How income and health intersect — plus more local news

You’re reading the July 30, 2024 edition of the Peterborough Currents email newsletter. To receive our email newsletters straight to your inbox, sign up here.

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Hello there, and welcome to the Peterborough Currents newsletter, where we share our latest stories and catch you up on local news.

This week:

• Local Children’s Aid Society blames province over job cuts
• “All roads to health lead through income,” says medical officer of health
• Kawartha Land Trust protects two new properties
• City opens, then closes, a new temporary homeless shelter

Let’s get to it!

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Children’s aid layoffs will put local kids at “serious risk,” union rep says

“How are we going to keep kids safe?”

That question has been on the mind of child protection worker Ruby Taylor since she learned this month that Peterborough’s local child welfare agency is laying off 25 staff.

The Kawartha Haliburton Children’s Aid Society faces a deficit of more than $2.6 million that it says is the result of rising costs and “years of funding reductions” by the provincial government. With no extra money coming from the province, “staffing reductions are inevitable,” according to the agency.

The layoffs will mean fewer staff available to check on the safety of children who might be in danger, Taylor said.

“We are worried that kids are gonna get hurt and ultimately we’re really concerned that a child’s gonna die,” said Taylor, who is also president of Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 334, which represents local children’s aid society staff.

In a statement to Currents, the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services deflected blame for the job cuts, saying that children’s aid societies are independent organizations that are “responsible for their own staffing decisions.”

The ministry also insisted that the Ford government has increased funding for child protection services across the province. But child welfare agencies say the funding has not been enough to keep up with rising costs.

Many provincially-funded children’s aid societies across Ontario are facing deficits. Job cuts are also coming for child welfare workers in London and Ottawa.

The word “crisis” has been thrown around more than a few times to describe the current situation in Ontario’s child welfare system, including by Irwin Elman, Ontario’s former child and youth advocate.

According to Elman, reforms the Ford government has made to the child welfare system have “brought on the hollowing out of every support system serving vulnerable children and families.”

For more on the strains on the child welfare system in Peterborough, check out my full story on our website.

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“All roads to health lead through income”: United Way hosts daylong symposium on healthy incomes

By Will Pearson

About 100 people attended a community symposium exploring the relationship between income and health on July 18, 2024. The event was organized by the local chapter of the United Way as a followup to its release of The Gap, a report on the prevalence of inadequate incomes in Peterborough.

“All roads to health lead through income,” Peterborough’s medical officer of health Thomas Piggott told attendees of the event. Piggott explained that low incomes leave many people in Peterborough without the money needed to make healthy choices for themselves. And sometimes, a lack of income means people can’t afford to access adequate healthcare, Piggott added.

Piggott said the current affordability crisis will have “tremendous long term health consequences” and create “costly health conditions that we will pay for later.” But he also expressed optimism. “There is materially enough to go around to keep us healthy if it’s fairly distributed,” he said. “Poverty is solvable.”

Later, panelists discussed strategies for fighting poverty in Peterborough, including instituting a basic income and advocating for liveable wages.

Lauren Kennedy, a registered dietician with Peterborough Public Health, offered a critique of the food bank model of responding to poverty. She said emergency food banks don’t address the root cause of food insecurity: low incomes.

“We need to shift the focus from only emergency band aids to longterm solutions,” Kennedy said. “And food insecurity is actually an income problem … So we need income solutions to an income problem.”

Kennedy mentioned basic income as one of these solutions. She said the majority of participants in Ontario’s aborted basic income pilot skipped fewer meals and ate more fruits and vegetables while they were in receipt of basic income.

She added that income solutions allow people “to make choices about what they need” rather than having a government or charity make those choices for them. “One of the amazing things about income solutions to some of these problems is that it is a dignified response,” she said.

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Other stories to watch

KAWARTHA LAND TRUST PROTECTS MORE PROPERTIES

The Kawartha Land Trust announced last week that it has protected two new properties totalling more than 100 acres. In Selwyn Township, an 83-acre property made up of hardwood forests and farmland has been protected through a new conservation easement, according to a press release from KLT. Additionally, a new 22-acre property was protected after cottagers came together to donate it to the KLT, the press release stated, noting that the cottagers requested the site’s location not be made public. Neither site is open to the public. These two new properties bring KLT’s number of protected properties to 41, comprising 7,350 acres, according to the press release.

HOUSING STARTS INCREASE

New home construction in the City of Peterborough increased 71 percent in the first half of 2024, compared to the same period last year, according to data released by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation this month. The city counted 70 housing starts between January and June 2024, up from 41 during the same period in 2023. The majority of the new homes under construction are duplexes and row houses.

HATE CRIME INVESTIGATION IN EAST CITY

Peterborough police are investigating an incident where a man’s turban was knocked off his head and stepped on last Thursday as a hate crime, according to a media release. Just after midnight on July 25, officers were called to the area of Hunter Street and Mark Street in East City, where a man alleged he was spat on while walking past a group of four young people. One of the individuals knocked the man’s turban to the ground and stepped on it after he confronted them. The man was also struck in the head with pop cans during the incident, as was another man who tried to intervene, according to police.

CITY OPENS, THEN CLOSES, NEW SHELTER AS ENCAMPMENT EVICTIONS CONTINUE

Residents of a tent encampment near the Wolfe Street modular housing community were evicted from their campsites last Tuesday, the Peterborough Examiner reported. A crew of security guards, police officers, paramedics, social workers and public works crews arrived around 8 a.m. to clear the site, which was occupied by about 15 people, the city’s spokesperson reportedly told the Examiner.

Also last week, the city opened a new temporary homeless shelter in the Morrow building on Lansdowne Street. But after no one used the shelter all week, it was closed on Friday as had been previously planned, the Examiner reported.

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