Toronto's Poor: A Rebellious History by Bryan D. Palmer & Gaetan Heroux
Foreword by Frances Fox Piven
8vo. pp. xvii, 523. black & white text illustrations. index. wrs. Toronto: Between The Lines, [2017].
Second Printing.
New.
ISBN-10: 771132817 / ISBN-13: 9781771132817
_____________________________________________________________________________________________
Toronto’s Poor reveals the long and too often forgotten history of poor people’s resistance. It details how the homeless, the unemployed, and the destitute have struggled to survive and secure food and shelter in the wake of the many panics, downturns, recessions, and depressions that punctuate the years from the 1830s to the present. Written by a historian of the working-class and a poor people’s activist, this is a rebellious book that links past and present in an almost two-hundred year story of struggle and resistance. It is about men, women, and children relegated to lives of desperation by an uncaring system, and how they have refused to be defeated. In that refusal, and in winning better conditions for themselves, Toronto’s poor create the possibility of a new kind of society, one ordered not by acquisition and individual advance, but by appreciations of collective rights and responsibilities.