Calgary women's shelters fill up in unusual holiday spike

 Some of the women’s shelters in Calgary say they are nearly at capacity this holiday season - an unusual occurrence this time of year.

The YWCA Sheriff King House, which shelters victims of domestic violence, is housing more than triple the number of women and young children compared to the same period last year. Numbers are also up at the agency’s Mary Dover homeless shelter.

The Christmas season is a particularly tough time to leave home, and many shelters traditionally have lower numbers during the holidays, a shelter spokeswoman said.

The climbing number of domestic violence victims seeking helps shows they’re making the difficult choice to forgo a Christmas at home over fears for their own safety, said Jean Dunbar, YWCA of Calgary’s director of family violence prevention.

“It’s a really tough decision to make at this time of the year. Is it bad enough to leave? Because you’re leaving with nothing. Or can you just hang in there, get through and things will calm down.

“This year, people are making different decisions.”

The Sheriff King shelter, which took in 10 people at this time last year, saw a sudden spike Friday to 34, edging close to its 42-person capacity. The YWCA Mary Dover housed 98 people, compared to 72 last year.

The shelters have enough space — for now.

The week following Christmas, however, is generally when numbers begin to climb. It’s a worrisome scenario considering the already peak numbers.

“In my 18 years of working here, I’ve never seen it this high,” Dunbar said.

“We’re getting ready to start to say no.”

Volunteers at the Sheriff King scrambled Friday to ensure the influx of clients, many of them young children, each had a Christmas present under the shelter tree come Sunday. Christmas dinners planned for about 10 people had to quickly be tripled.

Volunteers and staff do everything they can to make the holiday less painful, Dunbar said.

Many of the women in the shelter are fleeing violence. Some are protecting their children, who’ve been physically hurt, too.

“As bad as it is to (have to) make the decision to come into a shelter, it’s best to be safe,” Dunbar said.

“They’re all here because they’re not safe at home.”

Alberta consistently has high domestic violence rates, but shelter staff are perplexed by the sudden surge in clients.

The recent high profile triple-murder suicide in southern Alberta that saw three young people shot to death and another wounded before the perpetrator took his own life may also have prodded some victims to take steps to protect themselves, suggested Dunbar.

The horrific shooting involved an ex-boyfriend targeting his former girlfriend after their relationship soured, police say.

“If you’re a mom in a situation with young kids, you may be thinking, it could happen to them, could it happen to me?,” said Dunbar.

The women seeking help also tell the story of the “other side” of Calgary’s prosperity, said YWCA of Calgary CEO Sue Tomney.

Many of them are considered “working poor,” toiling at low paying jobs where paycheques simply don’t stretch far enough.

“That’s something we all carry as a city. We get caught up in prosperity and forget there are others not keeping pace with the city.”

The city’s collection of family violence shelters work together to do everything they can to ensure each person seeking help has a place to go, Tomney said.

Economic gloom weighs down Harper's holiday cheer

As the holiday season brings 2011 to a close, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says his focus for the new year remains on the world's fragile economic situation and its potential fallout on Canada's economy.

Harper, in year-end remarks to Chinese-language broadcaster Fairchild TV, said the continuing debt crisis in Europe and problems in the United States are bound to affect Canada’s economic fortunes.

“These things continue to impact the Canadian economy, so I think the economy’s going to continue to have to be our No. 1 focus into the next year,” he said, in an interview that aired Friday evening, and will be rebroadcast Wednesday evening.

“We’re preparing the next budget, the next steps of Canada’s economic action plan to create jobs and growth, and also to continue seeing our own deficit decline,” Harper continued. “So, we’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.”

Opening trade with Asia is one avenue Harper said he is looking to expand upon as Canada seeks to insulate itself from troubles in Europe and in the U.S. “Well, I think, given some of the problems in places like Europe and the United States, I think it’s more incumbent than ever that for our country, that we look at our wider trade opportunities, including our trade opportunities in Asia,” Harper told Fairchild in the interview conducted Dec. 19.

Harper’s Conservative government repeatedly has said it is looking to ease the country’s reliance on the U.S. market for its exports of resource-based commodities, such as oil and lumber.

With TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline project to ship oilsands crude to the U.S. facing legislative speed bumps south of the border, Harper’s government has made it clear that it will push to expand opportunities across the Pacific, through projects such as Enbridge Inc.’s proposed Northern Gateway pipelines from Alberta to Kitimat, B.C.

“I’m sure it’s important for the Chinese that they’re looking at markets where they can see potential growth and particularly, potential growth in their access to resources, which is very important to them, and which Canada obviously has an abundance of,” Harper said.

Harper said his government continues to monitor the situation in Europe, as the threat of a eurozone collapse continues to loom. “I do worry that the fundamental problems have not yet been fully addressed, and obviously, we’re working with them,” he said.

Harper also discussed the Occupy Wall Street protests and the continentwide demonstrations they inspired. He said many of the protesters’ grievances had little to do with Canada. “Well, you know, I don’t know what to make of it,” he said.

“In the United States, there was an understandable protest against the fact that the government seemed to have bailed out very large banks and financial institutions, and yet, you know, many of these continued to have large bonuses and obviously, paying their chief executives very well.

“I mean, none of this is relative to Canada, because we didn’t bail out our banks, so obviously, we have a different set of issues here.”

However, Harper said his government remains concerned that the middle class “remains under some pressure.”

“I think there’s a couple of things we have to do, individual things we can do to help the middle class, but I think also, we must realize as a nation that we’re in an extremely competitive world, not just competition with our traditional competitors in Europe and the United States, but from all the emerging economies.” Harper said.