at peace.

He noticed I was a bit down. I told him I could not afford a gift for my daughter's birthday. He acknowledged my pain, and then was back watching the squirrels at play.

A few days later shoeshine presented me with a gift certificate with a hairdresser for my daughter. One of his steady clients was hairdresser. After he assured me it had cost him nothing, I hugged him with heartfelt gratitude. I told him that his daughter was missing something not having him in her life, and I meant it.

I visited him once in hospital when he had a bout of pneumonia. He'd held back a pack of menthols for me. He could appreciate the concept of having nothing. He made it a mission to tell me exactly how to survive, he told me all that social workers were mandated not to. I met his mother at the hospital, a lovely woman. I think had shoeshine not contracted AIDS he could have put his life back together. Unfortunately when quite young, this young man had been to ill to work in any meaningful jobs because he repeatedly had cancer. He became angry, married, could not deal with the anger and threw it away when he tried numbing himself with drugs and then on top of it contracted AIDS.

Then I became too ill to work there anymore and sat a for the last time with shoeshine. I gave him my number but suspected he would not call. Happily he did not need me, he was ok.

I still think he might have lived longer if hospice was simply made available to him. The drug cocktail might have had a better chance if he was not so overworked and stressed. All the same, he died not much later, in hospice, on clean sheets. Shoeshine was not nobody, he was my good friend.

I live in this city over ten years now. I started living here in a very nice little penthouse on the West End. I thought the picture of poverty in this land was well reported. I had no reason to doubt that the security blanket and the free and universal health care systems were working very nicely. I was wrong.

These days I live on Vancouver's East, just north of Hastings Street. Since becoming ill, I also became, single, older, and unemployable for medical reasons. Through no fault of my own. down here at the bottom of those still having shelter, I am too well aware that I can fall further still, and I find that utterly terrifying.

Hopefully on this blog a picture wikll emergy that is true and objective, about being poor, here in Vancouver, Canada. Poor without an agenda that is drug, gender or politically biased. Just the truth, I'll leave the editializing to the reader.

aletta Feel free to contact me and become a contributor, I'd love the company, just keep your writing withhout agenda, that is all I ask.