Who
cares about Ontario's poor?
By Sarah
Blackstock & Jacquie Chic
Op/Ed in the Toronto Star - September 29, 2003
It should outrage all of us. But it doesn't. Nearly 2 million people in this rich province live in poverty. In spite of this, poverty has barely been mentioned by candidates in the current election campaign. Why?
Perhaps, after eight years of Progressive Conservate rants blaming poor people for their own poverty, we've started to believe the rhetoric. However, the consequences of buying into such rhetoric are dire.
We would do well right now to take a lead from the jury which examined the death of Kimberly Rogers. Eight months pregnant, convicted of welfare fraud and sentenced to house arrest during the height of summer, Rogers died in August, 2001.
When the jury examining the death of Rogers had the opportunity to consider the facts, they made a series of recommendations that rejected Tory "common sense" rhetoric. The jury indicated that what makes real sense are income security programs that enable people to have an adequate standard of living.
So let's compare facts to rhetoric.
The Tories paint a picture of a social assistance program riddled with fraud and freeloaders. They point to the 620,000 people who have left the welfare roles and claim a victory for the taxpayers of Ontario.
However, the facts tell a different story. Most people on social assistance require the help for one of three reasons:
- They've lost a
job.
- They've lost a
spouse.
- They're ill. These people are not freeloaders; they face hard times and need support.
Further, the welfare system in not rife with fraud. In fact, welfare fraud has been estimated to be approximately 3 per cent, while tax fraud is approximately 20 per cent.
If politicians really wanted to take measures to protect the interests of taxpayers, they would go after the 50 per cent of corporations which, according to the Ontario Auditor-General, didn't file tax returns in 2001.
As for those who have left the welfare rolls, there is good reason to believe that many are in worse shape than when they were trying to live on $520 a month. (A single person with no dependents receives $520.)
A 2001 report by the City of Toronto found that 33 per cent of people who were no longer receiving social assistance were in a worse financial situation than when they were on social assistance.
The jury examining the death of Rogers had access to these kinds of facts. However, in the current climate where poor people don't have the clout that middle-class and wealthy people have to garner media and political attention, and where politicians are keen to avoid complicated issues and blame easy targets, most of us hear a lot more rhetoric than facts.
Rhetoric can be seductive. It simplifies and provides easy scapegoats. Things are rarely so simple. Consider, for instance, that while 620,000 people may no longer be receiving social assistance, many have lost their housing and been forced into the shelter system.
Others will not have access to adequate medicine and food, necessitating more visits to hospital emergency rooms and food banks.
The problem with Progressive Conservative rhetoric extends well beyond issues of income security.
For example, the Tories have been relentless in their insistence that the private sector is often more efficient than the public sector and that more tax cuts mean a better economy.
However, the deaths of six people in Walkerton and the thousands left sick as a result of privatized water inspection, the tainted Alymer meat as a result of inadequate meat inspection, and the terrible state of our health-care system because of underfunding, are grim reminders that things are more complicated than many of our politicians would have us believe.
Rhetoric enables us to avoid hard, uncomfortable questions.
Rhetoric allows us to avoid confronting our choices, our silences and our complicity; our opportunities to examine systemic problems, to engage in questions about social equality and to think about what constitutes real security are undermined.
In the long run, we all lose by a politic characterized by rhetoric, scapegoating and shortsightedness. Surely, we are capable of refusing overly simplistic, nasty rhetoric in favour of asking hard questions, grappling with ideas and insisting that ours is a society where we are guided by facts and a commitment to social equality.
Ask candidates: Will you raise social assistance rates to reflect the actual costs of living? Will you raise the minimum wage so working people don't have to live in poverty? Will you implement the recommendations from the Rogers inquest?
Demand more of your political candidates.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sarah Blackstock is research and policy analyst and Jacquie Chic
director of advocacy at the Income
Security Advocacy Centre (ISAC)
Source: Toronto Star
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Page last updated September 29, 2003