Our volunteers tell us it is a life changing experience being able to lend a hand and offer a smile while making a difference!

The CRC needs volunteers Monday to Friday. The daily and seamless operation of our programs is dependent on the valuable time that volunteers can share with us.

You can make a difference. We need you to join our team!

Our daily Community Meal Program (which serves breakfast and lunch) needs volunteers for meal tray preparation, plating of food, serving, dishwashing, meal room organization, and conversation.

If you can participate one day a week or a few times a month, that will help us greatly. Times can vary, starting at 9 a.m. to 11 a.m., for 2 to 3 hours or more or after lunch to help with kitchen clean-up. More hands make lighter work!

Our Community Clothing Program needs volunteers to assist participants from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., during their pre-arranged appointments, to select clothing. Sorting and organizing new clothing donations is also part of this volunteer role.

Our Community Knitting Club, on Wednesdays 1-3 p.m., is looking for volunteers who can assist in teaching knitting and crocheting to participants.

Consider inviting a friend to come with you. It’s even more fun that way.

We also have corporations and businesses signing up to serve as a team building exercise and as an opportunity for their employees to give back. Speak to your employer about your company getting involved.

There will be opportunities in other programs in the future and we will keep you posted on those.

Volunteer at CRC at 40 Oaks, contribute to the Regent Park community, and be surprised at how great you will feel having done so!

Email volunteers@tcrc.ca or call our Volunteer Coordinator at 416-363-4234 Ext. 237

Tuesday, May 14th at 9:30am
Emily’s House Children’s Hospice Official Grand Opening
562 Gerrard St. (just west of Broadview Ave.)

Wednesday, May 22nd at 3:00pm
Belmont House Annual General Meeting
(followed by a reception at 4:00pm
55 Belmont Street – Auditorium

“The events in the next few days that go by the deeply prejudicial name ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ continue to be a counterproductive way to achieve social justice in the Middle East. When all who desire peace in the region should be supporting and encouraging respectful dialogue between parties, this week sets out to do the opposite.

Canadian universities and academic institutions have a long history of providing a space to engage in enlightened discourse on issues of justice and equality. For this reason, it is all the more difficult to comprehend a focus that ignores terrible atrocities presently taking place in the region.
We should also be wary of group-vilifying speech that seeks to delegitimize or demonize. Indeed, as our own Supreme Court found unanimously just this past week in affirming the constitutionality of hate speech legislation, such speech seeks to delegitimize group members, reducing their social standing and acceptance within society.

The failure to stand up for these real and pressing injustices is undermined by an approach that puts all the blame for inaction on only one country. Demonizing one people and one country does not encourage reconciliation, cooperation or respectful discourse about peace and democratization in the Middle East. A constructive approach to the Israeli-Palestinian issue would be more effective if it persuaded governments and civil society to work with both parties to reach a negotiated resolution based on dialogue and understanding.”

King was the first Liberal Leader elected by a party convention. He would go on to serve 29 years as Liberal Leader and an unprecedented 22 years as prime minister.

Known for his tireless work ethic and conciliatory approach, King governed with a focus on trying to achieve the balance necessary to ensure Canada’s national unity.

As a boy, King adopted the personal motto “help those who cannot help themselves” a sentiment that would manifest itself again and again in his long political career.

Beginning as a civil servant and later Minister of Labour to Wilfrid Laurier, King was instrumental in early reforms to improve labour rights and collective bargaining. He later laid the foundations of the modern Canadian welfare state, introducing old age pensions , unemployment insurance and family allowance.

King continually worked to achieve greater autonomy for Canada from Great Britain, his efforts helping to shape the Balfour Declaration and later the Statute of Westminster.

Immediately following the celebrated Persons Case, it was King who appointed Canada’s first female senator, Cairine Wilson in 1930.

Replacing the unpopular Bennett administration during the Depression, King brought in much more activist measures than his predecessor, including the National Housing Act and National Employment Commission.

He also established important cultural institutions including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1936 and National Film Board in 1939.

King later oversaw the massive wartime mobilization brought on by World War II and helped set up the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan which would have a decisive role in the conflict. He later ensured that Canada was a driving force in the establishment of the United Nations.

In 1946, King introduced the Canadian Citizenship Act and personally became Canada’s first official citizen.

Bob Rae

The Harper government needs to keep its cool. Canada now risks losing its way if it does not.  Canada’s support for Israel’s security should not mean we lose our own voice as a country that understands, and supports, the Palestinian aspiration for statehood.

The issue is still how that can be achieved. There are forces within the Palestinian political community that refuse to accept the legitimacy of “the other”, and there is always the risk that these forces – fuelled by extremist, even fanatical rhetoric and actions that inevitably trigger a reaction – will prevail.

On one of my many trips to the Middle East a senior Israeli politician – on the conservative side of the spectrum – said that the continued settlement of the West Bank was “bad for Israel”.  A “one state” dominated by Israel would mean that Palestinians would have no status as citizens, no real human rights.  It would also mean that within our lifetime, “greater Israel” would have a majority Arab population, much of it disenfranchised.  This is clearly untenable – Israel would lose its democratic identity.

Those Arabs and Palestinians who deny the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish homeland, have to be seen as opponents of a real peace process. A “one state solution” is a complete dead-end for both sides.

Logic leads back to two states, but these are issues that have to be settled between Israelis and Palestinians in direct talks. President Abbas’ quest for upgraded status at the UN has delayed those talks. The announcement of new Israeli settlements in east Jerusalem and the West Bank is an example of how “tit for tat” escalation can push the parties further apart, not closer together.

When and if negotiations resume, the issues will not be easy.  What mediators call “the zone of agreement” has been reached several times since Oslo, but each time talks ended in recrimination and were followed by intifadas, terrorism, and violence that destroyed lives and trust in ways that are truly difficult to repair.

The language of threats and “consequences” doesn’t contribute one whit to the search for peace. President Abbas missed a chance to show that he wanted an immediate return to direct negotiations, something he has said repeatedly in past months, but chose not to say in New York, retreating again to hard line rhetoric. In person President Abbas is conciliatory.  But if private assurances and public declarations don’t match, there is always a problem.

When the fighting stops, the rockets stop firing, the speeches are done, the symbolic resolutions are passed, the applause and demonstrations are over, the outstanding issues will still remain: recognition of the state of Israel; agreed-upon boundaries, including Jerusalem; a practical solution to the “right of return”; a workable formula for ratification of agreements within the Palestinian leadership. More particularly, can the Israelis deal with settlements outside the agreed borders and boundaries without fracturing their own society, and can Palestinians create durable, pluralistic, political structures which respect the rule of law, human rights, and democracy?

Canada needs to become as effective, and candid, a partner to the creation of a democratic and pluralist Palestinian state as we have been to the creation of the state of Israel, rooted in our own values and our own diplomatic traditions and skills.

Finally, the other feature of Mr Harper’s foreign policy – a continuing, unbridled attack on the UN, on humanitarian law, on the duty to protect – defies credibility.  The deep support for the Palestinian cause around the world, and the overwhelming vote at the General Assembly, is, for better or worse, a reflection of public opinion.  It is not the fault of “the UN”.  Canada is in the process of isolating itself – and only putting forward monologues that are fuelled by polls and short-sighted partisanship, and which abandon our basic values of dialogue, peace and unity. This is not where most Canadians want us to be as a country. David Cameron and President Obama were on the phone with President Abbas, and are reaching out to Arab and Israeli leaders in the hopes of finding a solution.  Canada should be picking up the phone as well, but it may be a while before we get an answer. It’s not always what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Bob Rae

In my last meeting with the chief political spokesman for the Tamil Tigers in 2005, there was an eerie exchange of messages and warnings.  He told me the cause was just and the LTTE would prevail.  I told him the international community wanted real negotiations and there were no guarantees a breakdown of discussions would not lead to renewed conflict.  A short time later Tamilselvan was dead, taken out by a targeted assassination.  While the “ceasefire” was not formally renounced by the government until 2008, conflict was well underway.

A civil war that had lasted, on and off, for forty years was brought to a close by a bloody, brutal, military assault on the Tiger territory that had been briefly protected by the 2002 ceasefire.  The hundreds of thousands of civilians who had returned to the Vanni, with the government’s support, found themselves trapped.  They would be shot by the government’s troops if they left, and would be condemned for desertion by the Tigers.

So they moved north east, in the tens of thousands, to a tiny strip of land on the coast.  Government planes and artillery pounded civilians and hospitals, with nothing but an international “tut tutting” that the government of Sri Lanka knew full well would produce no practical reaction from the UN and the international community.

The Tigers, for their part, continued to recruit children, refused permission to leave, and, by forcing civilians to dig trenches and help their cause, exposed everyone to greater harm.  As the UN report of March 31, 2011 put it:  “All this was done in a quest to pursue a war that was clearly lost; many civilians were sacrificed on the altar of the LTTE cause and its efforts to preserve its senior leadership.”

In a new report the UN has pointed to its own failures as an organisation – it succumbed too easily to pressure from the Sri Lankan government and withdrew observers from the field when it was clear the absence of witnesses allowed both sides to get away with murder.

There were serious efforts to effect a real ceasefire to allow for a surrender, but this was turned down by the Tigers.  This has now been documented, both in the UN Petrie report and in Frances Harrison’s stirring book Count the Bodies.

The Sri Lankan government denied entry to Carl Bildt, Swedish Foreign Minister, and then to me, to see the refugee camps for ourselves.

The important question now is:  will the UN and its members learn from the tragedy of Sri Lanka, or just move on, oblivious?  The dead number in the tens of thousands. There is still no accountability in Sri Lanka, or internationally.  Governments wag their fingers – three years too late – at the government of Sri Lanka.  And in Syria and elsewhere, more tragedies unfold with no effective response.

The League of Nations collapsed because it proved to be irrelevant as Europe descended into a chasm of belligerence and wars of conquest in the 1930s.  The humanitarian tragedies of our own time are different, yet the failure of international governance is no less grave.  We have laws, and rules, but no means of enforcement.  We have high ideals, but no apparent capacity for action.  We either wring our hands, or wash them, blaming someone else for our own inaction.

It is not simply the UN as an institution whose reputation is at stake – it is whether we have the collective means to curtail the violence that poses such a threat to human life in so many corners of the globe.

Bob Rae