Canada needs a poverty plan
WINNIPEG, MB--Margot Lavoie couldn't have known the humiliation of applying for social assistance until she found herself in a dismal lineup in a warehouse-like building at 111 Rorie Street.
"A voice out of nowhere told all the people who were here for welfare to line up at the door," says Lavoie. After sitting through a monotone slide presentation, everyone was told to go home.
'The whole tenor of it is, 'we don't trust you,'" says Lavoie, a member of the Mantioba Oblate Justice and Peace Committee. Lavoie went to the welfare office to give moral support to a recently widowed friend of hers who needed money and had nowhere else to turn.
"You mean to say I came here to have a slide presentation and I'm going home with nothing?" Lavoie's friend asked. She went home and dialed the social assistance office to make an appointment, as she had been told at the information session.
The receptionist told her they could pencil her in three weeks from now.
She had no money to pay rent.
"The whole atmosphere is very demeaning," says Lavoie. That's why she decided to attend a workshop on fighting poverty in May, presented by Citizens for Public Justice (CPJ).
'Canada does not have an official definition of poverty," says Chandra Pasma, a policy analyst for CPJ, an Ottawa-based Christian social justice lobby group.
In May Pasma and Trixie Ling held workshops in London, Winnipeg and Edmonton, urging Canadian Christians to join CPJ in a plea for the Canadian government to adopt a poverty reduction strategy.
A poverty reduction strategy would be a federal plan with a vision, measurable targets, a timeline, an action plan, budget and accountability.
Other countries, including Ireland and the United Kingdom have put such strategies to use with marked results. The UK cut child poverty by 23 per cent between 1999 and 2004.
In 1989 the House of Commons voted to set 2000 as a target date for ending child poverty in Canada. A report released last year by anti-poverty network Campaign 2000, shows 11.7 per cent of Canadian children living below the low-income cutoff point.
Poverty rates among children haven't budged since 1989.
Pasma also pointed out that one in three jobs in Canada is temporary, contract-based, part-time or self-employed. These jobs typically come with low wages, little stability and no benefits.
"In Canada we've made a self-fulfilling prophecy," Pasma told a crowd of 40 concerned Winnipeggers who attended the workshop. "We say nothing can be done, and then we do nothing."
"The responsibility lies with individuals and it lies with communities,' Pasma says. "But the government also has a leadership role to play.'
Pasma says CPJ has identified a key window of opportunity in which to influence the government to adopt a concrete poverty strategy. After meetings with MPs from three of the four parties in the House, CPJ reports that the Liberal, NDP and Bloc Quebecois parties are all prepared to support a poverty reduction strategy.
Pasma believes if Canadian Christians contacted their MPs now, the minority Conservative government might start to see a poverty strategy as an election issue.
"But only if you go home and write your MP tonight," Pasma told the crowd.
The best way for Canadians influence government is to write--or better yet--visit their MPs and ask for a commitment to a federal poverty reduction strategy to be included in the 2009 federal budget announcement, she said.
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