In rebuilding our economy, we want to see jobs in every community taking advantage of expanding opportunities in re-localizing.
In staying close to home during the pandemic, it’s been much easier to see the strength of our communities and the areas that need reinforcement. Local food, public transit, green spaces – these are systems and institutions that carry our communities forward through crises. Canadians want more food security and energy security. With the proper investment post-COVID, especially for municipalities, we can rely on these necessities for years to come.
- Safe, affordable housing is a human right. We must protect this right by:
- Ensuring the policy of “housing first” is utilized.
- Building more affordable housing.
- Increasing funding for cooperative and supportive housing.
- Encouraging provinces to continue the eviction freeze until the end of the pandemic.
- Demanding a rent freeze post-pandemic, by extending what is already in place and not allowing rent to be hiked for at least a year.
- Ensuring all housing in Indigenous communities is built following principles laid out in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
- We must increase people’s confidence in their communities by:
- Supporting small local businesses.
- Investing heavily in affordable, green public transit and healthy transportation that suits the region’s needs.
- Supporting municipal investment in new wastewater infrastructure.
- Encouraging continued pedestrian usage of streets, fewer cars, green travel and bike lanes.
- Encourage Canadians at all levels to embrace a “grow local” mentality by:
- Reinforcing local food supply chains such as farmers’ markets.
- Encouraging individuals to source locally or grow and make their own food, like the victory gardens of WWI and WWII.
- Providing funding to agriculture and farmers, especially small and ecological farms.
- Supporting local food production and tackling the huge problems we saw with Cargill and our current corporate controlled and centralized food processing system.
- Move away from the massive, monopolistic and unsustainable industrial livestock model. Re-localize food production and processing capacity
- Partner with municipalities for relief funding distribution, allying with organizations like the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.
- Develop urban partnerships with all orders of government to re-energize our urban cores across the country.
- It is evident funding should be spent on strengthening communities, not police departments. We call for race-based and gender-based data on all policing action taken during the pandemic. We also support municipalities and provinces reorganizing their budgets to put money into community developed and community led support systems.
- Proudly made in Canada
- Make public investments provide returns to the public. No public money for public-private partnerships (P3s).
- Increase in-Canada manufacturing of essentials (such as medical PPEs) by implementing an import substitution strategy to reduce dependence on global supply chains.
- Do more value-added and secondary manufacturing in Canada to put an end to such practices as shipping raw logs offshore to be sold back to Canadians as furniture.
- Support local and within-Canada tourism.
- Support employment in the arts, particularly in the infrastructure and tax policy that support film and television production.
- Invest in high-speed rail starting with Windsor-Quebec and Edmonton-Calgary.
- We also saw the benefit of fewer cars on the road — now is the time for green infrastructure to keep it that way.