A state of constant dread - Poverty Today

from The Toronto Star

In 2007, hidden in plain sight, one in six Canadians lives in poverty. With this report on the working poor, the Star begins a long-term series aimed at shedding light on poverty and finding ways to ease the pain.

David Olive
Staff Reporter

If the poor weren't so conveniently invisible, maybe we'd come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty.

But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty are hidden in plain sight. They return from their minimum-wage work to a cot in a flophouse. They continue to live with an abusive spouse for lack of an alternative to the streets.

They live with fellow new Canadians, three or four to a room, in houses that should be condemned. They live in cramped quarters with parents or grown children. Some reside in cars or cube vans. Some get by on intermittent "Red Cross remittances" from distant relatives.

Even in Stephen Harper's minimalist Ottawa, it's hard to keep track of all the strategies. Canada has an Oceans Strategy, a Biotechnology Strategy, a Strategy to Combat Money Laundering, a Strategy to Protect Species at Risk, and a Georgia Basin/Puget Sound International Airshed Strategy.

But there's no strategy to lessen the suffering of the 5 million Canadians living in poverty, more than 1 million of them children. To reduce poverty to a mere memory for the 750,000 Canadians who rely on food banks, and for the 1 million working poor in Ontario alone who must find a way to raise their families on wages of less than $10 an hour, as calculated by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP).

In New Brunswick, the minimum wage is $6.70, lowest in the nation. But in the piecework factories in the Spadina Ave. garment district, hourly wages are even lower than that, due to lax enforcement of labour laws.

The remedies available to a wealthy nation determined to greatly reduce, if not eradicate, poverty are as plain as day. A higher minimum wage. Affordable housing. Skills upgrading. Pharmacare. Universal child care.

Increased social assistance payments, which by OCAP's estimate have dropped 40 per cent after inflation from their peak in the 1980s. Nothing you haven't heard about. All that's missing is political will.

And that will derives from public pressure, sadly lacking because impoverished people don't advertise their stigmatized plight. They don't have a ribbon campaign.

They are too busy working two jobs to organize, and to lobby politicians for a better shake the way recipients of corporate welfare do.

Peggy Nash, the NDP MP for Parkdale-High Park, hastens to say her private member's bill to raise the minimum wage to $10 for workers in banking, transportation, telecommunications and other sectors covered by federal labour law is no panacea.

"It's just a start, a renewed effort to get people talking about why a G-8 nation tolerates so much poverty and suffering," Nash says. "And with luck, it will encourage provincial governments to raise their minimum-wage levels."

Minimum wages affect relatively few people directly, but tend to lift incomes for tens of millions of people earning above the minimum wage since general wage levels move in tandem with them. "When you raise the minimum," says Nash, "you lift everyone, directly or indirectly," outside the Far North, at $8 an hour.

But the highest minimum wage in North America is Washington State's $9.33 (Canadian). In Israel, the minimum wage is $20.65 (Canadian).

Reliance on the minimum wage is higher in Canada, at 4.3 per cent of the workforce, than in the United States (1.4 per cent), but much lower than in France (15.6 per cent.).

There is a banality to poverty that works against urgent reform. Since few of us have as much money as we'd like, we think we know what it means to struggle to make ends meet. Somehow we manage, and expect others will as well.

Yet obviously that's not poverty.

"Poverty is fear, malnutrition, chronic bad health, loneliness, illiteracy and inadequate job skills and no time or money to upgrade them," Nash says.

"It's not knowing whether you and your kids will have a decent place to sleep next month."

Imagine yourself in a state of constant dread. That's poverty.

John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario poverty coalition ever since OCAP was founded in 1990, believes, like many anti-poverty activists, that only a widespread sense of outrage will rid us of this social evil.

"When OCAP was launched, I couldn't imagine that over its history the conditions of drab misery for poor citizens would actually worsen rather than improve," says Clarke. "I believe Canadians are concerned about homelessness, for instance. But passive indignation is not enough.

"You have to challenge these injustices endured by our fellow citizens. Because only when politicians see that the public is acting on its discontent with the status quo will we see a difference."

It's a peculiar situation. Canada's economy has been booming for years, and employers are coping with skills shortages amid a 30-year low in unemployment.

So for Nash, it doesn't make economic sense that the 15.5 per cent of us mired in poverty are held back from playing a bigger role in Canada's economic progress.

Nash is a former executive director of the Canadian Auto Workers union who was supervising elections in developing world nations before her own election to Parliament a year ago.

She makes no apologies for her social-justice motives. "Existing conditions are terribly punitive for the most vulnerable people in our society," she says.

But Nash also regards poverty as an economic crisis, not only a social one – a crisis of lost opportunity for a nation failing to make the best use of its existing and potential workforce.

"In the short term, a boost in the minimum wage is a stimulus for the entire economy, because poor people spend what little they have right away on food and clothing and books for their kids that they've been postponing in order to pay the rent," Nash says. By contrast, affluent recipients of windfalls tend to park them in the bank or a mutual fund.

And in the longer run, "the working poor are better able – with modestly higher incomes, decent shelter and affordable child care – to upgrade their job skills and obtain certification for better-paying work.

They become more social, they become more engaged citizens, and of course they start paying substantial taxes."

Clarke marvels that politicians with a laggard approach to poverty reform ignore the evidence that "poverty is simply not cost-efficient for the economy. Working people denied a decent living wage put extraordinary demands on the system.

"They turn to emergency wards because they can't afford preventive care. They help raise the costs of incarceration among poorly supervised kids whose parents are collectively working three or four jobs.

And they are a tax drain on the treasury in welfare payments to folks who could be paying taxes if they were provided some help in climbing out of poverty."

The minimum wage is suddenly a hot topic, with Ontario and Quebec recently announcing minimum wage increases.

And one of the few issues where U.S. President George W. Bush has agreed with the new Democratic Congress on the need for a minimum wage increase.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to raise the federal minimum wage by a whopping 41 per cent, to $7.25 (U.S.) per hour, the first increase in a decade.

Much more is needed, though.

In November, Canada's food banks association released its HungerCount 2006 report, in which it noted that a major segment of food bank clientele are working people who complain of not being able to obtain more than 25 hours of work per week from any given employer.

That prompts them to take on additional jobs – "working night and day, graveyard shifts and no time for their spouse and kids, and still not getting ahead," says Clarke.

The conditions described in the food bank report angered John Murphy, chairperson of the National Council for Welfare, an advisory body to the federal government's Human Resources and Social Development department.

"The continued high numbers of people who use food banks make it abundantly clear that too many Canadians struggle with hunger and poverty," Murphy said.

He added that, "Welfare incomes in every province remain far below the poverty line."

Balky employers also figure into the crisis of underemployed immigrants, a significant segment of the working poor.

"I've had difficulty with some of the professional accreditation bodies, who've put up a fight over supposedly doubtful skills of immigrants from certain regions," says Mike Colle, Ontario's minister of citizenship and immigration.

"But my biggest problem has been with employers," Colle says. "There's a general reluctance among private-sector employers to hire new Canadians.

"They worry about language issues and cultural fit with their existing workforce. There's a lot of bias to overcome."

A plan for coping with those biases would be integrated into the "comprehensive national anti-poverty strategy" called for by the National Council for Welfare.

"Countries like Ireland and the United Kingdom have made fighting poverty a priority," said Murphy, "as have Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador. Preventing and reducing poverty is essential if we are to have a strong and prosperous country."

For Hugh Mackenzie, a research associate on the Inequality Project at the Ottawa-based Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, three key elements of an anti-poverty strategy would be affordable housing, pharmacare and universal child care.

"Housing is fundamental to a decent standard of living," says Mackenzie. "A family's struggle to find housing sucks resources from nutrition and other essentials."

Almost 70,000 people in Toronto alone are on waiting lists for affordable housing.

Since going off traditional welfare means foregoing drug benefits, the absence of prescription drug coverage for working-poor families "keeps them from climbing the `welfare wall'," says Mackenzie.

"It's a barrier to mobility, to entering a workforce where drug coverage is so rare in retailing, restaurant, janitorial and other low-paying jobs."

And universal child care is essential "because we live in a society where as soon as kids are in school, parents are expected to work, almost always outside the home."

For single parents, of course, their status as sole breadwinner makes child care a necessity long before their children are of school age.

Nash is troubled by "an increasingly polarized society" in which the 100 highest-paid corporate CEOs in Canada are paid an average of $9 million a year, and the $22,000 raise that Ontario MPPs recently voted themselves exceeds Ontario's $19,032 in annual welfare assistance for a couple with two children (a 17.5 per cent drop since 1989).

Indeed, welfare recipients are the only income group in Canada that has suffered a decline in income.

Between 1989 and 2005, combined provincial-federal welfare assistance – even before adjusting for inflation – has declined by an average of 4.4 per cent.

"We have working-poor people deprived of a reasonable standard of living for the time and energy they give their employers," Nash says, "and we have CEOs treated like royalty.

That's not a recipe for social cohesion.

"Our market economy is marvellous at creating wealth. But there's so little fairness in how that wealth is distributed.

"These huge and growing extremes in wealth and poverty are not in anyone's interest."