Priorities & Choices is a new initiative to awaken citizens to injustices that impact on the social and economic well being of vulnerable individuals and communities.
Our Vision is to find ways for people of different faiths and backgrounds to ‘pull together’ for a more just society.
Our initial focus is in calling for an additional $5 billion per year for 20 years to address the crisis in low-rental housing due to 25 years of neglect.
The federal government cancelled new long-term investments in social housing in 1994. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is asking the federal government for $800 million per year for 8 years. After 25 years of having no National Housing Plan, this level of federal government funding is no where near what is required to address the current crisis.
One option to pay for increased funding for housing is to redirect dollars from military spending. The Canadian defense budget was recently increased by 70% to $32 billion – with no public consultation? The federal government’s increase for environmental spending is 2%.
We need to ask how this increased military spending impacts on funding for humanitarian needs, such as climate change initiatives, race relations, education, transit, low-rental housing, child care, clean water projects, etc. Our particular focus is on housing.
Questions We Are Asking
* Why is there so little funding for housing and and other humanitarian needs for the most vulnerable in our society?
* Why is our government spending billions on funding the military in the midst of a housing crisis and a global pandemic?
If you are interested in exploring these questions with us, please contact us: kevin@prioritiesandchoices.org
https://prioritiesandchoices.org
Priorities & Choices
* A basic premise underlying our call for a shift in Priorities is that greatly increased funding is needed to address the climate change crisis and to provide low-rental housing to the most vulnerable in our communities. Redirecting $100 billion from military spending over 20 years is a good comparison of the additional funding that is required to address the housing crisis being experienced by thousands of people on low incomes.
Canadian Defense Budget: 70 per cent Increase and $32 billion in 2018
See – Defence Investment Plan 2018 and the following graph – https://www.cgai.ca/strong_secure_engaged_a_two_year_review#Strong<https://www.cgai.ca/strong_secure_engaged_a_two_year_review>
Click this poster to listen to audio recordings of the 2019 Conference on Peacemaking that featured prophetic speakers Kathy Kelly, Bob Holmes, Paul Pynkoski and others.
