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The Anti-Poverty Committee is a volunteer group comprised of
working poor and unemployed people. Throughout our 5 years of struggle
against the Liberal government we have held the Downtown Eastside as our
base of strength and support. And it is from here, now, that we struggle
to maintain what little housing is available and fight for more.
With the wrecking balls of Olympic gentrification in full swing our
current campaigns are to work with community groups, union locals and poor
people in establishing a grassroots resistance to the mass closures of
hotels and repressive welfare legislation. In forming the Save Low Income
Housing Coalition we have brought together unions, women’s center, sex
trade workers and drug user groups into a united campaign to raise the
rates of welfare.
The APC strategy within the coalition is to mass mobilize welfare
recipients in the welfare offices to demand ‘crisis grants’. By creating a
bureaucratic disruption on a mass scale through filing and appealing
crisis grant applications we hope to create the opportunity to force the
ministry of human resources to raise the rates of shelter allowance as
opposed to relinquishing the money in small, hard-to-obtain pay outs.
We have been successful with such strategies in the past. By employing
disruptive methods while maintaining a large base of union and community
support, we were able to stop the “two years out of five” welfare cuts
from happening. This took dozens of organizers, hundreds of welfare
recipients and thousands of supporters.
Our victories are won because they are fought by poor people. In our
struggles for day-to-day survival we have no leaders to steal what little
we gain. Our lives are the front lines of the class war and it is from
here that we fight for strength and dignity.
-APC
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