One of the things that recently happened, I guess, in the old north end in the last two years or so is that we lost our middle school through the school closure process. The numbers weren't high enough. It's been ONE Change's position that a neighbourhood needs a school. We're working at how to address educational issues and how that gap is there, but our programming isn't focused exclusively on youth. We have educational programming for adults, for example.
I can't remember if this is anecdotal or a stat that I read somewhere, but one of the folks I was talking to mentioned how few people in the neighbourhood know about UNBSJ being just over the hill. So one of the things in my mind is to let people know, or teach people, that education is valuable, whether through NBCC or UNBSJ or whatever.
It's also, in my mind, important to figure out what is the specific issue causing their poverty. Is lack of education what is making them unable to get employment, or is it something as simple as the fact that the employment available is for overnight jobs but our buses don't run overnight? We always have a lot of ideas about how to fix things years from now. It would be great if we could come up with ideas for people now, today, who are living in poverty.
I used to work at a call centre, like a lot of folks my age, and that call centre closed. A lot of my colleagues went to a new call centre that was opening, but one of them took a lower-wage job at a different call centre because he could walk to it. When he did the math, with the cab rate from that call centre to his home, he would actually have been losing. His net income would have officially been higher, but the cost of getting there would have been worse because the buses just didn't work.
With access to transit, I think the way the federal dollars worked was per rider, so then more could go on, but that doesn't address the need that a lot of.... When I lived in Vancouver, I would take public transit. It didn't even cross my mind to own a car, but that's not feasible for my line of work now.
One of the employees at the shelter, when his overnight shift would end, had to walk home or take a cab because the first bus wasn't going to come on a Sunday morning until 10 a.m. These types of things are putting up barriers that don't need to be there, I guess, is what I'm saying.