If the provincial government forces welfare and Ontario Disability recipients to scrape out an existence on starvation level benefits then we are left with little choice but to steal food for our children to survive. When it comes to providing the basic necessities for your household honesty in Belleville is a privilege.

Four months ago the Tenant Action Group (TAG) met with Ernie Parsons MPP asking that welfare and Ontario Disability rates be increased due to a large number of pleas for assistance that TAG has received from people on assistance.

Mr. Parson's response (speaking for the McGuinty government) promised an Ontario Disability rate increase by January 2004 with no immediate possibility of a welfare rate increase.

Parson's promised Ontario Disability rate increase never materialized.

As a result of another broken liberal promise and the absolutely clear desperate need in the community for basics like food, TAG is organizing unannounced "food grabs" where people in need will enter local grocery stores en masse and help themselves to what the Provincial government refuses to provide.

Sam Kuhn an organizer, caseworker working with the Tenant Action Group states:

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"This is the ugly truth in Ontario today. Folks on assistance are cornered into a situation where they are either risking starvation or imprisonment.

Our government has long abandoned poor people in Ontario, and it's clearly now left to us to feed ourselves, and our communities through aggressive action like these".

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Kuhn goes on to state that TAG has members willing to engage in civil disobedience in order to help people in need provide for their families.

This action is part of an Ontario wide campaign organized by anti-poverty groups that seeks to have the Liberal government increase welfare and Ontario Disability rates by 40%

For more information contact:

Katharine Davis, TAG Organizer at (613) 968-6151
Nicole Storms, TAG Organizer at (613) 967-7729

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Page last updated April 22, 2004