{"id":11995,"date":"2015-09-23T09:42:40","date_gmt":"2015-09-23T13:42:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=11995"},"modified":"2015-09-23T09:42:40","modified_gmt":"2015-09-23T13:42:40","slug":"newmarket-aurora-candidates-tackle-housing-and-food-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/newmarket-aurora-candidates-tackle-housing-and-food-banks\/","title":{"rendered":"Newmarket-Aurora candidates tackle housing and food banks"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Brock Weir<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the second Vote Smart debate, hosted by Aurora university student Kelsea Walsh, three of Newmarket-Aurora\u2019s five candidates took to the stage for a wide-ranging discussion on issues facing Aurora\u2019s northern riding. <\/p>\n

In a hypothetical situation posed to the candidates by Ms. Walsh, candidates Yvonne Kelly (NDP), Vanessa Long (Green) and Kyle Peterson (Liberal) were asked how they would address the issue of affordable housing and the cost of living nation-wide. (Conservative candidate Lois Brown declined the invitation to participate)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe riding is growing day by day,\u201d said Ms. Walsh in her hypothetical. \u201cThere are more families moving into Aurora and more families in need of homes. Some of these families are Canadian, some are not. Whatever the case, these constituents find themselves doubling up in homes in order to afford the houses they are living in. However, these low-income families often frequent the community food bank.<\/p>\n

\u201cCurrently, our community food bank regulates distribution per household and not per family. Only one of two families can receive food every week.\u201d
\nIn addressing this issue, Ms. Long stressed the Green Party commitment to establish a \u201cguaranteed livable income\u201d that eliminates the danger of \u201cprecarious employment\u201d and eliminating the need for overtaxing food banks. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe situation isn\u2019t staying the same, it is getting worse,\u201d said Ms. Long. \u201cWe\u2019re proposing to really change it because if things haven\u2019t changed in 25 years, maybe it is time to do something really different. We\u2019re talking about making bold changes: a national housing plan, a national building code, and an army of contractors who are doing retrofits. We\u2019re talking about $400 million a year to create 20,000 new units of new affordable housing per year.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Ms. Kelly, Ms. Walsh\u2019s hypothetical situation had already proven itself to be a reality. Food banks across York Region are currently experiencing just such a challenge and they are being \u201cforced to make rules they don\u2019t even want to make\u201d because they only have so many resources and don\u2019t want to see anyone go without. 841,000 people across Canada use food banks every day, she offered, and 4 million people are actually \u201cfood insecure\u201d and food banks were only designed to be short-term solutions to these problems.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need to reinvest for seniors, we need to look at what we\u2019re doing with our youth, and we need to raise our minimum wage because more and more people are living on the edge,\u201d said Ms. Kelly. \u201cPeople you wouldn\u2019t expect are relying on our food banks. One thing we know that is leading to this substantially right here in York Region is the rise of low-paying, precarious work. We need strong, full-time, good-paying jobs to address this situation. You can\u2019t expect your food banks to do this, and to rely on charity to meet basic needs for people across Canada is an absolute atrocity.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Mr. Peterson, this comes back to two fundamental issues: housing and food supply. All Canadians, he said, can agree everyone has \u201cthe right to healthy and adequate food\u201d as well as affordable housing. Without these fundamentals, many things in life can\u2019t be achieved. To address this, Mr. Peterson pointed to the Liberal plan to create jobs through significant investments in infrastructure, as well as their affordable housing policy. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe best social program in this situation is a good, high paying job,\u201d he said. \u201cWe need to make sure there is investment on infrastructure, an advancement in Canadians, and an investment in growth to make that happen. You don\u2019t get that way buy cutting; you don\u2019t get that way by cutting the budget, you don\u2019t get that way by cutting programs. Without investment, there is not going to be job creation. That has to be step one.<\/p>\n

“Step two has got to be to make sure the housing program that is there addresses the needs. Lack of affordable housing is a real problem and it is a real problem in York Region and Newmarket-Aurora.\u201d<\/p>\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the second Vote Smart debate, hosted by Aurora university student Kelsea Walsh, three of Newmarket-Aurora\u2019s five candidates took to the stage for a wide-ranging discussion on issues facing Aurora\u2019s northern riding. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":11976,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-37t","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-09-02 00:45:22","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/2015-09-24-07.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11995"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11995\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}