“Why isn’t anyone in this election talking about children and about how many of them are going to school hungry?” Toronto single mother of four young children Amy O’Neil asks. “I can’t believe this election. What about poverty? What about hunger? What about affordable housing?”
After the all-candidates meeting at the Davenport-Perth Neighbourhood Centre, the 40-year-old unemployed food services manager reveals that since her divorce five years ago her family has been living on money from family and friends, federal and provincial child benefits and food bank hampers.
Voters are hearing nothing about how to help the 75,000 households waiting for affordable housing or the 17,000 children waiting for child care subsidies. There’s barely any mention of the staggering 1.1 million hampers of groceries Toronto food banks handed out in the past year, an unprecedented 14 per cent increase over 2008.
Politicians won't talk about such issues because they don't have the solutions. The truth is that no elected politician can control the market—which operates for the private gain of a tiny number of owners. As long as the market exists we cannot have control of our own lives, run things in our own, and our own communities' interests, because that would threaten the profits of the tiny few. Mayors can't change that. Only we can, by acting together, without leaders, to end the whole profit-driven, market system.
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