| East Calgary provides a unique opportunity to connect with diverse perspectives that originate from all over the world – more than one in five Calgarians is an immigrant to Canada, most of whom settle in east Calgary. This is the third in a three-part series exploring the views of east Calgary residents.
When east Calgary resident Carmen Plante lived in Guatemala, she was surrounded by people and systems that acknowledged "the battle that goes on between the rich and poor." While not widely acknowledged in Calgary, the gap between the rich and the poor is dramatic.
The Canadian Council for Social Development recently released statistics spelling out that income gap explicitly – the top 10 per cent of Calgarians makes an average of $248,000 per year while the bottom 10 per cent makes less than $19,000. Looking at it another way, 109,000 Calgarians were below the poverty line in 2000, with a combined annual income of nearly $2 billion a year, while the combined annual income of the top 100,000 wage earners in
Calgary exceeds $24 billion a year.
And Calgary has geographic disparity as well. Deerfoot Trail is known to some as the great divide of Calgary – nearly one in four southeast Calgary residents lives below the poverty line. Living in an area of town with a stigma of poverty, east area residents have different understandings of what it means to live in east Calgary.
"Moving (to east Calgary), in the aboriginal way was: if you move here, you are poor like they are," says Verna Eagle Speaker, an east Calgary resident. "People didn’t respect you if you lived in this area, in the aboriginal way. But what moved me here was low-income housing."
Albert Park resident Carmen Plante laughs uproariously when asked about the great divide.
"To be perfectly honest, before I left Calgary six years ago, it never would have occurred to me to cross Deerfoot (into east Calgary) – ever," Plante says. "And when I came back, I looked around, and it seemed to me to be one of the better places to be. My view of the world had changed."
Now Plante sees east Calgary as "one of the poorest areas of the city in terms of economic wealth, and yet I think it is one of the richest in terms of diversity. In terms of ethnicity, experience, language – it’s incredible."
Plante tells of the joy of grocery shopping at the local merchant surrounded by discussions and debates often in different languages.
Junaid Malik frames the two namesakes of east Calgary – poverty and community – in the context of a fundraising story. When a friend of his had some Girl Guide cookies to sell, Malik sent her off to affluent Mount Royal. After 20 houses, she was still empty handed. In east Calgary, however, "everywhere she went people were willing to buy. They are better citizens in my eyes. They do not have a lot of money, but they will give you $2, $3." While some east Calgarians are successfully meshing community values with poverty, many are not. Diane Danielson, alderman for Ward 10 which includes a large part of east Calgary, says living at a survival level can have a detrimental effect on community and political involvement.
"You need to thrive to be able to take that extra step and volunteer and help your community," she says, adding that she has come to know Ward 10 as a less vocal constituency than others in Calgary.
While poverty has a direct effect on political involvement in Calgary, Cesar Cala had a different experience living in the Philippines. Despite living under a dictatorship without a social safety net, many people put themselves further at risk by engaging themselves politically in the democratization movement. Cala laughs with delight as he tells a story of people organizing against sham elections.
"Our dictator required people to vote, so we boycotted," Cala says. "But we made our boycott votes count as well. We had boycott ballot boxes and people would put their votes there and physically campaign against sham elections. We took the risk to be arrested, but never were."
Cala isn’t discouraged by low voter participation in Calgary. Instead he is excited by the potential of western Canada because of its political youth.
"We are still creating history. Calgary is around 100 years old, so we are still part of creating the overall direction of where the city wants to go," he says.We are still creating Calgary's political culture, and Danielson says the city is at a crossroads.
"[S]ometimes the thrust seems to come from business, from a very, very strong financial-fiscal focus," she says. "This is basically coming from some people who have a voice and they are being heard by the government." Danielson’s sense of the crossroads comes from increasingly hearing, "the voice of the people who are really at a disadvantage, who are vulnerable, who need that extra help."
Danielson credits the United Way with forcing business to think about others, but her idea of a crossroads is an important one, not only in east Calgary, but everywhere in a changing society as well.
"People are starting to realize that we are at a crossroads and you better be listening," she says. "People are starting to learn that if you truly want a great community, you have to look after everybody." |
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