{"id":25004,"date":"2019-10-18T19:12:53","date_gmt":"2019-10-18T23:12:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=25004"},"modified":"2019-10-18T19:13:06","modified_gmt":"2019-10-18T23:13:06","slug":"housing-environment-top-priorities-for-ndps-yvonne-kelly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/housing-environment-top-priorities-for-ndps-yvonne-kelly\/","title":{"rendered":"Housing, environment top priorities for NDP\u2019s Yvonne Kelly"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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

As Yvonne Kelly continues her community work within York\nRegion, she is seeing situations where it is getting harder and harder for\nmiddle-income Canadians to make ends meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They are struggling, she says, and worried about the\nessentials, including housing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why Ms. Kelly, who represented the\nNewmarket-Aurora Federal NDP in the 2015 General Election, has decided to carry\nthe orange banner once again in the community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of the folks I am working with, even the ones who\nare doing quite well, are not going to be able to buy homes in the Region or\nsomewhere else,\u201d says Ms. Kelly. \u201cThat is particularly concerning. In the work\nthat I do, I am constantly hearing from people about how they want things to be\ndifferent and better, and that has fuelled my conviction that it is important\nto me to put myself out there and do what I know I can do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since making the decision to throw her hat back into the\npolitical arena, Ms. Kelly has been knocking on doors. As she moves through the\ncommunity listening to residents, the primary issues she hears time and time\nagain are housing and the environment. Not a lot has changed on either file\nover the last four years, she says, and it is time to do something about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHousing has not improved in terms of housing stock\navailability or rental and the cost of rental is what people might expect to\npay on a mortgage for a home,\u201d says Ms. Kelly, a resident of Tottenham. \u201cThose\nthings don\u2019t get better with time unless there are investments made. I work\nwith families and students in our school system. We see how people struggle and\nare not able to stay where they are, so there is a lot of mobility amongst\nfamilies who aren\u2019t able to maintain rent, and that is a lot of hardship for\nthose students. I feel that if we don\u2019t take this issue absolutely seriously\nand start investing the way we were prior to the nineties in building\naffordable housing stock, then we aren\u2019t ever going to be able to address the\nproblem.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There has been increasing talk about addressing\nhomelessness, something Ms. Kelly finds encouraging and productive, but this\nhas not led to concrete investments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Compounding the issue, she says, is the \u201crampant\nincrease\u201d of precarious employment over the last few years; that is, people who\nare working more jobs, more hours, but are \u201cnot making any headway in terms of\nthe actual income they are bringing in.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recent studies, she says, have indicated that the GTA has\nthe fastest increase of rates of precarious employment, which has a direct\nimpact on quality of life. As such, income inequality is on the rise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t want to just create more services to meet the\nneeds of people who happen to fall into those categories, we want to attack the\nroot causes of those problems,\u201d she says. \u201cFor housing, it is something that\npeople can afford, can afford to have a job that can have a living wage, or at least\none job with a decent wage, then there would be a fighting chance to make ends\nmeet and I think right now a lot of people feel like they are being hit on all\nfronts, and that\u2019s just not okay. That is not a vision for the future I want.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The vision for the future she and the NDP want includes\nputting more money into affordable housing with the expressed goal of creating\nmore stock. It\u2019s essential, she says, because if you don\u2019t do it now the\ncountry is not going to be able to meet the people\u2019s needs. It is a vision that\nincludes expanded pharmacare and overall improvements to the health care\nsystem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe stand behind our legacy of universal health care, but\nwe do know, for example, for seniors and lower income families, the cost of\nmedication is precluding them from being able to take what they need to stay\nhealthy,\u201d she says. \u201cThere are more and more seniors falling below the poverty\nline and medication is a huge issue for them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Their vision for child care, she says, is \u201cbold and\nprogressive\u201d and will help address \u201cthe main income gap between genders. It\u2019s\nnot about giving families a tax credit; it\u2019s about \u201ccreating spaces\u201d through an\ninvestment in infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe [conversation over the last four years] has changed\nin a number of ways,\u201d she says. \u201cI think there has been a lot of frustration\nwith the current government when it comes to things like promises that were\nmade around the environment, around our electoral system that is more fair and\ninclusive and progressive, because that was a keystone promise of the Liberals\nin the 2015 election, that we would never have another election that was first\npast the post, and that obviously isn\u2019t happening. There is some\ndisillusionment with those kinds of big ideas that people believed in and I\nthink were good ideas that didn\u2019t come to fruition. As a result, if you don\u2019t\ntackle some of these bigger structural and institutional issues, people on the\nground end up feeling the pinch every step of the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe continue to have a government and a society that\nsupports large corporations over small people, or ordinary average Canadians.\nThat can only continue for so long before people in the middle and lower- and\nworking-class groups continue to lose ground. We have seen, for example, a huge\nspike in the numbers of seniors and families that are going to food banks,\nwhich is really alarming because food banks, as much as they are a solution,\nthey were brought in as a temporary mainstay during the 80s in the recession.\nThey are still here but they are actually being accessed more and more. When\nfamilies are going to food banks, not just individuals who happen to be unable\nto find a job, but whole families, when shelters are having to turn away\nfamilies because they are underhoused, been evicted, or haven\u2019t been able to maintain\nthe cost of housing, that is really concerning. We see people really losing\nground on those things.\u201d<\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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