Poverty advocates unimpressed

from The Hamilton Spectator

Reaction to the province's so-called Poverty Budget from poverty advocates, low income families and researchers ranged from the disdainful to the lukewarm.

"Poverty budget? I think it's a poverty budget because it's going to keep people in poverty," said a clearly unimpressed Kelly Hayes, a labour advocate and former NDP candidate who helped organize income security and living wage campaigns. Hayes was angry that the province will be taking three years to raise the minimum wage to the $10 mark.

In addition to the stepped hikes to the minimum wage, the 2007 Ontario budget promised more affordable day care spaces and 27,000 new subsidized housing allowances, and, the centrepiece of the budget, $2.1 billion over the next five years to create a new Ontario Child Benefit for low income families. When it's fully implemented in 2011, the OCB will give low income families (i.e. with incomes less than $20,000 a year) about $91 per child per month. But poverty advocates warned that the devil is in the details.

"The net benefit to a single mother with a one child will be about $50 a month," Sarah Blackstock of the Income Security Advocacy Centre said. But, she said, "it's a first step. The last time we had a premier talking about poverty he was telling welfare mothers to get off the couch and buy a can of dented tuna."

Rev. Wendy Roy, of St. Matthews House, said that while the budget offered working low-income families some much needed relief, it had little or nothing for everyone else. " I don't think single people in particular and others are gaining much at all -- it's one step forward and four steps backward."

Craig Foye, a poverty lawyer and member of the Income Security Working Group said the budget was a "first step. But the elephant in the room is the adequacy of social assistance rates. What we really need is an intelligent social assistance rate based on actual costs."