Saturday Afternoon Links

Assorted content for your weekend reading.

- Paul Taylor argues that it's long past time for our leaders to take poverty and food insecurity seriously:

While nonprofits do incredible work, I can’t think of many that can truly claim to be reducing poverty. Why? Because, while non-profit organizations, such as FoodShare Toronto and others, do everything we can to support people access good food, we do not have the power to set welfare and disability rates or minimum wage. We need politicians willing to commit to working with us to dismantle systemic inequities in our society, including racism, white supremacy, the policing of people of colour, violence against women, and of course income inequality.

Governments have at their disposal the tools to develop meaningful legislation that honours food as a right. Poverty and food insecurity are not inevitable. It’s time for us to put them where they belong — in our history books.

- But in a sad example of how far the Saskatchewan Party is from the mark, Lynn Giesbrecht reports on Carmichael Outreach's call for tents to try to provide some temporary relief against the a lack of affordable housing which Scott Moe has chosen to make worse. And this even as U.S. health insurers are beginning to provide housing directly because it costs less than dealing with only the health expenses arising out of homelessness.

- Naomi Lakritz rightly challenges the anti-worker spin that price increases are caused to any substantial extent by improved minimum wages - and notes that to the contrary, government policy is needed for workers to keep up with prices which tend to press upward in any event.

- Paul Willcocks writes about the need for a public response to Skip the Dishes and other business built on skirting employment laws.

- Finally, Anya Zoledziowski reports on the reality that the recent reports of blatant racism in Cardston, AB only reflect new attention to a longstanding reality.