Grant for Food Bank in Burns Lake
MLA John Rustad presents cheque to Jessica Hart, Secretary of the Lakes District Family Enhancement Society – photo-submitted
Burns Lake, B.C. – The Lakes District Family Enhancement Society in Burns Lake will be receiving $66,300 through the B.C. Government’s Community Gaming Grants Program.
The funds are for the Society’s community food bank program.
Approximately 250 children and adults use the food bank twice every month.
“The Lakes District Family Enhancement Society, through its community food bank program, provides an essential service to families in need with healthy and nutritious food options,” said Nechako Lakes MLA, John Rustad. “This funding will go a long way to assist our volunteer-run food bank in Burns Lake serve more local families and build a stronger, healthier community.”
The grant comes from the Human and Social Services category of the Community Gaming Grant program.
Comments
Good use for this money but I wonder whatever happened to all the promise of gaming money being used to pay for our healthcare? Anybody ever look into that?
That was one of the big promises put forward to make the lotteries acceptable in the first place.
Photo-op for John but is sad that $$ have to go for food banks – no one should have ot go hungry especially chidren.
OOPS – few spelling errors – meant children.
A bit of having your cake and eating it too, for Rustad, I thought. The provincial Liberal government supports those of its citizens in need so poorly that many of them can’t buy enough food to feed themselves and their children. Then, along comes SuperDooperLiberoMan to give some money and save the day. Of course, that money should have been provided through social support in the first place if the Liberals would only put families first, but then there would be no opportunity for a photofest and grinning pictures in the press. Better late than not at all, I suppose. Why does children getting enough food to eat depend on a “volunteer-run food bank”, as Rustad puts it, in a province as rich as BC?
BC Lottery Corporation generates more than $1 Billion in revenue for the Provincial Government each year.
Perhaps a portion of this money comes from those who receive Government money, and rather than spend it on food, they gamble?? Is that possible? If so then the Government gets some of its money back, and various societies provide food for the needy. Hmmmmm.
Anything is possible Palopu. It is also entirely possible that the scenario you describe is untrue in whole or in part.
In any case, the bottom line is that a very frugal government with a hangup about social assistance felt it necessary to give money to a food bank to feed hungry children.
Secondly, are we at a stage in our society where giving enough food to children depends on gambling money? Really!
45 Years ago I never heard of Foodbanks and Shelters, now it’s in the News every Day!
Well done points by Woodwoman and Ammonra. I thoroughly agree that there should be no reason that food banks exist. If the Liberal government collected the proper taxes and gave tax credits to those who need them, we perhaps wouldn’t have the highest child poverty rate in the country. Shame on our government.
Poverty in Canada, or in any other country than can actually produce more real wealth than it can ever consume is a purely ‘financial’ construct.
It is not like it is in some parts of the world, where the ability to actually produce is absent completely, or physically deficient.
In such places those who have nothing to eat, or wear, or any shelter, would certainly be justified in insisting those there who have more than they can eat, or wear, or live in, actually “share the wealth”. It is a matter of their personal survival.
When we try to extrapolate what would be perfectly true in such Third World places to a modern industrial country like Canada, many here believe that ‘money’, which is really only a ‘ticket’ to wealth, and NOT wealth itself, is should be what is more equally shared.
And so we have the notion that if the poor are poor it must be because the rich are rich, and the solution is to ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’, generally through some form of taxation.
This assumes that for every article of real wealth ~ every can of beans in the market, every stich of clothing in the store, every house, or the materials needed to build one, everything with a PRICE on it ~ there is, at any same moment it’s offered for sale, there’s an equal sum of money itself, out there, somewhere, in somebody’s wallet or bloated bank account, that can meet that price.
But no one ever seems to question if there is, and what are the results going to be if there isn’t.
For if the total amount of money in the hands of the public, no matter how unequally it may be distributed amongst us, is still collectively LESS than the total sum of the PRICES of all goods and service for sale ~ and those prices currently can’t be lowered because they all contain PAST costs that have to be fully recovered from their price, (or those producing or providing such goods and services can’t remain in business), there will still be an overall insufficiency of money in the hands of the public no matter how it is re-distributed. And it will still ‘financially’ impossible to fully do that “which is physically possible, socially desirable, and morally correct.”
In a province that highest child poverty rate in the country in almost every one of the 13 years this Liberal government has been in power.
Scroll back up and have another look at the picture, now that’s irony for you!!!
I a province “with” the highest child poverty rate in Canada! Oh, why can’t this site have an edit function?
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