politics: Rally at Vancouver city hall raises transit, poverty issues
Kiley Domenko, Associate Staff Writer

Community groups demonstrated outside Vancouver City Hall last week in order to voice concerns about transit, social housing, and police brutality. The rally was spearheaded by the Bus Riders Union.

"It's grassroots organising that's really going to make a real change in this city," said Jennifer Efting of the Bus Riders Union. "It's not going to the ballot box once. It's the ongoing work of doing mass organising within the community."

The Bus Riders Union called on civic election candidates to endorse their demands for more buses and lower fares, as well as the demands of the other organisations participating in the demonstration.

Green Party candidate Connie Fogal-Rankin said she shared the union's concerns about transit. "The issue of moving people around this city [and] returning our buses to the service level that we did have at one point, which was never really good enough," is one of the main issues this election, she said.

End Legislative Poverty, a province-wide coalition of 36 groups who are organising and acting in response to the continuous social assistance cuts, raised different concerns. They focused on the failure of the government to provide people on social assistance with resources that would aid in job searching, such as bus passes.

"If the government wants to see people back at work then they're going to have to provide the very basics for people to do that," said Lesley Moore, an ELP member.

David Cunningham from the Anti-Poverty Committee, "an organisation with the objective of mass mobilisation of poor people and poor working people," outlined demands for immediate social housing and plans to end police brutality in a powerful speech.

"The only way these demands can be achieved is through a social movement: a social movement of strike, a social movement of empowerment," he said. "We have to be willing to intensify this movement before and after the election until these demands are met."

The group Grassroots Women was also present. "The situation of marginalised working-class women, the disappearing and missing women who are working on the streets of Vancouver, and the lack of social housing, day-care and access to transportation," are key issues according to Martha Roberts, a spokesperson for the organisation.

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