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Tuesday, May 5, 2015
EMERGENCY RELIEF
CHILD CARE
Montrose resident faces homelessness after fire
$10-a-day push looks to reduce poverty in Alberni ERIC PLUMMER ALBERNI VALLEY TIMES
Robert Houle stands by the remains of the rental building on Montrose Street and Second Avenue where he used to live. The structure caught fire last month and the resulting damage displaced the residents of all 12 apartments. [MARTIN WISSMATH, TIMES]
Provincial support runs dry, victim looks to friends MARTIN WISSMATH ALBERNI VALLEY TIMES
Robert Houle lost everything he owned in a fire that burned down his apartment on Montrose Street and Second Avenue last month. When the fire, sparked from an electrical outlet in the apartment next door to Houle, destroyed the rental building on Montrose and Second, the Alberni Clayoquot Regional District offered emergency accommodation to the residents of the 12-unit structure. Disaster assistance funding covered the costs of accommodation, said Russel Dyson, chief administrative officer of the ACRD. The night of the fire, which took place in the early morning of April 17, Houle said there was no transportation provided. He slept on a couch and the next
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day someone offered him a ride to a local hotel where the ACRD had arranged rooms. After spending three days in the local hotel and two in the Port Alberni shelter, Houle was left on his own. The hotel locked him out of his room, he said. And the shelter pressured him to leave. “It was getting tough because I was out on the street again,” Houle told the Times on Monday as he stopped by his old neighbourhood to look at the charred wood and scattered wreckage of his former residence. “I was gonna sleep under a bridge.” But thankfully before it came to that a friend offered him a place to live in the North Port area. “It’s really comfortable,” he said. “Big screen TVs.” Only a slumped and blackened shell remains of the Montrose rental building, with “Do
not enter” warnings crudely scrawled on boarded up windows and doors. A heavy metal fence surrounds the property to deter curious passersby. A cautionary note attached to Houle’s old apartment entrance appears to indicate a hazard. “They found asbestos,” Houle said. Trained as a mechanical radiographer, the 58-year-old Port Alberni resident lives on disability with a bad leg. He couldn’t afford insurance to cover his belongings. “We can barely afford food,” said Houle. He lost all his furniture, his computer and clothes in the old apartment; but it was the lack of small personal care items that were most frustrating in the immediate aftermath of the fire. “Those little things, like nail
clippers,” Houle said. “Toothbrushes. I’m just starting to get all that stuff.” It’s difficult for people who live in comfort to truly understand poverty, Houle noted. “If you’re hungry, just go into the fridge,” he said. “If you need something, just get it out of the cupboard.” His new landlord sometimes takes him out to eat, he added. Dan Holder, emergency program coordinator for the ACRD, was at the scene that night assisting firefighters. He organized emergency support services to find accommodation for the residents. Emergency support services is a provincially-funded program to house residents displaced by a fire for up to three days, Holder explained. See EMERGENCY, Page 3
Soccer team makes it to provincial finals
Vegan hopes to inspire others about lifestyle
It’s been an unforgettable season for the Alberni Athletics, and it’ll end with a shot at a provincial title.. » Sports, 6
Animal lover and health foodie, Jennifer Carroll, has been vegetarian since childhood and transitioned to an all plant-based vegan lifestyle a few years ago. » Taste, 10
An initiative aiming to improve the region’s alarmingly high rate of child poverty is gaining support in Port Alberni. In late April city council endorsed a province-wide push to overhaul how childcare is available to families, ensuring that full-time daily costs do not exceed $10. The $10-a-day childcare plan would be enabled through increased subsidies from the provincial government as well as making public buildings – including closed elementary schools – available for day care programs, said Sharon Gregson, a spokesperson for the Coalition for the Childcare Advocates of B.C. “There’s some cases where we can take advantage of unused space in elementary schools, but we also will need to expand,” she said, adding that municipal buildings need to be made available for child care. “We need to start making better use of our public facilities and schools are just one of those things.” The $10-a-day childcare plan aims to increase government funding to existing day cares and increase the number of programs available. This is necessary to meet the large number of families struggling to make ends meet, while only 18 per cent of B.C. children under 12 have access to day care, stated the coalition. Part-time childcare would be $7 a day, and families with an annual income of less than $40,000 pay no fees. The initiative is predicted to allow 17,189 more women to work across the province, saving families an estimated $685 million. This could improve the lot of struggling families in Port Alberni, which belongs to a region with the fourth highest rate of child poverty in the province, according to a report released last December from the B.C. Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition. In the AlberniClayoquot Regional District 32.2 per cent of children live in families subsisting below the poverty line. See CHILD CARE, Page 3
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