Raise the Hammer

If people can't see the extremely basic connection between job creation and helping many people who are in poverty to find need additional or better employment, I'm going to find it very hard to dialogue with them. If their only concern is for people who never hope to work or are unable to work, they're missing most of the people in poverty, especially unemployed and underemployed teenagers and young adults who have enough interpersonal skills for service jobs.

This comment on the Mayday article sums it up:

"I am anti-capitalist. I don't have a reasonable alternative, so I just get angered by the changes I see around me. I hate cops and I feel I am championing for the poor. I hate people who have money, even if they do spend their money supporting the arts. I don't want them around me because I feel they are judging me, even though in reality I am the one being judgmental. "

I don't think anything I plan to work in will ever begin a storefront business... but I certainly see the value in those who do. And having lived (in a cheap basement apartment) in a yuppie-central urban Toronto neighbourhood, I also see how many full-time jobs paying $15/hour and requiring minimal to no skills were created and available.

Though that type of full-fledged gentrification is not what Hamilton's facing - though if it was, it wouldn't be a bad thing for a single neighbourhood surrounded mostly by poor ones. It's OK to have a 30-minute bus ride to a neighbourhood in the center of your city if it means you actually have a job now.

What's the alternative? Keep entire neighbourhoods poor, where people must compete for another $14/hour plus benefits Tim Hortons job? Because that's one of the few reliable sources we have of full-time, steady employment with benefits in many portions of the city.