Libraries, Housing, Multinational Edmonton, Water, and Hope

Saturday, January 12, 2013  Capilano Library, Edmonton

This sunny, chilly Saturday, -15 degrees, one bus took me across Edmonton.  This library, in its namesake mall, is less busy than Jasper Place Library, the closest to my apartment.  I will leave Edmonton in March, before the Jasper Place Library leaves its temporary location in an office building,

http://www.epl.ca/about-epl/branches-and-hours/jasper-place-branch

 for its new building,

http://hcma.ca/jasper-place-library/

In this library, people ranging in age from toddler to senior bustle around, many signing out books.  Others write or read at carrels by the sunny windows that face west.  There are more than a dozen internet terminals, more than the three at Jasper Place.  Many terminals are unoccupied here now, unlike the crowded Jasper Place ones.  Indeed, the Stanley A. Milner Library downtown has about 40 terminals, always busy when I am there.  Sunday is the busiest day, a librarian told me last Sunday, when street people come from the cold to get online.  Download a place to live? 

Edmonton's expensive and crowded housing is a sign of the national embarrassment which Canadian housing is.  The housing of many indigenous people is not only crowded, but unhealthy:

https://www.google.ca/search?q=attawapiskat+crisis&hl=en&tbo=u&tbm=isch&source=univ&sa=X&ei=6qTxUKvIMOiWjAKr-oCoCg&ved=0CF4QsAQ&biw=1680&bih=924

Those images are from Attawapiskat, a community in Northern Ontario.  One could find similar or worse images in many indigenous places.

Communications technology, such as the internet and social networks, connect Edmonton and Attawapiskat, as yesterday's Edmonton rally implied:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/story/2013/01/11/edmonton-idle-no-more-rally-churchill.html

 In March, I will happily return to Williams Lake, British Columbia, where my family has lived in a nice, affordable public housing apartment building for most of the time since 1996:

https://maps.google.ca/maps?q=529+Carson+Dr,Williams+Lake,BC

Baker Manor, named after the late Earla Baker, is a British Columbia Housing Corporation building for disabled and low-income people.  The Society for People in Motion, the Williams Lake group which continues Baker's disability activism, operates the 23-suite building.

Back in Edmonton, a 2012 essay by Ricardo Acuna, whose family fled Chile after a 1973 coup overthrew the progressive government of Salvador Allende, argued that the Alberta economic boom's benefits flow very unequally.  Indeed, high living costs make upward social mobility harder than in other parts of Canada:

 http://vueweekly.com/front/story/divided_wealth/

My one-bedroom Edmonton apartment rents for $775.  Our two-bedroom Williams Lake apartment rents for $174-$576, depending on our income in a given year.  I'm glad we kept it.  Affordable housing enhances social mobility, and mental and physical health.

Acuna's arguement has stuck in my mind for months.  A Vancouver study has stuck in my mind for years.  The study found that housing is the most important action to reduce poverty and the destructive effects that flow largely from it:  addiction, family violence, low educational achievement, and poor mental and physical health.  Poverty hurts the rich as well as the poor, as Denmark proves.  Danish income distribution is among the most equal in the world, and Danish mental and physical health are among the best in the world.

 As I type this, I listen to Radio Ecoshock:

http://www.ecoshock.org/

"It's all connected," as the Carleton University professor of my graduate English course in Canadian Ethnic Literature said in 1989.  A healthy environment helps make a healthy people, of whatever ethnicity. 

Multicultural Edmonton rides in the courtesy van I drive for a local auto dealer.  This week's passengers included a man originally from Spain, one from Azerbajan, and others from Wales, India, China, and Philippines.  Earlier weeks included passengers originally from Kuwait, Syria, the United States, Burundi, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, Ireland, Pakistan, Guyana, and Venezuela.

Perhaps Edmontonians who resent the world landing in their city will remember their own ancestors coming here only a few generations ago.  Indeed, perhaps all will respect the indigenous people who trod this land for centuries, and still exist.

Land, like housing, is a right, not a commodity.

Water too is important.  I remember this when I swim for free in City of Edmonton pools, to which I have a Leisure Access Pass by virtue of my low income.  One pool worker said that the city envisions free recreation for all, a social investment that would repay several fold in reduced health care costs.   

Here is a link to Hardisty Pool, a 15-minute walk from Capilano Library:

http://www.edmonton.ca/attractions_recreation/sport_recreation/hardisty-fitness-and-leisure-centre.aspx

Water is more important than oil in many places in the world.  This trend is growing.  Alberta motorheads who waste water to unearth tarsands and natural gas, like developers who pave over the good farmland that surrounds Edmonton, cause problems for us all, and for our descendants.  Pipeline mongers, who would despoil hundreds of kilometres between the Alberta tarsands and the British Columbia Coast, meet growing resistance:

http://pacificwild.org/site/our-work/no-tankers-no-pipeline.html

Closer to my Williams Lake home, the Friends of Nemiah Valley protect water and life against a mining scheme that threatens the Fraser River, the most productive salmon river in North America:

 http://www.fonv.ca/

Halfway around the world, Palestinians know the importance of land and water, both stolen from them by Israel, a late-1940s European and American colonizing invasion that continues.  For news of their resistance, listen to "The Voice of Palestine:"

http://www.voiceofpalestine.ca/?p=3604

For your health and happiness, listen to the crunch of snow underfoot, children at play, the wind in the trees.  Join people who talk and act together for justice, the only durable way to justice.  In a few weeks, hear the birds sing, the melting water trickle, people holding babies, signs that where life is, hope is.