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Mar 16, 04
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Online Petition to Save Women's Centres
This is from an email I just received... I STRONGLY urge you all to sign the petition. These shelters provide a lot of good for a lot of people and I can't fucking believe they're going to be 100% cut. It's sickening.
read the info below from www.savewomenscentres.ca and if you want to sign the online petition to support the cause, go to http://www.bcgeu.ca/index.php4?do=show&page=swc March 31 deadline marks end to women's centres On March 31, 2004, the Campbell Liberals will eliminate 100 percent of the funding to all women's centres in British Columbia. This amounts to about $47,000 a year for each women's centre, or a total of $1.7 million. The cost translates into just over 5 dollars per woman helped by a women's centre, or 91 cents for every woman and girl in the province. In other words, it costs less than a dollar a year per woman and girl in B.C. to save lives. The funding cut will devastate B.C.'s women's centres. Two centres (Richmond, Surrey) have already been forced to close their doors permanently . The remaining 35 centres are preparing to shut down unless they can find alternate funding sources. This will leave hundreds of thousands of women and their children in crisis with nowhere to turn for help. They include women who are victims of violence, women fleeing abusive homes, women who have been cut off welfare, women with disabilities, homeless women, poor women, immigrant women, single moms, teenagers and seniors. For many women, this is a situation of life and death. Women in communities across our province are already reeling from massive provincial cutbacks that are disproportionately hurting women. Cuts to legal aid, social assistance, court services, sexual assault response programs, transition houses, and countless other services are pushing more and more women into poverty and despair. Until now, women's centres have been providing services to fill the gaps created by these cuts. But this will cease as of March 31, 2004. 
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Mar 16, 04
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Fucking government.
Done.
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Mar 16, 04
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I do wholeheartedly understand and agree with the importance of this issue...
However, this should be taken with a grain of salt. The BC GEU does have a tendancy to inflate things to make them out to be worse than they are at the expense of the provcincial government (ie, there may be cutbacks but it will never be a situation where there is "nowhere to turn for help"). I'm not saying that I agree at all with the half-assed fiscal conversatism that the government has participated, I'm just saying that this information isn't completely impartial. The war of words between the provnicial government and things like the BC GEU or the BC Medical Association is getting nothing constructive accomplished. If this issue is seriously pressing to you, if it genuinely concerns you, you're probably better off having a chat with your local MLA..No matter how many signatures of potentially millions of BC'ers on that petition, I doubt the province will really take concern with that.
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Mar 16, 04
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anyhoo, I went and done did the petition.
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Mar 17, 04
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of course the information is impartial - but lets look at pure fact dozens of womens centres are being closed been to one? Know what goes on there? Working with guiding we brough some babysitting aged girls there for months so that they could babysit while single moms went to group conselling -- we met dozens of women on the run from abusive lovers/husbands/boyfriends true - there are still other places to turn in time of crisis even with the closure of these womens centres, but these centres are designed for WOMEN where as other facitlities include both sexes and in situations, especially the ones pertaining to abuse that simply is not always an option for a woman What irks me about these closures is that it's another blow to the teeth to those living below the poverty line Women accessing these ventres tend to be single mothers, some working, some on welfare - and struggling Single mothers make up the majority of families living in poverty on this continent and here the provincial governemnt goes and cuts something else that keeps them connected to one another and the community Closing down womens centres is helping to keep women in distress isolated I told my MLA as much - and i recomend *especially men*(because there is a social perception that this is purely a womans issue) that you speak up -- because shit can happen to anyones mother, sister, future girlfriend, ex wife and so on and it would be nice if they had more options of where to go
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