shelter – mackaycartoons

Tuesday December 28, 2021

December 28, 2021 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Tuesday December 28, 2021

Hamilton’s Efforts to Combat Homelessness this Winter

While the debate rages on about the dismantling of homeless encampments in Hamilton. City staff are gearing up for providing shelter for the homeless this winter with approximately $3 Million in projects. These include:

August 26, 2021

Transitioning the former Cathedral Boys School into a temporary shelter for women (approximately 80-100 beds) at an approximate cost of $1 Million.

Adding approximately 28 temporary emergency shelter beds as men’s overflow at an approximate cost of $350,000.

Something new would be the establishment of a $500,000 fund to support churches, social clubs who have expressed interest in supporting vulnerable residents through the winter months until March 31, 2022 but who may not have the operational funds to be viable.

Creation of a special fund of $500,000 to address homelessness experienced by Indigenous community members who are overrepresented in the homeless population of Hamilton.

A grant of of $500,000 to the YWCA Hamilton for capital renovations required to continue to operate Carol Anne’s Place as a temporary drop in program for 22 single homeless women.

A grant of of $150,000 to the Good Shepherd Centre Hamilton for capital renovations required to continue to operate Cathedral as a temporary shelter for women.

December 17, 2020

Staff are also recommending that a consultant be hired to evaluate the feasibility of implementing a New Westminster style bylaw which was used in that BC city to combat renovictions. The city has already taken preliminary steps recently to discourage renovictions by denying some develpers tax increment grants, which were designed to encourage the construction of residential units in the city core.

Director of Housing Services, Edward John also presented Emergency and Community Services Committee with a detailed snapshot of the homelessness situation in Hamilton. The report says over 15 percent of Hamilton residents are experiencing housing need which is defined as requiring more than 30 percent of household income for shelter. The report also says there are 1375 persons in Hamilton identified as homeless. (Bay Observer)

Wednesday April 6, 2016

April 5, 2016 by Graeme MacKay

Editorial Cartoon by Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Wednesday April 6, 2016

Panama Papers: Document leak exposes global corruption, secrets of the rich

The financial secrets of heads of state, athletes, billionaires and drug lords have been exposed in the latest — and biggest ever — leak of records from an offshore tax haven.

The leak includes 11.5 million confidential documents shedding light on the assets and murky fiscal dealings of everyone from the prime ministers of Iceland and Pakistan to soccer player Leo Messi, movie star Jackie Chan and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The records, dating as far back as 1977, come from a little-known but highly influential Panama-based law firm called Mossack Fonseca, which has 500 staff working in 40-plus countries. The firm is one of the world’s top creators of shell companies — corporate structures that can be used to hide ownership of assets.

German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files from a source and shared them with global media partners, including CBC News and the Toronto Star, through the Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

CBC News will be exploring more of what’s in the documents, including Canadian connections, in a series of stories this week.

“These findings show how deeply ingrained harmful practices and criminality are in the offshore world,” said Gabriel Zucman, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and author of The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens.

Zucman, who was briefed on the media partners’ investigation, said the release of the leaked documents should prompt governments to seek “concrete sanctions” against jurisdictions and institutions that peddle offshore secrecy.

While offshore accounts are not in themselves illegal, the leaked records show they are often used to shield illicit dealings.

In a written response to questions from the media consortium, Mossack Fonseca said it “does not foster or promote illegal acts.”

“Your allegations that we provide shareholders with structures supposedly designed to hide the identity of the real owners are completely unsupported and false,” the firm said. (Source: CBC News)

Wednesday March 28, 2012

March 28, 2012 by Graeme MacKay

By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator, Wednesday March 28, 2012

Ontario’s rough road

The budget introduced by Finance Minister Dwight Duncan on Tuesday is entirely absent new goodies of the sort that Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals spent their first eight years in office distributing; the most that can be said is that it preserves a few old favourites, such as full-day kindergarten and smaller class sizes. And it takes aim at much of what Mr. McGuinty has always held sacred, including the labour peace that has been pivotal to his political success.

Save for cancelling corporate tax cuts, it could mostly pass for a Progressive Conservative budget – which makes Tim Hudak’s flat rejection of it more than a little peculiar. Conversely, it may be too much for the provincial New Democrats to swallow, which means that the Liberals have placed their minority government in some jeopardy just months into its existence.

But if the budget passes, which remains the likeliest outcome, there’s a big caveat before declaring the province well on its way out of its deficit.

While there is no shortage of immediate cutbacks and revenue increases in Mr. Duncan’s plan – abandonments of planned infrastructure projects, cancellation of corporate tax cuts, freezes of base funding for hospitals – many of the big-ticket items will require sustained effort and focus, rather than just strokes of the pen.

Wage restraint, one of the budget’s centrepieces, fits that bill. The Liberals seem prepared to take a hard line in their current negotiations with the Ontario Medical Association. But their resolve, which includes a purported willingness to legislate salary freezes and other measures if they can’t be achieved through collective bargaining, will be tested by this year’s encounter with their erstwhile allies in the teachers’ unions – and again and again as contracts expire over the next couple of years. (Source: Globe & Mail)