I’ve planned a blanket drive for my student association and one for the Calgary NDP Holiday Open House. Basically we have a box out that accepts donations of blankets, packaged socks, jackets, gloves, toques, etc… and then we donate everything we collect to a local homeless shelter.

We are doing it at the Alberta NDP open house tommorrow, and I will let you all know how well it goes. The one at my college, SAIT, will be taking place next week during exams. I will let you all know how that one goes as well.

If you are having a holiday party, or any sort of get together, I urge that you try this out. It’s quite simple, you leave out a box at the party/event and in the invitations you ask guests to bring items if they have them. It’s a little help for the homeless this holiday season. It’s no roof over their heads, and certainly not a solution, but it is something we can do to help while we urge the government to start building affordable housing.

As I had previously mentioned, the Conservative government had announced that they were doing major cuts to many housing initiatives.Well it looks like they changed their mind, and they are reversing the cuts.

OTTAWA – NDP Housing Critic Irene Mathyssen applauded the victory for housing groups across Canada today as Minister for Social Development Diane Finley announced that cuts to federal funding for housing through the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative (SCPI) have been reversed and the program’s $37 million rollover from 2005-06 will now be released.

“Minister Finley’s announcement comes as welcome news to housing groups across Canada, but there’s still work to be done,” said Mathyssen. “We need to ensure the funds now promised are delivered on time and put to effective use. With only seven months left to spend the 2006-07 funds, housing groups need their support delivered as soon as possible.”

Earlier this month, housing groups in Toronto and Ottawa were informed that federal funding for housing in their communities would be cut by $5.8 million and $1 million respectively. As well, Service Canada recently sent letters to housing shelters in Winnipeg confirming that it “had not received the full budget allocation [from the Conservative government]” it had been promised and would therefore be cutting housing spending.

“I applaud the hard work of housing advocates and organizations across Canada as well as the municipal officials who helped apply pressure on the Minister. The NDP will continue to serve as the effective opposition to any cuts the Harper government imposes in housing or in other programs that benefit our society’s most vulnerable,” said Mathyssen.

And some people say the NDP is an ineffective opposition. Without the NDP these cuts would not had been reversed. The NDP is effective!

And if you think the Liberals were apart of reversing the cuts. Think again. Joe Fontana was of course speaking words of progressiveness, but does he really mean it? He was slamming the NDP for bringing down the Liberal government.

And the London-North-Centre MP said the NDP must share the blame for bringing down the Liberal government just as it was developing a national housing strategy.

It wasn’t the NDP. It was the voters! The voters got tired of the Liberal’s arrogance, corruption and inaction. Also the NDP hardly called that election. It would have been held weeks later, that is if Paul Martin would keep one of his promises. And the Liberal Government would have not done anything to help fund housing, their record speaks for itself. As you can read here:

A majority Liberal government abolished the world-recognized housing program in the 1990s: “Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation will phase out its remaining role in social housing except for housing on Indian reserves.” (Source: Ministry of Finance, Budget in Brief, 6 March 1996, p. 11)

As always, the Liberals are full of words but lack any action. They actually do the opposite of what they say will do. While the NDP says these things too, and accomplishes them even when they are outside of Government.

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.