#DearLaureen

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

#DearLaureen Harper,

​Citizens for Social Justice would like to thank you for taking the time to visit the City of Oshawa and recognizing the plight of homeless youth in our community. While you’re in town to attend a fundraiser for The Refuge, a homeless youth drop-in centre, we’d like to offer some practical policy proposals to combat poverty and homelessness.
​We’ve been told you are bringing a couple of neck-ties belonging to your husband and Minister Baird for auction at the fundraiser. With skyrocketing youth unemployment, good jobs leaving our community, and a lack of youth shelters and affordable housing, we think it’s going to take more than a couple of neck-ties to address the problems of youth poverty and homelessness.
​In return for the neck-ties, we’d like to offer you some practical poverty reduction strategies to bring back to Ottawa:
1) Create a comprehensive national housing strategy to bring good, affordable housing to our community;
2) Ensure all homeless youth have access to social services regardless of race, religion, sexual orientation, or gender;
3) Increase funding for addiction and mental health services;
4) Implement a job creation strategy to bring back good paying jobs to our community; and
5) Re-open the Youth Employment Centres that were recently cut in the federal budget.
Again, we’d like to thank you for recognizing the need to address youth homelessness in our community. Now, it’s time for this government to make poverty reduction and youth homelessness a priority through social policy at the federal level. We need less neck-ties and more action.

Sincerely,
Citizens for Social Justice:

For Labour and community groups:

We want to initiate a twitter/Facebook campaign to coincide with this press release. We would like to use the hashtag #DearLaureen and use it to offer poverty reduction solutions one tweet at a time. Please spread this widely to your network of social justice, labour, and poverty reduction activists and ask them to post a tweet with the hashtag “#DearLaureen”!
Here are some examples:
#DearLaureen, while neck-ties are nice a National Housing Strategy would be better.
#DearLaureen, neck-ties may raise some money but re-opening Youth Employment Centres reduces youth poverty.
#DearLaureen, neck-ties don’t put youth to work or create jobs.
#DearLaureen, tell Steve to keep the neck-tie – our community needs mental health and addiction counselling.
#DearLaureen, please ask your husband to create a REAL job creation strategy!

Join us on June 25th

12:30 PM

Allan Gardens, corner of Carleton & Sherbourne

Why?

Because women, children, and trans people bear the brunt of violence, war, racism, colonialism, ageism, economic inequality, and climate degradation. The G8/G20 as an organization profits from and proliferates all of these problems.

Because Indigenous women are disproportionately victimized, incarcerated, and denied basic rights in Canada and across the world.

Because women and their families are displaced by war, by privatization and climate disasters caused by government and corporate actions, and are forced to migrate with their families to survive and thrive, only to be faced with criminalization and racism in Canada.

Because the Harper government has cut funding the Status of Women in Canada, killed plans for national childcare, and ended the court challenges program that sought to help women and minorities fight for their rights.

The Conservative government’s G8/ G20 maternal and child health initiative does not support contraception or abortion, and will result in far more preventable deaths than the overall number of lives saved.

Bring yourselves, your ideas, your passion, your rage!

Bring some food, bring paper, pens, markers, paints, tape, costumes, bullhorns, boomboxes … whatever you want to use to help make women’s voices heard in the G20!

Afterwards we will join with All Out for Gender Justice! to form a Gender Justice contingent as we lead off the Justice for Our Communities! March against the G20.

Keep our communitys safe

Keep Our Communities Safe!

A backbench Conservative Member of Parliament’s plan to dismantle the registration of rifles and shotguns in Canada became closer to reality on November 4.

That’s when 20 opposition MPs joined with the entire government caucus to send Bill C-391 (which would change the Criminal Code and repeal the long gun registry) to a committee for study before being brought back for a final vote. It was a big setback for public safety.

Heading into the final steps of the law-making process with a 27-vote lead gives C-391 a good chance of succeeding. If that happens, registration of rifles and shotguns would stop and the government would delete the nearly 8 million firearms records used today by police and other law enforcement officials.

Police use those records to keep themselves and our communities safe. Statistics show that gun registry information is accessed as often as 10,000 times a day. Statistics also show a 50% drop in gun-related spousal homicides since records started being kept.

We can still turn things around.

People who think it’s a good idea to keep track of weapons like rifles and shotguns for the sake of public safety need to have their voices heard. That’s the only way to get at least 14 MPs to change their minds about C-391 and stop it from happening.

If your MP is a Conservative, your voice is especially important. That’s because the Conservative Party has a history of strong support for public safety and the police.

It doesn’t make sense that so many Conservative MPs who represent communities where the police say they need the gun registry, and where public support for keeping track of guns remains strong, voted in favour of C-391. They clearly need to hear more about this from the people they represent.

Which is why we’re asking for your help today. We need to convince a few MPs to change their minds about C-391, and vote NO when it returns to the House of Commons for final approval.

You can help us make this happen.

Forward this message to 20 of your friends.
Ask them to do the same.
Join our Facebook page.
Tell all your Facebook friends about it.
Send a post card to the Prime Minister
about how gun control is an important part of any plan to reduce violence against women.

Tell them the law is working. Tell them that gun-related spousal homicide is down 50% since the gun registry was started. Tell them to keep our communities safe. Tell them to vote against C-391 (if you really want to get their attention, add that you won’t vote for anyone who votes in favour of C-391 come the next election).
We know there are more Canadians who support having rifles and shotguns registered for public safety than who want to see this important policing tool dismantled and all of its records destroyed.

That’s why it’s still possible to turn things around and win this one for public safety.

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