A new report from the CMHC (Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation) shows that rental vacancies in Calgary are up a full percentage point, now at 1.5 percent from 0.5 percent last year, but the cost to rent in the city of Calgary is downright expensive!

In Calgary the average rent for a 2 bedroom apartment is $1089, making Calgary the most expensive metropolitan city to rent a home in, in Canada – beating longstanding champion Vancouver.

I am reiterating my call for the need of rent controls in Alberta. These rent controls would make it so that landlords can not raise their rent faster then the rate of inflation and limit these increases to once a year. With the average rent increase in Alberta metropolitan areas between October 2006 and 2007 being 17.2% and between October 2005 and 2006 being 13.3%, we are having a rental crisis.

Alberta is out of the norm with rental increases of 17.2% in the previous year. Other provinces are seeing smaller rental increases during this period of time. For example, British Columbia only had a 5.5% rent increase (Meaning we will be well ahead of Vancouver in terms of rent costs next year), Manitoba had a 3.9% increase, Ontario had a 1.6% increase, Quebec had a 2.5% increase, New Brunswick had a 2.3% increase… I think you get the point. Albertans are being ripped off.

Someone making minimum wage in Alberta can not or barely can afford the average 2 bedroom apartment. The minimum wage in Alberta sits at $7 an hour.

I’m going to do some calculations just to show you how difficult it will be for someone making minimum wage in Alberta to afford a place to live. But before I do I want to say that you may hear statistics that only a small portion of Albertans make minimum wage, that is true. But those statistics do not include people making just above minimum wage (For example $8/hour or even $7.10/hour). I was once one of those making $7.10/hour, in reality I was making minimum wage. So I will do these calculations at $8/hour with no tax deductions and no missing days of work.

So here it is: Somebody working 5 days a week, no sick days, at $8/hour with no tax deductions (which wouldn’t happen) will take home $16,640. The cost for their two bedroom apartment is $13,068 per year. This leaves them $3572 left, if they didn’t pay taxes, which of course they did. That leaves this person with only $297.67 before taxes per month left for all other expenses. Not even enough for suitable food and transportation. Now imagine being a single parent making that much, having an extra mouth to feed, extra body to clothe and having to pay $300 or more each year in school fees – There goes a month’s budget. Alberta has a huge poverty problem that needs to be addressed today!

Saskatchewan looks to be headed in the same direction. With a 9.1% increase in rental rates between October 2006 and 2007 compared to an increase of only 3.6% between October 2005 and 2006. Saskatchewan can stop these unfair rental rates before they got out of hand like they are in Alberta, but with a new free market Premier, it seems very unlikely.

So to conclude, Alberta has such high rents that even a full time working person struggles to stay alive. Alberta also is the home of Calgary, the city with the largest homeless population. It’s a shame being the richest province in Canada and having so much poverty. Rent controls are needed in Alberta more than ever, and a full plan needs to be implemented to make poverty history in Alberta.

Update: I’ve made a Facebook group calling for Rent Controls in Alberta. Please join it, and we can have organized action for rent controls. Click here to go to the Facebook group.

I catch the Dalhousie train every morning at Chinook to get to SAIT. Every morning it is completely packed and sometimes I have to wait for 2 or 3 trains till I can get on a train. The city keeps on adding more and more stations at the end of the line, which is great because it is allowing the train to be more accessible to other people but it makes the train less accessible to existing users. Don’t believe me? Look at the two Stampede stations in the morning, maybe 5 people wait on those platforms during the morning. Most of the people I know at those stations say they walk downtown to catch the train after it unloads everyone.

So this dilemma got me thinking. How can we free up space on the C-Trains while increasing access to the trains? Some ideas that floated around my head were putting more trains on the track. The problem with this is that the trains already run 5 minutes apart during the morning, if they added anymore between it could be a safety concern. Another idea was to just add more cars to the train, but that would mean either extending the platform or having the train stop once then move up a bit and stop again. Not too realistic or practical.

Other ideas that raced through my head were overhead trains, express trains and express buses on bus only roads. All of them had their pros and cons. But none of these solutions really addressed the root problem we are facing here in Calgary. That root problem is urban sprawl. Why are we constantly expanding the borders of our city when there is plenty of room within the city to grow? This kind of city planning not only causes traffic problems in the morning on the roads and C-Train but it also affects the environment and our quality of life negatively. The farther we have to travel to work each day, the more green house gases that get emitted. Also the farther we travel to work each day, the more time we are spending commuting instead of doing many other more enjoyable and healthy activities. (Click on graphs to see more.)

So I stopped looking at solutions to fix the C-Train problem, for the time being. The problem still exists but I don’t believe it can truly be looked at until we start to fix the bigger issue, urban sprawl.

You may be asking what is urban sprawl and here is a definition that the Sierra Club (Chinook Chapter) provides:

“SPRAWL is a style of development that has been prevalent since the 1950’s. What we have come to know as suburbia, and where most of us in Calgary live, is based upon a SPRAWL pattern of growth and development. SPRAWL has three common characteristics:Car dependence Low density Segregation of various uses”

As you can probably tell by now, planning a city around sprawl is not a good idea. It causes so many problems that grow as time keeps ticking.

Some alternatives to sprawl can be seen in some Calgary communities, including Sunnyside. Whether you need to go to work, shop for groceries or go to school, walking is an actual option where in other communities it is not. If you would like to learn more about urban sprawl in Calgary, I would suggest you check out this website put out by the Sierra Club (Chinook Chapter): http://www.sierraclubchinook.org/UrbanSprawl/Sprawl.html

So back to the C-Train dilemma. How can addressing the urban sprawl problem in Calgary fix the crowded C-Trains? Simple, if communities are built in a way that work places, schools and shopping centres are near by, there will be less of a need to use the C-Train and vehicles. People will spend less times in their cars or on the trains, and instead they will be able to spend time with the family, enjoy recreational actives, and overall have more free time.

I will be writing more about urban sprawl and possible solutions in the next few weeks on this blog. I hope this will open up much needed discussion among Calgarians about this serious issue.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately! I’ll try and keep this blog more updated from now on. I’ve been super busy.

I was up in Edmonton twice this past month. Once for the Alberta NDP Organizing Institute, which was quite valuable. It gave me valuable tips on getting involved at a local level. Plus I got a bunch of leaflets that I get to hand out! The second time was for the Alberta NDP Convention. I saw my girlfriend, who lives up near Edmonton, and we went to dinner together at the fundraiser which Jack Layton attended. I met up with Jack in the hallway and we started to compare our “Make Poverty History” bracelets… his was quite dirty, but it was union made

I also went on a camping retreat with the student legislative council at SAIT, which I was recently elected onto. It was great; it’s been such a long time since I last went camping. Part of the activities included repelling off a cliff, which I chickened out of, oh well there is always next time. Anyways, we’ve started off a sustainable committee on campus, and we’ve already had our first meeting. I’m going to advocate at the next meeting that we try and start friendly competitions with other universities/colleges and see who can be the “greenest”! I’ll keep you guys updated on that.

Last Wednesday, I was involved in a conference call with Jack Layton about our position in Afghanistan. This conference call involved students from across Canada and we had a chance to get our questions answered. I got my question answered on the phone, and I also got it answered in an email which I will be sharing in my next post. The conference call got us prepared for the peace rallies taking place all across Canada last Saturday. There was over 150 people that showed up in Calgary, and we got a lot of support from motorists. I managed to collect 66 signatures on a petition calling on the Canadian Government to begin the withdrawal of Canadian Forces from southern Afghanistan, so that a comprehensive peace process can begin.

I will be out in Kensington this weekend collecting some signatures for this petition as well and I hope to double the amount of signatures. I’m planning on going out into the public each Saturday with petitions and/or pamphlets, just to let Calgarians know that the NDP is active in Calgary! I think it’s important to have presence in the community all year round.

I shall post again soon.

Darren Entwistle’s (Telus CEO) made 14.096 Million last year.

A minimum wage earner in Alberta made $14,560 working full time last year.

This means that the Telus CEO made 968 times the amount of money as a minimum wage earner in Alberta did. Does he really deserve it? To break it down even further, it only took the CEO of Telus nine hours to make the same amount that the minimum wage earner makes in a year. Does he really do the same amount of work in those nine hours as the minimum wage earner does in an entire year? Not to mention he makes that money even while he is sleeping, unlike the minimum wage earner.

This is corporate corruption at its worse. If the telecommunications industry were under public ownership again, the person in charge would not be making nearly as much as this. This means that more people could get hired, which means more jobs. Also, we don’t even need to shut Telus down. The government could compete with Telus. With little or no profit margin, the government could easily offer services for a lot cheaper then Telus could ever dream of. Also think of what we could use the little profit that we could make for. I can think of tons of things, starting with fixing the roofs of many schools in Calgary.

With Telus’s poor service and lack of regard for its unions, I say it’s about time we bring public ownership back to the telecommunications industry.

I’ve been hearing a lot of talk from fellow Calgarians about having more cops in the downtown core to stop the growing drug problem. Having more police downtown will not be enough to solve this problem, actually it won’t even address it if other things are not done. It will just move the problem to another neighborhood, as seen previously in Vancouver. The homeless will still have no home and dug addicts will still be addicted and using.

What we need to do is go after the root of the problem and stop only fighting the side effects. We need to go after poverty! This can be accomplished by such things as making education more affordable, housing more affordable and implementing a living wage. Not only will these implementations prevent these problems in the future, it will also help the people presently on the street get off the street and eventually we will be able to eliminate the problem of homelessness.

There is a notion going around that I’m hearing quite a lot lately. That is, “Most people on street, choose to be on the street.” Yet when someone says this to me and I ask them to give me an example of one of these people, they can not. They later confide in me that they heard this from someone else but have absolutely nothing to back it up. Let’s stop spreading these lies and get out the facts. Stating the previously mentioned notion is just a way of not addressing the problem and taking away the guilt associated with it. But there is a better way to take the guilt away. You can take away the guilt by addressing the problem!

It may be hard work, but we will be living in a much world if we do the right thing.