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The 350-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment is a cramped, no-frills space, but it provided a safe place for cabinet-minister-to-be Shane Simpson, his little sister and his mother when they desperately needed a home.

As Simpson walks through the tiny unit in the large East Vancouver housing project, he recalls a frugal time when his single mother raised two kids there on welfare wages after leaving her husband in the late 1960s.

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“My dad beat my mom up. And one day, when my sister was about eight and I was about 11, we left. We walked out the back door and down the alley with what we could carry,” said Simpson, the NDP MLA for Vancouver-Hastings.

“I grew up poor. I grew up in a housing project in the Downtown Eastside. The thing about poverty is, it’s really hard when you get in that situation to get out.”

Fifty years later, it is now his job as the minister of social development and poverty reduction to make it easier for people to get out of poverty.