Liberal plan discussed at Meadowvale Public School

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Four Scarborough MPPs sat in the wilting heat of a school gym Monday to hear denunciations and mixed reports from Scarborough's daily war on poverty.

They heard from David Hope, chairperson of a small charity called Malvern Rouge Valley Youth Services, who because he got funding, had sat in a local mall and signed up 1,000 people for free computer courses in the previous six days.

And Glen McKerron, a Toronto Community Housing tenant, told them he had put up $5,000 of his own money to teach youth and seniors audio-visual skills.

"Other people can do what I'm doing," said McKerron, a former teacher who expects soon to be running a small film school out of a room provided by TCH. "If you've got a skill you can share, do it."

That's exactly the attitude Ontario Children and Youth Services Minister Deb Matthews, also present as the woman in charge of writing a province-wide poverty reduction strategy this year, urged people to have.

"Yes, it's what can the government do but it's also what can the community do, what can you do," she said, suggesting people gather friends around the table "and be part of the conversation" that combats poverty.

But the MPPs also heard Alma Gabriel, founder of Celebrate Us! in Malvern, announce her popular end-of-summer festival will be shelved if she can't get more funding by the end of July.

Gabriel said she started Celebrate Us! because of gun violence in Malvern but found poverty in the neighbourhood - the fact a lot of teens in trouble there "had no meal" - an even more serious issue.

A lot of money is distributed by government but it isn't reaching people like her, she said.

"We must ensure the funding is getting to the trenches."

And Thansha Sadacharam said last year the breakfast club at her school, R. H. King Academy, received no funds. "It's hard to focus on class at 9 a.m. when you're hungry," she added.

At times, people at Meadowvale Public School accused the all-Liberal panel - Scarborough-Rouge River MPP Bas Balkissoon, Scarborough Centre MPP Brad Duguid, Scarborough-Agincourt MPP Gerry Phillips and Pickering-Scarborough East MPP Wayne Arthurs - of stating the obvious, acting dismissive or not being able to understand what living in poverty is like.

"Give us labour rights. We don't want more reports," said Lien Huynh, an organizer for the United Food and Commerical Workers.

The province under the Progressive Conservatives in 1995 took away the right to organize a workplace without a mandatory week-long check of union cards the Scarborough resident calls a "week of intimidation."

It's been particularly effective against workers making only $9 or $10 an hour, many of them women of colour, Huynh added later. "There's so much fear going on."

Edwina Bascombe-Buhnai said people have to beat poverty by attracting "good jobs," the ones that pay at least $15 an hour, "because you can't survive on $10."

But politicians in Scarborough have never been able to deal with these problems, she declared. "They don't even want to meet with you."

Matthews, who hosted another meeting yesterday at Scarborough's Cedarbrook Community Centre that was closed to the public, said the government's effort was "historic" and will develop a comprehensive strategy with measures and timelines.

Duguid added Ontario's Liberals have taken the provincial minimum wage from the lowest in Canada to the highest. Raising it to $15 an hour sounds easy, but would put Ontario companies at a disadvantage, he said.

"It would put the very people we're trying to help out of work."

Duguid as well as Balkissoon, a member of a cabinet committee on poverty headed by Matthews, said the strategy's most important task will be to define poverty and ways to measure government progress in fighting it.

"Everybody's situation is different. They're all looking for a different answer for a different problem," said Balkissoon.

He added he wanted to hear more about what people are struggling with, including the "red tape" that, for example, discourages children in community housing from getting a job because that income would be deducted from the family's social assistance.

The cabinet committee has lots of leeway to change those things, he said. "Until you identify those cases you don't know where the system is failing."