Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how people without housing, people living in poverty, and unemployed people have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.

In The Canadian Labour Movement, historian Craig Heron and political scientist Charles Smith tell the story of Canada's workers from the midnineteenth century through to today, painting a vivid picture of key developments, such as the birth of craft unionism, the breakthroughs of the fifties and sixties, and the setbacks of the early twenty-first century. The fourth edition of this book has been completely updated with a substantial new chapter that covers the period from the great recession of 2008 through to 2020. In this chapter, Smith describes the fallout of the financial crisis, how Stephen Harper's government restricted labour rights, the rise of the "gig economy" and precarious work, and the continued de-industrialization in the private sector. These pressures contributed to fracturing the movement, as when Unifor, the largest private sector union, split from the Canadian Labour Congress, the established "house of labour." Through it all, rank-and-file union members have fought for better conditions for all workers, including through campaigns like the fight for a $15 minimum wage. The Canadian Labour Movement is the definitive book for anyone interested in understanding the origins, achievements, and challenges of the labour and social justice movements in Canada.

Twenty-five fascinating images that offer a 360º panorama of the Toronto's downtown in 1856-57 mark the beginning of the use of photographs to document Toronto's growth, its achievements, its great civic works, and its citizenry. Since 1856, the City of Toronto has been commissioning photographs to document and to promote it. This book, published to celebrate the 175th anniversary of the city's incorporation, brings together more than 100 of these images, selected by city archivists from their collection of hundreds of thousands. Waterworks, roads, and bridges, many of them familiar landmarks today, are seen as they are being built. The Bloor Street Viaduct, the R. C. Harris water filtration plant, and the old and new city halls are all celebrated in these images. Toronto's citizens are also captured in these photographs, going about their affairs on the street, as proud workers, or as spectators at public events. At times, in an effort to raise public concern about poverty and poor housing conditions, city photographers have documented conditions for residents in low-income neighbourhoods. Some of these photographs are included here, in an impressive series of poignant images. In the past fifty years, as Toronto has grown into the cosmopolitan metropolis it is now, city photographers have recorded the construction of key projects like the Yonge Street subway, the new City Hall and the CN Tower while documenting major public events and celebrations. This book offers a visual overview of Toronto's history and at the same time documents attitudes and values expressed by City officials, from 1857 to the present.

"In wealthy nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, issues of poverty and homelessness have often been displaced or sidelined by the accelerating number of studies on income inequality and wealth disparity. In Poverty and Austerity amid Prosperity, Gregg M. Olsen refocuses our attention on rising levels of poverty and homelessness, suggesting what we can do to address these issues. Highlighting the important differences between Canada, the UK, and the US, this volume explores the broad and narrow ways that poverty and homelessness have been conceptualized, and how this has shaped the way they are defined, measured, and addressed in each country. After a careful examination of poverty in these three countries, the volume draws comparisons with European nations that have been more successful in keeping issues relating to poverty under control. Olsen presents and critically contrasts the two main theoretical traditions, individual versus society, that have emerged to explain poverty and homelessness. Olsen argues that societal approaches to the study of poverty are better equipped to explain the developments unfolding across these nations, and that the eradication of poverty will only happen when the socio-economic system has been seriously overhauled and founded upon economic democracy."--

By the late 19th century and the early 20th century, there were at least nineteen large and small areas, streets or neighbourhoods that were declared or labelled slums in Toronto. By the 1960s, almost all the slums had been cleared and were replaced by institutional, governmental and residential modern buildings. However, the foot prints of these slums, their boundaries and characteristics of their residents had been lost. This book intends to trace the development of these slums and outline their lifecycles. Although the book deals with all major Toronto slums, the emphasis focuses on Regent Park, which replaced the largest Anglo-Saxon slum in North America named Cabbagetown. Regent Park was also the first large housing project that received the approval from Toronto electors, which partially replaced Cabbagetown. In order to comprehend why Toronto ratepayers approved the project, we are considering the movement to implement the project (that had been recommended by the Curtis Report) as a social movement for affordable housing and utilising the Resource Mobilization Approach (RMA) to analyse and evaluate the success and/or failure of the project. In this book, the authors want to challenge the widely held assumption that policy making in Canada was an elite process primarily involving Cabinet ministers and senior civil servants by bringing the citizens participation back in and highlighting their critical role in challenging the governments housing policy and the building of Regent Park. This book has two parts: the first part examines the fate of the slum dwellers. Now that slums are gone, what happened to the poor working classes that used to live in these slums? The second part argues that when all the slums in the old city dissolve and are replaced by luxury condominiums and expensive gentrified homes, where will the recent immigrants go for accommodation? The recent information indicates that the majority of the low-income immigrants are seeking accommodations in the high-rise apartments of St. James Town or in the inner suburb communities in Scarborough, North York and Etobicocke. As these high-rise apartment buildings (mainly built in the 1980s and 1990s) age and deteriorate while overcrowding continues, there is a possibility that what happened in the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century will be repeated, causing the development of new slums. This alone should draw the attention of the municipal government and is one of the goals of the authors of this book.

This third edition of Dennis Guest's book provides the most complete and up-to-date history of social welfare in this country. Yet it also offers insights into the nuts and bolts of policy creation, and explodes recent myths that underlie the current residual approach to social policy, such as 'death by deficit' and 'the inevitable demise of the Canada Pension Plan.' The Emergence of Social Security in Canada is both an important historical resource and an engrossing tale in its own right, and it will be of great interest to anyone concerned about Canadian social policy.

Sixteenth-century humanist Juan Luis Vives sought to find ways to alleviate the sufferings of the poor of Bruges, dealing with problems and presenting solutions that sound remarkably familiar to twentieth-century urban ears.