On June 21, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) took over a downtown Toronto park for and with the homeless. We were able to create a short lived space where destitute victims of social cutbacks and urban redevelopment could stand together and raise a voice of resistance. Nine years previously, we had done the same thing in the same park. At that time, Mike Harris was in power at Queen's Park and Mel Lastman was the Mayor of the City. This time, we confronted an attack on the homeless that is far more brutal and effective than that of a decade ago. We were also dealing with a 'progressive' municipal regime, under Toronto Mayor David Miller (and supposedly a similar government under Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty), that took a much more hard-line position on our park takeover than the right wingers on city Council in the late 1990s had done. We held the park in the face of a direct ban by the City on our staying there overnight and a police force that had been given a green light to attack us by City Hall. And attack us they did!

Today (Monday) we went to City Hall to demand that Mayor David Miller immediately restore shelter beds in the downtown east side. We've lost over 350 shelter beds in the downtown core, and tens of thousands of meals over the past year, and the City has done nothing.

"They closed University Settlement for renovations today, so where am I supposed to sleep now?" asks Chris. "I'm sleeping in parks, under bridges. They got empty rooms here in City Hall tho, maybe we should stay here?"

On our way in to City Hall, security and 52 division cops arrested Gaetan Heroux— in a pathetic attempt to quash the protest, but we continued in to Miller's office demanding to speak to the Mayor [Gaetan was released from 52 division two hours later]. Instead we got the dregs of Miller's PR department, someone with zero decision-making (or even scheduling) authority, nor anything interesting to say, so we went to Council Chambers to confront Miller and Council directly.

"Last February when a man died on the streets, you told us you would
address this crisis," Danielle Koyama told the remaining sheepish city
councillors. "You patted yourselves on the back for replacing 60 of the
350 shelter beds lost. Well now we've lost another 65, so thanks for

As you likely know, the Provincial Liberals are currently touring the
province with a consultation scam to make it seem like they care about
poor people while they do nothing for us. We are going to go to the
Toronto closed-door consultations and tell Minister Matthews and the
government that we don't need more talk, we need action!

June 18th
3:30 pm
meet at PARC - 1499 Queen Street West

We have been unable to get a bus so if you have one (or a car or van)
please let us know at the OCAP office as we are scrambling to make sure we
have enough space for people to get there.

Accessibility - call or e-mail to make arrangements.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
OCAP Not Participating in Sham Consultations: Minister Matthews lies to
legitimize secret 'poverty meetings'

(June 11, 2008) Yesterday, during an interview with CBC's Metro Morning,
the Minister of Children and Youth Services, Deb Mathews, claimed the
Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) was invited to and attended a
secret poverty consultation.

In reality, these meetings have been designed expressly to avoid
interacting with anti-poverty groups like OCAP and with poor people in
general. OCAP has never received an invitation to attend these
private consultations. These meetings make no attempt to address systemic
poverty in this province, rather they seek to allay the public's concerns

The Liberals are certainly no friends of poor, low-income people and
anti-poverty activists in this province. After 4 years in office, they
have kept social assistance at dangerous subpoverty levels, raising the
rates by a paltry 2 or 3% while feeding themselves a hefty 25% raise. The
Harris Tories made the first devastating cut to welfare in 1995, but the
McGuinty Liberals are to blame for failing to return this stolen 22% to
the people.

The Liberals’ recent provincial “poverty tour” is simply more of the same
- an expensive public relations exercise to cover up their continued
violent inaction. Even worse, the heavily policed, closed door
meeting/photo-op at the Evinrude Centre on May 5th was designed to shut
out the voices of people who are poor, low-income or anti-poverty
activists.

PCAP and allies showed up to expose this shameful hypocrisy. Instead of
listening to our reasonable demand to open the meeting to the public,
Liberal mouthpiece Deb Matthews and her sidekick Jeff Leal ordered the
doors locked and allowed rent-a-cops to assault at least three people.

It is unacceptable for Peterborough City Council to participate in this
Liberal charade, and their complicity in this assault on the people of
Peterborough is a serious breach of public responsibility. Mayor Ayotte’s

Are they Trying or Lying?

By the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

The McGuinty Liberals have jumped onto the very overcrowded bandwagon of ‘Poverty Reduction’. They have set up a process of highly selective consultation to ‘define the problem’. Then, they tell us, they will ‘set targets’ to reduce poverty and implement a package of reforms to that effect. Implied in all this is an expectation that we should accept it as a good faith initiative. In fact, we are expected to play along and wait patiently for the eventual benefits that will,
supposedly, flow from it.

The first thing that needs to be said is that an uncritical acceptance
of this undertaking would be an act of extraordinary naiveté. This is
the second term for the Liberals and everything they have done to date consolidates the Harris Common Sense Revolution while smoothing over social divisions with token gestures.

Perhaps we should just take a glimpse at how the Liberals have dealt
with the poor over the last few years. They campaigned the first time
they were elected on a platform that included repealing the Safe
Streets Act that Harris used to set the cops on the homeless. To-day,
that law is still in effect, being used on a scale far greater than
when the Tories held power. In Toronto, over the last three years,

By NICOLE RIVA, Examiner Staff Writer

The public was locked out of a meeting between public officials, including the mayor, a councillor, an MPP, a public task force and a provincial minister, on an issue of public concern — poverty.

The meeting between Ontario’s Minister of Children and Youth Services and the Mayor’s Action Committee on Poverty yesterday at the Evinrude Centre — a public building — was by invitation only, excluding angry anti-poverty activists, the media and the NDP’s poverty critic.
The meeting lasted three hours and was designed to give the minister, Deb Matthews, some insight into Peterborough’s poverty strategies.
The meeting was attended by Mayor Paul Ayotte, Coun. Doug Peacock, Peterborough MPP Jeff Leal and the deputy reeve of Cavan-Monaghan Brian Fallis.

The lack of public access resulted in shouts of anger by members of the public, some of whom say they were pushed from the building by security, including former MPP Jenny Carter.

Protesters greeted Matthews with shouts of “shame” and “we want 40 per cent” upon her arrival.

Mark Lynas, 17 April 2008

World cereal stocks are at an all-time low, food-aid programmes have run out of money and millions face starvation. Yet wealthy countries persist with plans to use grain for petrol.

The irony is extraordinary. At a time when world leaders are expressing grave concern about diminishing food stocks and a coming global food crisis, our government brings into force measures to increase the use of biofuels - a policy that will further increase food prices, and further worsen the plight of the world's poor.

What biofuels do is undeniable: they take food out of the mouths of starving people and divert them to be burned as fuel in the car engines of the world's rich consumers. This is, in the words of the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, nothing less than a "crime against humanity". It is a crime the UK government seems determined to play its part in abetting. The Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation (RTFO), introduced on 15 April, mandates petrol retailers to mix 2.5 per cent biofuels into fuel sold to motorists. This will rise to 5.75 per cent by 2010, in line with European Union policy.

STOP THE WAR ON THE POOR!

April 2, 2008

Yesterday, the Metro Toronto police announced almost 300
arrests in a sweep of one of this city's poorest neighbourhoods. The
arrests took place in the area bounded by Gerrard St. E., Queen St. E.,
Church St. and Parliament St. Developed through the 51 Division
"Community Police Liaison Committee", the sweep involved undercover
officers in a 6 week operation, code named "Project Roundup" and
"Project Revival".

The priorities of cops, city officials, and the gentrifying forces of this
neighbourhood are clear. The downtown East End is being remade and
'revived' through crackdowns on the poor people who call it home. It is
our friends, our neighbours, the people who use the rapidly disappearing
services in the East End, who are being swept into jail through operations
like this one.

According to Detective Sgt. Howie Page of 51 Division, "When the community
came
to 51 Division ... it was a project aimed at improving the quality of life
of people in this area." And we must ask: Which community? Whose quality
of life? We must also ask: When demands are made for affordable housing,
detox or harm reduction programs, shelter beds, and better welfare rates,
the basic right for people to live in dignity and safety, what kind of
response do we get?

Consider: "There were 469 US billionaires, worth a combined $1.6 trillion, while
the 656 billionaires who live outside the United States are worth $2.8
trillion." That is the upshot of the latest Forbes billionaire list. Leave
aside the thought that US troops probably kill more Iraqis every week than are
on that list. I just wondered if it was possible to calculate how many man
hours of labour produced the $4.4 trillion of wealth that is enjoyed by this
very small number of individuals. Obviously, we could pretend that the
canniness of these investors was itself the key magical ingredient that
produced all this wealth, and then the problem would no longer exist. That
claim has the grave disadvantage of being insusceptible to proof or disproof,
of course, like most forms of magical thinking. On the other hand, if the value
embodied in that wealth was principally produced by labour, then surely it would
be possible to produce aggregate figures for all the man hours of labour that
went into producing it.

On Wednesday February 27, 2008, a homeless Aboriginal man was found frozen to death in a downtown stairwell.

The death of this man rests with City officials. Rather than claiming adequate services exist for homeless people, as City officials did just two weeks ago, the municipal government must take responsibility for this preventable death and ensure not one more such terrible loss occurs.

Just six days before the death, City of Toronto officials were warned that such a tragedy would occur, if the crisis facing homeless people was not immediately addressed. City councilors heard numerous urgent deputations from social service agencies and homeless people, warning that the huge cuts to services had forced people into a very dangerous situation.