As long as we don't have to keep on coming back here and talking about poverty.... Let's just end it. Do you know what I mean? If we get it into the Charter of Rights that you protect us so that this never happens again.... It's billions of dollars that we're going cost us just on health care alone.
You take work from the working class for two years and you have a mental health issue. That's one of the saddest things. Instead of defining us as unemployed, we became defined as chronically depressed, bipolar, etc. Then there are all the medications, which is another thing that came up when I did this study last year with the drop-in centres: cannabis.
Many of the women who were originally told to take these psychotropic drugs were vomiting and having extreme difficulty with them. Their choice was to turn to cannabis. Now, of course, we have little grannies walking along seedy alleys trying to get their medication. A number of women who have taken that over the last 13 years have multiple kinds of health care problems. You can't take that stuff without hurting another part of your body.
To either prohibit or at least include.... Post-traumatic stress, I think, is how you can define what we're going through. There are eating disorders, sleeping disorders, and the anxieties. When you get on welfare, you are caught in a system of going to the welfare office and trying to get your cheque and then going to food banks. It becomes a little culture in itself. A cigarette is actually an economy. I lived in those shelters. There's everything in there.
When I was in Kitchener, the poor kids were the hookers. As for Children's Aid, I mean, who's the parent here? These were the hookers in that place. In sitting down and talking with them, I can tell you, if you want access to pedophiles, let's use these young girls. We have a wealth of information that can help Canadian society. I had no idea that this happens.
I had no idea that the lower you go down in your work, the worse your paycheque is and the more you get abused. When I worked for that American company in doing market research, you had to talk a lot and you needed to drink. If you go to the washroom, it's deducted from your cheque. There are no rules for us because nobody really looks at it.
You give us a guaranteed income and then we have something to start off with. We can begin to heal. We can begin to dream again. That's what we all have to do. This is a mess, but we've been in messes before, and we can get out of it.
Home ownership is absolutely necessary. Expand Canada Mortgage and Housing. For your public housing, you can clean it up and give people the opportunity to buy into that. They now have money, so it's not subsidized anymore, and we don't have to be constantly wrapped up in things.
Did you know one of the reasons that houses in public housing are so ugly? I lived in them. If you get in there and plant a garden with flowers everywhere, or if you do anything inside the house, when you leave they tear it all apart. For 30 years we could have had beautiful places, but because of the policies there, they rip it all out and you go into the same ugly thing that somebody else was in. If you actually have a good time and you're able to fix the basement, which is empty, they rip all that out. What sense does that make? It takes away the whole ambience of a community.
It's great to walk through those little communities. You can smell the Jamaican food. You can smell somebody else's food. There is a real chance to really make that work.
