Ontario Election: Poverty issues take centre stage at all-party debate at University of Toronto

from Eye Weekly

Sean Kelly Keenan

With election-day in Ontario a mere two-weeks away, the issue of poverty is starting to catch fire on the campaign trail reports the Toronto Star today.

Talk of providing a “living wage” was at the forefront of an all-party debate at University of Toronto yesterday, with representatives from the Green Party, Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and the NDP squaring off over the issues of poverty and health.

NDP candidate for Scarborough-Rouge River, Sheila White, said that raising the minimum wage to $10 per hour is the most important thing government can do to combat poverty, while Green Party deputy leader and candidate for Brampton West, Dr. Sanjeev Goel, said $10 is nice, but the Communist Party’s plan to up it to $15 would be better. The Liberals continued to pound their own wage increase plan, saying that minimum wage will be $10.25 by the year 2010, and the PCs maintained that they would increase the wage gradually over time.

The event, organized by the Income Security Advocacy Centre, Health Providers Against Poverty and the Registered Nurses’ Association of Ontario, brought to light some disturbing statistics concerning the state of the province’s working poor. According to the article, recent figures show that one in seven Ontarians live in poverty, and of those, more than 232,000 have disabilities and 345,000 are children under the age of 18.

While the debate raged in Trinity-Spadina, leaders from the Progressive Conservatives and NDP party’s were out promoting some of the major tenets of their poverty reduction platforms at separate events yesterday.

Progressive Conservative leader John Tory put forward his party’s pledge to boost funding for families with children who have autism by $75 million in London yesterday.

And NDP leader Howard Hampton told Elliot Lake locals that he would pay for delisted health-services cut by the Liberals during their term in office yesterday, while today at the Sheraton Hotel he railed about the Liberal’s wage policies.

“Low paid workers will have to wait three years until a possibility of a $10-an-hour minimum wage — that’s if you believe his promise” and “Mr. McGuinty, with the help of (Progressive Conservative leader) John Tory gave himself an immediate $40,000 pay raise,” Hampton said.