One in Ten, One in Five

I've been working on an article about poverty lately and one of the facts that I found out totally gob smacked me:  the maximum monthly housing allowance under Ontario Works is only $390 for a single person. The Ontario Disability Support Program provides an only marginally better $497. This is not adjusted for local conditions---it's the same in high rent districts as in low. Just to put these numbers in a context, the National Rent Report just announced that the average one bedroom home in Guelph costs over $1500/month.

And it's not as if there is a large number of rent-geared-to-income housing for these people. The County social housing website says:

"The waiting time will vary depending on the housing location you choose and the number of bedrooms you need. For some areas it may be less than one year before you are housed, in other areas it may take over five years."

Since the hardest place to get social housing in Wellington County is in the city of Guelph (where most of the social services people need are, as well as the largest concentration of poor people in the county), and, the hardest sort of housing to get is a single apartment, this is probably where that "over five years" statement applies. (Here's a musical interlude c/o UB40---named after the form one used to apply for the dole.)

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I was complaining about these facts while having a beer with a friend and he made the mild comment "Yeah. I really find fault with the provincial Liberals that they had so much time in office and yet they never got around to dealing with this."

Kathleen Wynne---why did she wait so long?
Image from Ontario Liberal Party Website.
C/o Wiki Commons.

One of the things "nice people" are supposed to never do is try to figure out exactly why people do the things they do. Ascribing hidden motivations is something that will get you kicked out of Parliament and expelled from well-moderated discussion boards. But the question remains, why do our leaders do one thing as opposed to another? It's true that Kathleen Wynne tried to get a conversation started about bringing in a Guaranteed Annual Income---but why did she wait so long and why didn't Dalton McGinty try to improve things for people on welfare?

I've met Liz Sandals---our previous Liberal MPP and cabinet minister in the Wynne government---and talked to her at some length. I find it hard to believe that she is anything but a decent, caring person. In fact, I've met a lot of politicians over the years and I found many of them to be very concerned, decent people. The problem that I have is "How can such good people not do anything about such an outrageous situation?"

The problem with trying to figure out someone's real motivations is that you never really get a chance to know. I interviewed Sandals for a series of stories, but even retired she admitted that she was careful to not tell me what she really thought about everything. I understand why. If someone says something that people don't understand or misinterpret---or could be twisted into something it that could be seen as such---it can be hung around the neck of a politician like a dead rat. Once something like that happens, it can be almost impossible to remove, and, it can totally destroy an otherwise exemplary political career.

Dalton McGuinty
Why didn't he do anything at all?
Image by Sherurcij, c/o Wiki Commons.

Moreover, I know that for most of my lifetime a significant fraction of the voting public have a deep-seated, visceral hatred of poor people. One of the few times that I actually felt physically threatened while going door-to-door as a Green candidate was when I suggested that we could find some real savings in a specific government program that we could then use for something more useful---like increasing the amount of money given to people on welfare. The person I was talking to literally started shouting at me about "welfare bums". Another time I can remember conversing with a businessman in his restaurant where he calmly suggested that anyone on welfare should be shipped off to the North-West Territories and forced to plant trees.

The problem for politicians is that under our "First-Past-the-Post" system elections are won or lost by a very small change in people's votes. And the thing about issues like welfare is that it is something that gets a small percentage of the population "frothing mad". And these are exactly the sorts of people that will actually change how they vote if someone goes after people on welfare. That means that if 90% of the population believe in some general, vague way that welfare payments should be increased they can be totally ignored because they won't change their votes based on that issue. But if 10% are screaming mad about people getting anything at all, those folks will make or break an election campaign because they certainly will change their votes. This is what is known as a "wedge issue", and they are the "holy grail" of political parties.

The problems we face with regard to social assistance stem back to the 1995 election where Mike Harris ran on "The Common Sense Revolution". Among other things, two points that the Conservatives ran on were to get rid of photo radar and a reduction in social assistance payments. My belief is that these two issues were enough to push the Tories "over the top" so they could win a majority government with only a total of 44.8% of the popular vote. Once Harris got into power, he lived up to his campaign pledge and cut social assistance by over 21%. Indeed, he got rid of traditional welfare and replaced it with the current system called "Ontario Works".

I can remember when this happened. Almost over night the downtown core had beggars asking for spare change---something I had never seen before. 

Mike Harris, ex-Premier of Ontario.
You can blame him for a great deal of the poverty we see today.
Photo originally from the Manning Centre Flickr account, c/o the Wiki Commons. 

The problem isn't that a specific premier cut funding for welfare, the problem is that he found a path to power through attacking the poor. This taught an entire generation of progressive politicians that they couldn't increase taxes and redistribute it to the poor. If they did, they felt they'd never get into power, and all the other good things that they could do for the population---like fighting the climate emergency, building transit, providing good medical care, funding education programs, etc---would never get done. (Indeed, Ms. Sandals told me that she thinks that the reason why Wynne ended up so hated was because "she tried to do too much, too fast".) It also taught a generation of Conservative politicians that the best way to get to power is to fight tooth and nail against raising taxes, and that they can curb-stomp the poor and get away with it. 

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Just to let you know how the money subscribers gives me gets spent, I just bought two months advertising for the Back-Grounder in the local senior's magazine, The Sentinel. I'm doing this because I seem to have hit a plateau in how many local readers I can connect with through social media. 

Also, I just want to remind people about a few features on this website. 

If you find it hard to remember to look the website up, you can subscribe to it by email (just look on the right side where it says "Follow by Email"---and put in your address). If you do that, the blog will get automatically emailed to you when I publish it.

Also, there is an extensive "back catalogue" of stories. You can check out the "Blog Archive" and click on the little triangles next to the years and months. If you do that a list of article titles comes up with links that will take you where you want to go. Also, just under the "Subscribe by Email" function, there is a "Search This Blog". That will allow you to type in a keyword that will allow you to do a subject search for back articles.

Finally, if you don't feel comfortable using your credit card to support me, feel free to send me a cheque. Make it out to "Bill Hulet" and mail it to 124-A Surrey Street East, Guelph, N1H 3P9. (Cash is fine too---I have the odd person come up to me on the street and put money into my hands. Thanks Ann for being so awesome!) 

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This has been a disaster for a wide variety of reasons. And it's totally unnecessary. Our society is absolutely awash in money. I know that this is true because I can remember how much different things were when I was young. Smaller numbers of people now live in much bigger homes. Far more people own cars. Most folks in my parent's generation only traveled when they had a rifle in their hands and a helmet on their heads. I get reminded about the tremendous change in people's expectations whenever I hear someone complain about being poor and then seamlessly transitions to talking about their vacation trip overseas. (The only vacation I can remember my parents taking was an all-expenses paid trip to beautiful Chatham Ontario because my dad won a contest---and my brother and I were finally old enough to take care of the animals in his absence.)

Most middle-class people could easily afford a pay tax hike in order to help the poor among us. But the fact of the matter is that a wealth tax on the really well-off would be a much easier way of find the money we need to finance things like that. It isn't just a problem of money, either. If people would stop fighting tooth and nail against building new housing in this city, we might eventually have a chance at lowering the cost of finding a place to live. 

But underlying it all is the need for ordinary voters to start to grow a heart and start caring about the poor. Not just in a vague, general sense---but in the same way that the "haters" do. They have to be pissed off about poverty. They have to stop voting for the party they've always voted for if it won't deal with it. They have to quit the party their family has always supported and they grew up in---if it won't do anything about poverty. And they have to be like that guy who yelled at me when I was going door-to-door---only they need to scream at the politician who refuses to do anything more than spout empty platitudes. We need to make dealing with poverty a "wedge issue"---just like the way Mike Harris made one out of kicking the poor in the gut. 

Politicians only follow one key policy plank: "Get elected at all costs!" If voters won't punish them for ignoring the poor, don't blame the MPPs. 

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I recently bought a thumb drive of old music from James Gordon, Councillor for Ward 2. One of the absolute gems I found was the title song from his album One in Five. James is one of those "decent caring politicians" I mentioned above. But just remember, he has to get elected and he simply cannot go any further than the voters will let him. 

I couldn't find a YouTube, but this link will take you to the title song.
It's well worth the listen, as I think it is James at his best. 

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Furthermore, I say onto you the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!