This is a show first done in 2005 but all of the topics are still relavent today. Civic disobedience is getting stronger with the Occupy Movement.
Maggie Hughes Producer Alice Smith guest
The Other Side of the News 93.3 fm
Is a weekly alternative News Radio show out of McMaster University. While digging into the archives, I found an interview that first aired in 2005. Alice Smith is a Civics teacher at Allen McNabe High School in Hamilton. In fact an award winning teacher.
She has been actively involved in local to Hamilton Urban sprawl, with a keen eye on our City Council. At the time she spearheaded a group called CAN, to get citizens to come forward with their concerns about the decisions that City Hall was making.
Hamilton is a large City of 450,000 at the time and even more now. Because of our proximity to Toronto, we have become a bedroom community for those that work in Toronto.
Poverty has abounded, with no view in sight of getting under control.
As our Federal Government has made deals to sell Canadian resources (Tar Oil) being the biggest, along with our plants that make Steel and other manufacturers to buyers that are Billionaires 4 or 5 times over. The FTW and NAFT deals and all the deals currently being worked on without Public input, have hollowed out work in Hamilton.
The bits of money the city does get seems to be diverted from Social issues to developer demands. Older buildings â the History of the City have been bought up for the postal code, or the location, and left to rot because what the developer wants is not to restore the History of the City but to build their own idea of hotels, and high priced business offices. There isn't much thought given to the homeless and the working poor.
So where will they live?
Nobody wants to see people sleeping on the streets, it's bad for business, but developers by and large never think to build affordable environmentally sustainable housing. The long fight I waged to get the New City Hall renovation to include a green roof, ended up with a small strip of grass being laid out at the rear of the office windows. That isn't what I would call a âgreen roofâ.
So as Alice pointed out in her discussion in 2005, the discussion is still on the same topics now in 2011. The Occupy movement in every city in the world if possible, is around the very same issues.
We are not that different here in Canada, from the demands being made by gun carrying rebels in Egypt, or any Middle East country.
Prime Minister Harpers government is delisting the long gun laws... so people that want rifles and and high powered gun, can purchase them without having to register. That is a very dangerous precedent to do in a world that is getting more and more violent by day.
You don't need to be educated on the issues, or even care about about your neighbour to own a gun. As Alice Smith says...âJust because you learned it in school, and read it in a text book, doesn't make it true.â I totally agree. Thanks Alice
civic lessons haven't changed
the Other Side of the News - Alice Smith, Civic disobedience
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