What happened to all the poor people in Toronto?
Remember the bad days of the Mike Harris nonesense revolution? Then you couldn’t escape the coverage in the media about how difficult it was for welfare recipients to get by.
That’s because with a Scroogesque stroke of his pen Harris had cut welfare rates in Ontario by just over 21% before he’d even got his seat warm in the Premier’s office. Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals promised to hike the rates and return dignity to those hit hardest by systemic unemployment and poverty. So, job done, right? Not!
Check this out: in equivalent 2009 dollars a single person on welfare received about $872 in 1992. Today a single person receives $572. Yep! Rates for those on welfare, now called Ontario Works and ODSP, the province’s disability pension plan held at the Harris level for about 10 years-with no increase even for inflation. So by the time McGuinty started raising rates, by 2% a year, they were already about 40% below what they were when Harris first took office.
In order to try to get try to get our heads and those of our politicians around the impossiblity of living in the Tdot on that kind of coin anti-poverty advocates at The Stop Community Food Centre have launched two great projects.
One, a photo exhibit down at Hart House called Hungry For Change: What Toronto Eats by anti-poverty activist and photographer Cheryl Duggan as part of U of T’s World Food Week program.
The other is a great online tool called Do The Math.
Its a survey that asks you to fill out a monthly budget you feel is required to live a life of health and dignity in Toronto. Once you’ve punched in the numbers it spits out your total and automatically compares it with what you’d get on Ontario Works, ODSP or if you were working 35 hours a week at a minumum wage job.
No surprise the math simply doesn’t add up. For example, the first time I did the suvey I skimped on a lot of monthly expenses, left out car payments and upkeep altogether but I still came up with a total of about $2000 a month to live in dignity and health. Then I went back and skimped further, lopping off my entire budget for recreation and entertainment and backing off on my grocery bill and still came up with about $1600 a month. With that total I’d still need to use my credit card to survive if I had a full time minimum wage job. If I was on social assistance? Well how could I survive?
“We’re trying to bust through stereotypes. It is not a free ride on welfare, ” says The Stops civic engagement coordinator Jonah Schein referring to the Harris era characterization of welfare recipients as beer swilling layabouts scamming the system. “No matter how much people want to work there are very few jobs.” He says the anti poverty fight today is about turning the current economic model on its head. “Globalization has pushed down real wages. The idea is to make life so miserable on social assistance that you’ll work any crappy job for really low wages.”
Activists are also making the social justice links between poverty and health. Public health units across the province have sounded the alarm that poor access to healthy food is creating malnutrition which will create long term challenges to our health care, education and justice systems. They peg the average monthly amount needed to purchase healthy food at $209.55. But in neighbourhoods served by The Stop access to healthy food is as big a problem as having the money to pay for it. “If you don’t have a car in this neighbourhood it is very hard to find affordable food,” he says.
I urge you to log on and Do The Math.[rssbreak]
