I have not written here in a period of time, mostly because I am trying to build my business and develop a broader client base. At this time of the year, clients affected by economic crisis tend to strike out at everybody in their way and spread their hurt all over, including those that are trying to fix things for them. One Christmas a few years ago, a gentleman phoned my office to tell me he had a gun and was prepared to use it on himself. His sister ended up spending the holidays with him, though his words haunted me for a long time. This is why I try to take a few weeks off at Christmas time to get out of everybody's way, not because I celebrate anything or care about the crass consumerism known as Christmas.
Anyhow with the advent of recent federal by-elections, we heard so much about the middle class. I don't know about you, but I am frankly fed up with hearing about the so-called "middle class" when many of the people I deal with would be very happy just to belong in the "middle class". The media has it all wrong about us. During the summer, we're all supposed to be going to cottages, taking road trips and participating in sports, such as swimming, hiking and fishing. As voters, we are theoretically supposed to be too busy with our "families" in the summer and, as such, out of touch with politics. In the fall, kids are supposed to go back to school and parents are supposed to be paying at least $600 - $900 on back to school supplies and clothing, while parents of older children drive their kids off to universities or colleges, the tuition for which is being paid by them. I knew a lot of these kids. They were just as self-entitled in the 1980s and 1990s as many of them are today, living off Daddy's trust funds and blowing all their money on beer and parties. There are more serious students though, but we don't hear about them in the media, because these people are usually the mature students that go back to school, rely on OSAP and barely get enough to eat, let alone enough money for beer.
In a few days, there will be a day that is called Black Friday, which follows Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., and this sort of crass consumerism has crossed our borders to make us Canadians think we have to do it too. Oh, how we all are now suppose to drive across the border and shop and make an official start to our Christmas shopping ... Yeah, right. WHAT Christmas shopping, many of you are asking ... I don't even have to be there with you, but I know many of my readers barely have two pennies to scrape together to do any kind of Christmas shopping, let alone have families to go to during the holidays. Reality on the ground is too different than what it appears to be on TV, in the media and on reality shows ... even politicians have it wrong. During the last federal election, I couldn't shut off the TV fast enough when the clowns running for the federal Conservatives were going on about how they want to offer 'income splitting' for the average family, which they say earn a household average of $93,000 a year.
These clowns go on to offer -- if elected -- and if they bring the deficit down -- a big expensive tax cut that will allow families where it is possible for one high earner to transfer up to $50,000 of his income (or hers, too -- but we all know they are imagining high earning men and stay at home women to be their trophy wives). The man who likely earns a six figure income can then "save" on taxes by artificially transferring up to $50,000 of his earnings to his stay at home wife (or much lower earning wife), so he will only be taxed on the remaining income. This whole thing was concocted by the false dichotomy of pitting dual earner families against single earner families ... pretending again, the old Conservative way, that women really all want to stay home to care for their children and not go to work until after the fly the coop. Na da. Ain't happening, especially since tying the knot with anybody doesn't come with guarantees these days. Most families are two earners, simply because one salary doesn't cut it anymore.
The average expenses of a family tell us much more about our so-called make belief earnings that the media would like us to believe we have or can strive for. I live in a region that is packed full of low wage, low skilled, no future type jobs ... all this, for those who have turned fifty, worked in the plants all their lives and now were told their employer is moving to India or China or Indiana or Detroit, take your pick. We are supposed to believe our families average $93,000 a year, because our politicians tell us so when they are on the election trail. I would really like to invite these politicians into MY life and show them what is real and what is fantasy. I live in a house that is falling apart and I have no money to fix it. I live in a neighbourhood that has been losing amenities right, left and centre - all whilst the municipal politicians see fit to continue to increase my taxes. If this is the case, what am I getting more of? Certainly not services ... we are losing our schools, so kids can no longer walk to school. We lost the only two financial institutions that were here when we first bought the house. There are no more family style restaurants or recreational facilities. The west end of town also has no community centres, no supermarkets, no community agencies, no swimming pools (e.g. the one that was there was shut down and rebuilt in the north end where three indoor pools are within walking distance of where they put the "new" one, and those of us that must take the bus can't get to at night or on weekends). This tells you who the municipality serves - people that live in the neighbourhoods where all the amenities are all have money and usually drive.
Over the past few years, the only businesses that can thrive in my present neighbourhood are hair salons, low end bars, pawn shops, tattoo shops, convenience stores, fundamentalist churches, as well as other "businesses" which might be less than legal. Over the past two years, I've seen more tags on buildings, representing the settlement of self-identified gangs. I hear more about stabbings and shootings, let alone the fact I had personally handled cases that arose from this neighbourhood resulting from families being firebombed, a Muslim man getting beaten within an inch of his life and a family whose son recently killed himself. With the loss of the high school, I can imagine a sharp increase in drop-outs, along with an increased cycle of poverty. This is why I need to find a way to get rid of my house and get out of here before its value plummets and I end up owing more on it than I get for it.
My dream would be to leave this region, but until that is even possible, I need to get at least out of this 'hood. I've noticed a rash of home sales over the last year or so in this part of the city, or shall I call it town (because we still don't get city level amenities). Others have sort of stuck it out here, but then they are retired and are not going anywhere. The rest of the housing is going to student housing or rentals, with high turnover like many on my own street. Over the years, people have come and gone from this block. At one time, if one lived in the 'hood, they'd at least see other people's kids grow up and fulfil their dreams and have kids of their own, and so on. Unfortunately, this is not the kind of 'hood for that sort of thing. Many times, I long for community and the need to be part of something. The unfortunate thing is even if there were some of us in the 'hood that wanted to get together to do something about it, we have no place to meet, not even a decent restaurant where we can all gather for a coffee. Isolation breeds alienation.
We heard so much about a certain 'crack smoking' mayor of Toronto, which has hit not only all the Toronto media, but international media as well, including talk shows, late night comedies, comics, etc. I feel if there is any of that 'crack' being smoked, an awful lot of it must be smoked by city planners that make decisions, such as where transit routes go, where to locate municipal services, where to build schools, etc., but then again, the federal government didn't help matters when it chose to scrap the long form census and turned it into a National Household Survey which nobody really had to fill out. Whole neighbourhoods, age groups, social classes and so forth, were left out, because these being the "prototypes" who will be less likely to voluntarily complete such a thing, city planners even if they aren't on crack still won't have a clue as to what communities like my neighbourhood needs or what it is like to live here.
While the media continues to talk about the typical "middle class" who all have loving families to turn to, more than one vehicle to drive, a rich array of community services to go to, the media also tends to portray the "other Ontario" in a stereotypical way. The food bank, which seems to be another money grabbing machine, hogs a lot of publicity at this time of the year pretending to be the saviour of all the fallen souls and broken spirits this chronic depression left behind. Certainly, they are not necessarily stereotyping the poor, but they're doing nothing else for them either, such as what I'd want if I were to even visit an agency like that, and that is, to be pulled out of poverty and be given some hope for a future in my life. If all I am to be given is expired food rich with preservatives and artificial ingredients for three days and told to come back again two months from now, while their 'researchers' take down way too much information about me, I would just want to run ... run far away. It's time we shut these charities down and started pushing for policies that work.
While I never had much of a family while growing up, I certainly do have and value a strong sense of independence. That should be upheld by our society. That doesn't mean, society should just tell people in their darkest nights to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps", but no ... society should come together once more and find ways to get people out of desperate straits once and for all and to actually provide and promote the kind of equal opportunity that our current media pretends that our society still offers. That means we need to stop pretending that everything is fine for most of us, that most families are pulling down $80,000 to $90,000 in total household income, or that families can go back to the 1950s and rely in a single earner and get all their needs met. We need to stop living in the past, turn off the TV, put away that newspaper and start looking around you and talk to the people you see.
Instead of assuming certain people are certain ways because ... (fill in whatever self-blaming principle you think fits), we need to ask ourselves what we as a community can do to make things different enough so that the people we see who are in trouble can find themselves out of trouble and be able to stand on their own two feet, given resources that should be universally available and not just "targeted" to those "in need", or in other words, the "damaged goods", "the poor" or "less fortunate". We need to find ways so we rely less on charity and the goodwill of others, as fairweather as it might be, to fill our basic needs. We need to have what we all need in our own communities, our own neighbourhoods and our own homes what we need to maintain ourselves and live our lives out in dignity.
Until then, we must all fight and place the responsibility at the feet of our policy makers that want to make it hard for those who were not born with Daddy's trust account or one of the few remaining good jobs left on this planet, to get by and have a reasonable quality of life. An election is rumoured to be held in the spring of 2014, and the last thing I want to hear on the hustings is how a typical Ontario family lives, unless those making these statements have met and lived the lives of real people, such as the ones I am talking about.
Showing posts with label food banks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food banks. Show all posts
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Thursday, July 11, 2013
THERE IS NO DIGNITY IN CHARITY, BUT THERE IS WHEN WE ALL DEMAND EQUALITY
In the past few weeks, the news was filled with tragedy, ranging from a massive flood in parts of Alberta, the bombing of the Boston Marathon, a train wreck of a freight train carrying oil through a small Quebec village and the death of more than a dozen fire fighters fighting a fire in Arizona. With the news coverage, the public is presented with both heroes and villains, while both government and members of the community come together to provide whatever support the "innocent" victims of these tragedies need and deserve. Some of these tragedies are natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, while others are sparked by human error like the derailment of an oil freight train in Lac Megantic, Quebec. In any case, people are all around, while governments promise and deliver financial relief to individuals and families finding themselves in the thick of whatever happened. Thousands of families returned to their homes in Calgary, Alberta, to find they had to demolish their homes or they lost everything they had, while there is community support to bring these families back to at least a stable position once again. There is nothing wrong with lending a helping hand in these circumstances, or governments stepping in to provide aid when necessary, and for these circumstances, the public does not view this as a charitable act, but as a form of natural justice.
I wish Canadians and our respective governments would take the same approach to eliminating poverty in our country, which is otherwise blessed with wealth, resources and an abundance of talent. In the above scenarios depicted, most members of the public view these tragedies as being nobody's fault, or perhaps, being someone's fault, but not necessarily to the point of finger pointing or placing blame. Certainly, those who are directly suffering the effects of these tragedies are not being blamed for their circumstances and people all around want to ensure they are returned to a position of dignity. At the same time, our citizens and government still don't get the dignity part of this equation when it comes to eliminating poverty. We still want to blame the person who is poor for their circumstances, like they somehow brought it on themselves. It is as if these people woke up one day deciding they were going to get sick and unable to work, or they were going to find themselves at the other end of a layoff when the company they worked at for thirty years slams its door shut on them, or they decide to marry somebody who is later found to be an abusive alcoholic and in order to get out of the situation, they must turn to welfare.
First, before we try to understand our hegemonic concepts of what creates poverty and what solves it, we need to discuss issues of dominant theory and privilege. People have varying levels of privilege in our society, even though many people with privilege within the dominant culture are not always aware of how privileged they really are. I wrote in this column in the past about how people who have both their driver's licenses and access to their own reliable transportation tend to take this for granted, especially in a region like our own. They plan their days around their automobile, what routes they will take to their job or to their daily activities, and if they need to do anything else afterwards. Drivers usually have a pretty good idea how long it is going to take them to get to different places and usually know to allow more time in bad weather, or if they are going somewhere at a time there are likely thousands of others like them using the same roads they will be on, such as taking a trip to Toronto starting out at 8:00 a.m. here and holding out false hope they will get there by 9:30 a.m. That is why many commuters going there start their drive about 7:00 a.m., as they will more likely get there on time. The thought of leaving one's job and picking up their son after hockey, and then purchasing a few groceries on the way home is a minor detail for most people. However, take that car away, and the driver quickly finds out that their trip to work may or may not be accommodated by a bus, so a $30 taxi ride might be necessary each way. They would not likely be able to pick up their son from hockey or make a stop over for groceries on the way back, unless they want to pay additional taxi fare. They plan the groceries for a day they do not have to go anywhere else. As a consequence, the former driver realizes they have little time for their family, little time for themselves and much of their time is spent planning how to get places and when to go there. That is just one example of how privilege is instilled in people; how people in a position of privilege don't often realize how advantaged they are until that advantage is somehow taken away from them.
In our community, most people seem to believe in charity and goodwill towards others. People believe in these things because they naturally feel a need to "give back" to the community. We are socialized to believe that we all come from some type of privilege and how important it is to "help the less fortunate". There is nothing wrong with that. I do not object to the motive; I object to the method. The method of "giving back" to the so-called "less fortunate" is riddled with hegemonic ideas that are created by this same privilege and in many ways, serves to protect the privilege that people feel they have, as opposed to bringing the so-called "less fortunate" into a position of equal privilege themselves. We give to food banks because we feel we need to feed the hungry, but rarely do we hear from the hungry about what they need. We volunteer at nursing homes to keep an elder companionship, but rarely do we ask if there is a better environment this person could be in. We support the development of "affordable" and "subsidized" housing because we believe that nobody should have to sacrifice their basic necessities for the high price of shelter, but we don't ask what residents of social housing really aspire to become. We continue to donate to "charity" because we believe they are a "good cause" and in many cases, they are, but more and more, we are discovering that not all charities are equally effective at achieving their goals. While there seems to be a growing awareness of members of the donating public about how monies are being spent in a charity, as well as how much is being used to advance the reason for that charity's existence, we have not yet come around to ask the real questions that need to be asked. These questions surround the issue of what the charity is actually doing and if they are actually achieving anything for those they purport to serve.
I know these kinds of questions. My husband lost his mother last year to a rare form of cancer. For many months prior to her death and seemingly eternally after her death, he ranted on about how "billions" of dollars are being donated and/or granted to cancer research and cancer organizations, but there never seems to be a cure. We continue to see people die from the disease. One begins to become cynical, wondering if there really was a cure out there, how many of these people that currently work for these organizations or partake in this research and so forth would lose their jobs. It creates an industry of its own. "Cancer Can Be Beaten" is a mantra that was played over and over in my day, while today, we continue to have the same amount of cancer, but the Cancer Society appears to be replacing its mantra with other phrases, while millions more of us continue to die of the disease. The same applies to diabetes, a disease I suffer from and relentlessly curse because of bad genetics, poor health and disadvantage in my day, but to no surprise, there is also a significant diabetes industry out there. Many organizations "benefit" per se with the alleged tsunami of diabetes hitting our communities. There are organizations to educate people with diabetes, dieticians to set up meal plans for people with diabetes, doctors to prescribe and treat people with diabetes, clinics to test and assess the progress of diabetic treatment in individuals (e.g. A1C tests), charities to raise funds to provide support and find a "cure" for diabetes, as well as bemoan the world over with apocalyptic thinking how ten percent of our population will soon be afflicted. There is talk of a cure, improved medications, improved forms of insulin management, and greater knowledge, but no cure again for this disease!
This brings me back to the concept of both industry and privilege and how it deals with the concept of eliminating poverty. People who are not poor are the ones that are currently setting up and benefiting from programs and services that are supposed to "help" the poor. There are services of all kinds delivered to poor people, from food banks, soup kitchens, budgeting classes, housing agencies, counselling services, drop in centres, homeless shelters, street workers, etc., but no program in sight to help the poor become NOT poor anymore. For most poor people, what is needed is more money. Instead of spending "billions" of dollars, as my husband describes, on more "services" to make poverty more comfortable for the poor, perhaps these "billions" can instead be given to the poor people themselves and let THEM decide how to spend it. This is not only a scary thought for those who work in and are in particular, paid to provide "services" to, the poor -- it is seen as politically untenable. Yet when a city experiences a major flood, a small village in Quebec is struck with an exploding freight train, or the country of Haiti is struck with a god-awful earthquake, there is NO LIMIT to the amount of money and resources people think should be spent to get these people out of their straitened circumstances. After all, they are there by no fault of their own. I wish we would think the same way about the poor here in Canada.
As I said, nobody woke up one day to decide they were going to have a horrible accident at work that would leave them disabled and unemployed. Nobody woke up to plan their spouse on leaving them, trading them in for a new model. Nobody woke up to decide to become ill enough to make finding and keeping a job difficult, if not impossible. Nobody when asked what they want to be when they grow up, chooses "welfare" to be the career they want to have. These things happen. Programs like Worker's Compensation, Social Assistance, Old Age Security, Unemployment Insurance and Medicare, were created for a reason. Unfortunately, too many people are buying into the idea that only if people relied more on their neighbours, their families, their communities, to support them through rough patches, and then there would be no need for welfare, worker's compensation, minimum wages, and so on. Well, think again. We were in this position before, and if it worked so well, why is this not still the case? Perhaps, there was a time when capitalism began to show its cracks and we learned of its imperfections, which are leaving many people behind, either intentionally or unintentionally. As our recessions become deeper and longer, the only solution big business has to offer is to cut back further on these "entitlement" programs, so that people will have less "incentive" to use them and just get a job. Oh, if it was only that easy. I always ask those that make these assumptions if they know where they are hiring the thousands of people that seem to have chosen day after day recently to be unemployed and dependent on the pittance they get from welfare or unemployment insurance.
Niagara Region was recently determined by the Adzuna Group to be the worst place in Canada to find a job if you are unemployed, whereby there are allegedly 100 job seekers for every job vacancy. In the current way of thinking, the other 99 people simply chose to remain on social assistance because that lifestyle is so easy. The answer they give us to cut these programs even further. I have yet to see how this helps. Perhaps, if we withheld any aid to those people in Lac Megantic or to those flooded out in Calgary, perhaps these people will just learn to save their money for rainy days for now on and not live so close to the damn train tracks, right? The pre-historic thinking that surrounds the elimination of poverty needs to be eliminated as well. We need to fight poverty as hard as we fight to bring people involved in the above referred tragedies back to their normal lives to the best of our abilities.
We have to stop thinking about food banks and shelters and so forth as being the answer, but instead try to understand how continuing and perpetuating these sorts of programs keeps poverty intact and helps no one. Feeding somebody today is fine, but the same person will be hungry again tomorrow. What are we going to do about this? Are we going to continue to erode the dignity and prosperity of an increasing portion of our population by dividing our communities into donors/heroes and recipients of charity/helpless beings? Or are we going to recognize that the dominant culture that we live in is as much at fault as the economy at keeping this segment of the population down. Or is it that we fear that if we empower those we serve with the same privileges and rights to participate in the community that you and I have taken for granted will somehow take something away from you? Food banks didn't grow out of nature; they were invented in 1981 in the city of Edmonton. Since that time, this concept has grown and become institutionalized, whereby way too damn many of us have become smug and feel we are doing our part by donating to food banks, even partaking in food drives, thinking we are doing anything for those in need, when in fact, we still have not yet asked those in need what they really want to do with their lives, have we?
There is an important element of dignity at play here, which is something that we all need to keep in mind. We also like to believe that to continue to do what we do will continue to distance the poor and their problems from our own lives, to keep us in the privileged positions that we might someday be aware that we are in, but even this does nothing of the sort. We need to take steps to the elimination of poverty, put the responsibility for this situation at the feet of those that can do something about it and despite their pleadings to the contrary, can damn well afford it too. That is, business needs to start creating jobs that pay well and investing in our communities. Governments needs to stop paying businesses not to hire and not to invest, while tax breaks after unconditional tax breaks keep getting handed to them year over year, while it is so clear that there is a growing gap in wealth, the middle class is bleeding and that damned Emperor is walking down Bay Street buck naked! Let's start asking the questions of ourselves and demand answers. Let's stop assuming that hunger is "being dealt with" and that a massive restructuring of our society and our thinking is in order, in order for not only for us to maintain our position, but to keep the rest of us from falling further into despair and desperation at the hands of the one percent minority that none of us want to have control us.
Your thoughts?
I wish Canadians and our respective governments would take the same approach to eliminating poverty in our country, which is otherwise blessed with wealth, resources and an abundance of talent. In the above scenarios depicted, most members of the public view these tragedies as being nobody's fault, or perhaps, being someone's fault, but not necessarily to the point of finger pointing or placing blame. Certainly, those who are directly suffering the effects of these tragedies are not being blamed for their circumstances and people all around want to ensure they are returned to a position of dignity. At the same time, our citizens and government still don't get the dignity part of this equation when it comes to eliminating poverty. We still want to blame the person who is poor for their circumstances, like they somehow brought it on themselves. It is as if these people woke up one day deciding they were going to get sick and unable to work, or they were going to find themselves at the other end of a layoff when the company they worked at for thirty years slams its door shut on them, or they decide to marry somebody who is later found to be an abusive alcoholic and in order to get out of the situation, they must turn to welfare.
First, before we try to understand our hegemonic concepts of what creates poverty and what solves it, we need to discuss issues of dominant theory and privilege. People have varying levels of privilege in our society, even though many people with privilege within the dominant culture are not always aware of how privileged they really are. I wrote in this column in the past about how people who have both their driver's licenses and access to their own reliable transportation tend to take this for granted, especially in a region like our own. They plan their days around their automobile, what routes they will take to their job or to their daily activities, and if they need to do anything else afterwards. Drivers usually have a pretty good idea how long it is going to take them to get to different places and usually know to allow more time in bad weather, or if they are going somewhere at a time there are likely thousands of others like them using the same roads they will be on, such as taking a trip to Toronto starting out at 8:00 a.m. here and holding out false hope they will get there by 9:30 a.m. That is why many commuters going there start their drive about 7:00 a.m., as they will more likely get there on time. The thought of leaving one's job and picking up their son after hockey, and then purchasing a few groceries on the way home is a minor detail for most people. However, take that car away, and the driver quickly finds out that their trip to work may or may not be accommodated by a bus, so a $30 taxi ride might be necessary each way. They would not likely be able to pick up their son from hockey or make a stop over for groceries on the way back, unless they want to pay additional taxi fare. They plan the groceries for a day they do not have to go anywhere else. As a consequence, the former driver realizes they have little time for their family, little time for themselves and much of their time is spent planning how to get places and when to go there. That is just one example of how privilege is instilled in people; how people in a position of privilege don't often realize how advantaged they are until that advantage is somehow taken away from them.
In our community, most people seem to believe in charity and goodwill towards others. People believe in these things because they naturally feel a need to "give back" to the community. We are socialized to believe that we all come from some type of privilege and how important it is to "help the less fortunate". There is nothing wrong with that. I do not object to the motive; I object to the method. The method of "giving back" to the so-called "less fortunate" is riddled with hegemonic ideas that are created by this same privilege and in many ways, serves to protect the privilege that people feel they have, as opposed to bringing the so-called "less fortunate" into a position of equal privilege themselves. We give to food banks because we feel we need to feed the hungry, but rarely do we hear from the hungry about what they need. We volunteer at nursing homes to keep an elder companionship, but rarely do we ask if there is a better environment this person could be in. We support the development of "affordable" and "subsidized" housing because we believe that nobody should have to sacrifice their basic necessities for the high price of shelter, but we don't ask what residents of social housing really aspire to become. We continue to donate to "charity" because we believe they are a "good cause" and in many cases, they are, but more and more, we are discovering that not all charities are equally effective at achieving their goals. While there seems to be a growing awareness of members of the donating public about how monies are being spent in a charity, as well as how much is being used to advance the reason for that charity's existence, we have not yet come around to ask the real questions that need to be asked. These questions surround the issue of what the charity is actually doing and if they are actually achieving anything for those they purport to serve.
I know these kinds of questions. My husband lost his mother last year to a rare form of cancer. For many months prior to her death and seemingly eternally after her death, he ranted on about how "billions" of dollars are being donated and/or granted to cancer research and cancer organizations, but there never seems to be a cure. We continue to see people die from the disease. One begins to become cynical, wondering if there really was a cure out there, how many of these people that currently work for these organizations or partake in this research and so forth would lose their jobs. It creates an industry of its own. "Cancer Can Be Beaten" is a mantra that was played over and over in my day, while today, we continue to have the same amount of cancer, but the Cancer Society appears to be replacing its mantra with other phrases, while millions more of us continue to die of the disease. The same applies to diabetes, a disease I suffer from and relentlessly curse because of bad genetics, poor health and disadvantage in my day, but to no surprise, there is also a significant diabetes industry out there. Many organizations "benefit" per se with the alleged tsunami of diabetes hitting our communities. There are organizations to educate people with diabetes, dieticians to set up meal plans for people with diabetes, doctors to prescribe and treat people with diabetes, clinics to test and assess the progress of diabetic treatment in individuals (e.g. A1C tests), charities to raise funds to provide support and find a "cure" for diabetes, as well as bemoan the world over with apocalyptic thinking how ten percent of our population will soon be afflicted. There is talk of a cure, improved medications, improved forms of insulin management, and greater knowledge, but no cure again for this disease!
This brings me back to the concept of both industry and privilege and how it deals with the concept of eliminating poverty. People who are not poor are the ones that are currently setting up and benefiting from programs and services that are supposed to "help" the poor. There are services of all kinds delivered to poor people, from food banks, soup kitchens, budgeting classes, housing agencies, counselling services, drop in centres, homeless shelters, street workers, etc., but no program in sight to help the poor become NOT poor anymore. For most poor people, what is needed is more money. Instead of spending "billions" of dollars, as my husband describes, on more "services" to make poverty more comfortable for the poor, perhaps these "billions" can instead be given to the poor people themselves and let THEM decide how to spend it. This is not only a scary thought for those who work in and are in particular, paid to provide "services" to, the poor -- it is seen as politically untenable. Yet when a city experiences a major flood, a small village in Quebec is struck with an exploding freight train, or the country of Haiti is struck with a god-awful earthquake, there is NO LIMIT to the amount of money and resources people think should be spent to get these people out of their straitened circumstances. After all, they are there by no fault of their own. I wish we would think the same way about the poor here in Canada.
As I said, nobody woke up one day to decide they were going to have a horrible accident at work that would leave them disabled and unemployed. Nobody woke up to plan their spouse on leaving them, trading them in for a new model. Nobody woke up to decide to become ill enough to make finding and keeping a job difficult, if not impossible. Nobody when asked what they want to be when they grow up, chooses "welfare" to be the career they want to have. These things happen. Programs like Worker's Compensation, Social Assistance, Old Age Security, Unemployment Insurance and Medicare, were created for a reason. Unfortunately, too many people are buying into the idea that only if people relied more on their neighbours, their families, their communities, to support them through rough patches, and then there would be no need for welfare, worker's compensation, minimum wages, and so on. Well, think again. We were in this position before, and if it worked so well, why is this not still the case? Perhaps, there was a time when capitalism began to show its cracks and we learned of its imperfections, which are leaving many people behind, either intentionally or unintentionally. As our recessions become deeper and longer, the only solution big business has to offer is to cut back further on these "entitlement" programs, so that people will have less "incentive" to use them and just get a job. Oh, if it was only that easy. I always ask those that make these assumptions if they know where they are hiring the thousands of people that seem to have chosen day after day recently to be unemployed and dependent on the pittance they get from welfare or unemployment insurance.
Niagara Region was recently determined by the Adzuna Group to be the worst place in Canada to find a job if you are unemployed, whereby there are allegedly 100 job seekers for every job vacancy. In the current way of thinking, the other 99 people simply chose to remain on social assistance because that lifestyle is so easy. The answer they give us to cut these programs even further. I have yet to see how this helps. Perhaps, if we withheld any aid to those people in Lac Megantic or to those flooded out in Calgary, perhaps these people will just learn to save their money for rainy days for now on and not live so close to the damn train tracks, right? The pre-historic thinking that surrounds the elimination of poverty needs to be eliminated as well. We need to fight poverty as hard as we fight to bring people involved in the above referred tragedies back to their normal lives to the best of our abilities.
We have to stop thinking about food banks and shelters and so forth as being the answer, but instead try to understand how continuing and perpetuating these sorts of programs keeps poverty intact and helps no one. Feeding somebody today is fine, but the same person will be hungry again tomorrow. What are we going to do about this? Are we going to continue to erode the dignity and prosperity of an increasing portion of our population by dividing our communities into donors/heroes and recipients of charity/helpless beings? Or are we going to recognize that the dominant culture that we live in is as much at fault as the economy at keeping this segment of the population down. Or is it that we fear that if we empower those we serve with the same privileges and rights to participate in the community that you and I have taken for granted will somehow take something away from you? Food banks didn't grow out of nature; they were invented in 1981 in the city of Edmonton. Since that time, this concept has grown and become institutionalized, whereby way too damn many of us have become smug and feel we are doing our part by donating to food banks, even partaking in food drives, thinking we are doing anything for those in need, when in fact, we still have not yet asked those in need what they really want to do with their lives, have we?
There is an important element of dignity at play here, which is something that we all need to keep in mind. We also like to believe that to continue to do what we do will continue to distance the poor and their problems from our own lives, to keep us in the privileged positions that we might someday be aware that we are in, but even this does nothing of the sort. We need to take steps to the elimination of poverty, put the responsibility for this situation at the feet of those that can do something about it and despite their pleadings to the contrary, can damn well afford it too. That is, business needs to start creating jobs that pay well and investing in our communities. Governments needs to stop paying businesses not to hire and not to invest, while tax breaks after unconditional tax breaks keep getting handed to them year over year, while it is so clear that there is a growing gap in wealth, the middle class is bleeding and that damned Emperor is walking down Bay Street buck naked! Let's start asking the questions of ourselves and demand answers. Let's stop assuming that hunger is "being dealt with" and that a massive restructuring of our society and our thinking is in order, in order for not only for us to maintain our position, but to keep the rest of us from falling further into despair and desperation at the hands of the one percent minority that none of us want to have control us.
Your thoughts?
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
ON PUNISHING THE POOR AND WHY POVERTY PROFITS SOME
The Agenda did a serious entitled "Why Poverty?".
Normally, The Agenda can present some interesting topics that people want to hear and they do bring in guests that can speak intelligently on these issues. This show is a refreshing change to what is usually found online where people blame the poor for their own circumstances and propose even more rules on them to keep them apart from others. It is somehow believed by the "average Joe" that poor people are more likely, for example, to have addictions, but the research on the issue does not bear this out. Chances are greater that one's colleague at the next desk or their boss is likely to be addicted, when compared to welfare recipients. Why isn't anybody proposing to test these people for drug use?
The Agenda first had Frances Lankin and Munir Sheikh, the authors of the quintessential social assistance review report, to discuss their final report and what they felt it would mean. As you are aware, I am no fan of this report and feel that even if it were fully implemented, not a single person on assistance affected by the report will ever get out of poverty. Unfortunately, I feel that both Lankin and Sheikh swallowed too much of the same Kool Aid that is being distributed among people in coffee shops, people driving stop and go on the Gardiner Expressway and people that feel that "if I work, why should THEY be allowed to sit at home?"
This is so frustrating, as the crux of their report essentially pits the so called working poor against those receiving either Ontario Works (OW) or Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) benefits. Apparently, they think there are too many people on ODSP and want to stem the tide of people getting on. They also want to get some people off it through their own version of workfare that will theoretically cover everyone, including those with severe disabilities and even terminal illnesses (similar to the way they do in the UK). They further want to put more responsibilities and management on the municipalities, which over time will ensure major cuts to programs for the poor because municipalities do not have the same taxing power that the provincial and federal government have. Because most municipalities are loathe to increase property taxes and user fees, they will look to cuts first and benefits for the poor are low hanging fruit.
The current situation with municipalities where people living in some communities can access a rich array of benefits, while others in other communities can only get the bare bones will only be further enhanced with the province's choices of its own priorities, such as: giving rich people tax cuts, giving rich seniors a "healthy home tax credit" to do repairs they will probably do anyways without the tax credit, and pouring more money in corporate welfare to various companies with the hope -- even the faintest hope -- that these companies will hire people off the welfare and disability rolls. Even companies that want to "champion" people with disabilities don't know the first thing about the true potential of people with disabilities. A government office will hire people with disabilities to water plants. An insurance company will hire a few in their mail room. A publisher/newspaper will hire some to deliver their publications. Higher level jobs that involve higher skills and higher pay will still be remote for people with disabilities, even among those that have the required skills for these jobs.
Barriers to employment will persist even with the report's full implementation. As one person told Steve Paikin's producer at The Agenda, "There are no other working people in Ontario that have fifty percent of their wages taken off, even though we pay the same taxes that everybody else does". The report recommends scrapping the $100 work allowance and raising the "earnings exemption" to $200 per month for both OW and ODSP recipients. I bet it cost YOU much more than $200 a month to keep your job, let alone even get one in the first place. Thank about the price of gas, car insurance, work clothing, lunches, coffee breaks, dry cleaning, haircuts, and in some cases, cell phone and internet access if required. The total bill for these basic items exceeds $500 - $600 per month for most people. You might not think so, but for those of you that have retired, you will note that you don't have to drive as much, don't need to dress up, can eat at home and can throw away the cell phone.
If you went to work and paid the normal taxes and deductions you normally do, plus lost fifty percent of what is left over, how much more willing would you be to work more hours, take on a second job, especially if your job does not provide much security and benefits? For those who are self employed, it is worse. Anybody in Ontario can start and run a business of their own. Canada Revenue Agency has rules that allow for certain deductions and tax rates for base levels of income, and depending on how your business is set up, Canada Revenue Agency is fairly permissive around such issues as hiring staff, investing in equipment, work related clothing, mileage and even something called "business meals". That is, if you have to work long hours and need to grab a bite to eat, or you are meeting with a potential client over lunch, the cost of this can be written off by fifty percent. The situation is totally different for self employed also in receipt of OW or ODSP.
Self employed people on OW or ODSP are not permitted to hire staff, so the business owner has to do absolutely everything in their business by themselves, which often means cutting into the time they could have to actually grow the business and make money. The government appears to believe that people with disabilities are only capable of running low skill, low cost home based businesses, such as dog walking, baby sitting, or envelope stuffing. After all, this is what employers would hire them to do anyways. This same thread of ignorance that crosses over for prospective employees with disabilities also affects the kind of businesses one can have. When somebody shows or demonstrates that they can operate a business that has more skill required, as well as a potential to get them completely off benefits altogether, OW and ODSP rules sabotage any attempt on the business owner to get ahead.
They are not allowed to hire staff. If their company is incorporated, the income the corporation receives (as opposed to the individual) is counted as income, which leads to the corporation being unable to retain earnings and keeping a base from which to pay taxes and other bills that only come periodically. The person is not allowed their CRA deductions, such as "business meals", work clothing or transportation beyond what is considered "reasonable". They cannot go to conferences and conventions unless the person is earning an income from this attendance, even if their profession or business requires this attendance. The OW or ODSP recipient has to choose to pay their business taxes or eat each month, or pay their commercial rent or to purchase clothes for their kids. There is no distinction made between the person with the business and the business itself, which leads to loss. Even the monies that are "left over" after approved expenses are ravaged and cannot be set aside to pay taxes later or to save for a large expense, or even contribute to a meaningful retirement plan. Nope. These people are not allowed to retire, unless they are satisfied with the dumpster diving level of income people without a private pension will likely get when they hit 67.
The social assistance review report ignored this issue entirely even though they claimed to be in favour of work incentives. Yet at the same time, I speak to many business owners as well as people on OW and ODSP that have paying jobs that actually quit because it is more financially beneficial for them to sit at home and pick their nose. When I raise the issue of treatment of business income, I get the same runaround that somehow OW and ODSP doesn't cover the business, just the person. Hello? Since when did OW or even ODSP cover all the basic needs of the person? Does ODSP even cover the full cost of one's housing, including utilities? Most people are paying between 70 - 80% of their entire month's income on shelter. To say that a business run out of one's home cannot write off part of the housing costs is ridiculous, as ODSP does not cover all the housing costs. This applies to food too. I am not aware of anybody that works and receives benefits that actually get INCREASED benefits to cover the cost of working, etc. True, they get a $100 "work allowance", but this is soon negated by the 50% claw back of everything else a person earns.
Further, the argument that this is taxpayers' money doesn't sit with me either, especially when governments hand out billions of dollars in corporate welfare and tax breaks to companies year over year that contribute little to the economy, and few have actually used these breaks to create new jobs. If we want to cut welfare, let's start cutting from the rich first. At least, they won't feel it as much. They may have to give up their fourth vacation and cruise to the Carribean or give up one of their Mercedes or rent out one of their five homes they own, but these people are still eating and living somewhere safe -- even without a penny in tax cuts or corporate welfare.
Another argument often given is that everybody is assessed on family income and it affects their tax credits. Guess what? Earned income affects the tax credits of OW and ODSP recipients too. The more they earn from employment or self employment, the less that family receives in tax credits, while at the same time, their total household income actually drops that more that they do work. If millionaires had to follow the same rules, they would have moved to Aruba a long time ago!
At the same time, poor people are told to accept charity. I haven't met anybody that has used a charity that was helped to escape poverty through that charity. The charities in question benefit from the poverty of its users. If nobody lived in poverty, the directors of these charities wouldn't have a job, nor would anybody have a reason to go crying to the papers about stocking their shelves with old, sub-nutritious processed foods that to be honest, few would even feed their pets. Charities are also uneven and do not follow any set of rules when determining eligibility for services. Privacy is compromised against its users all the time, while the agency just writes it off as a "mistake" (despite the fact this 'mistake' in question could have cost somebody their job or custody of their children). My advice to the poor -- stay away from charities, unless they allow for anonymity and do not use a means test.
What is needed for people living in poverty is to be included and be supported in this inclusion. Inclusion means different things to different people. For some, it means getting their food at the same places that others get their food. For others, it means being able to get to community events and meetings without having to beg or to depend on others for a ride. Niagara Region is bad for this sort of thing. It recently held a high profile conference on accessibility issues for people with disabilities at yet another location that one has to drive to in order to be included. If you do not drive, or do not own a car, then you are not included, despite the fact this conference was theoretically set up to discuss issues related to accessibility. The less people feel included, the less they feel they are valued as a member of the community.
This feeling of value of oneself, of one's own person, does not come from handouts of aged, rotting food from a food bank, a lice laden homeless shelter or some kind of afterthought given to people that don't drive in arranging rides to a meeting. I've experienced it in Niagara, where even when a ride has been arranged to get to a meeting, one has to find their way back -- usually about another $100 in taxi fares, because most areas of Niagara are not accessible to people with disabilities that do not have their own means of transportation. Niagara's only so called poverty group also meets in an inaccessible location, which again excludes many people that can provide input around that table. As a result, the voices of the non poor and service providers are the only ones that get heard, once again somebody else that gets paid to "help" the poor determining what poor people need.
We have to protest against downloading to the municipalities. Doing this will only encourage future cuts of greater depth with little or nothing that can be done to reverse them. Already the so called program that is going to replace the provincial Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit in Niagara will only be available to people on OW. I get told to protest this to the region. Many people already have, but our region has its own priorities, which usually involve goods and services that benefit the non poor and the police services (e.g. a $100 million new police palace in Niagara Falls, for one). Our region talks about the GTA Expressway, as though this is going to encourage thousands of new jobs ... even if it does, not one of these jobs will be available to the poor, as most of the poor do not have vehicles. These jobs will likely be located along this new highway, where one would need a car to get to anyways. Why did I have to file a lawsuit against this region just so they can set up some type of starter regional transit between the three main cities (but nowhere else), in order to get them to move on it as opposed to continuing to talk for another forty years? Now, some regional councilors are attempting to sabotage this pilot project by pushing for its discontinuation. It is a safe bet that none of these dinosaurs would be willing to drive me between cities when I need to go outside of my own city to work on different files, etc. if they got their way. It is also a safe bet that not a single one of these regional councilors are without a personal vehicle. Chances are they each have three or four of them in their driveway.
Privilege breeds ignorance. People who live in privilege have no idea what others that live with less privilege or without privilege altogether actually live like, or what they need. Privileged people should not be in a position to make decisions about people without privilege, because of this willful blindness most of them tend to have. I notice that our regional councilors and city councilors cry poor and whine about seniors that cannot pay more property taxes, as a reason for them to cut essential services further. Yet these same seniors are the ones that miraculously can afford to upgrade and renovate their homes and will now, thanks to Dalton McGuinty, receive a tax credit for it too. The so called "poor seniors" or the truly poor seniors are already unable to live in their own homes and have had already moved to subsidized housing, the home of a child or sibling, or even to a nursing home, and very little of this has to do with property taxes ... it has to do with their income in general. With a net retirement income of approximately $1,300 a month for a single senior that no longer has coverage for dental, assistive devices, etc. cannot afford to live in their own home - period! While this is not the fault of the municipalities, I wish our local politicians would stop lying to the people about this, because most of the retirees that are able to live in their own homes have private pensions, thanks the generation before me that actually had job opportunities that meant something.
The province needs to UPLOAD, not to DOWNLOAD. Municipalities should not be in the business of delivering social services of any kind. Municipalities should be only responsible for predictable programs, services and infrastructure that do not ebb and flow wildly with the economy like social services do. Services like libraries, public transit, road maintenance, sewage and water treatment, bridges, community centers, certain recreational programs, police and fire departments, are examples of municipal services that should be run locally. Social assistance of any kind, including OW, ODSP, social housing, employment support services, health and addiction services, senior's support services and so forth, should be run and paid for provincially, even though local offices can operate programs at the local level. This way, expenses that fluctuate can be covered as required without having to raise property taxes, which by the way, impacts on the supply of affordable housing in any local area.
Most of the rules that govern OW and ODSP need to be eliminated if they actually expect people to work, or accept any kind of employment. Stop clawing back half the income of people when they take a job. Stop counting the income and assets of spouses and older children when they take a job or run a business. For those interested in starting a business, they should have no more rules to follow than anybody else that runs a business and in fact, they should be able to hire, fire, incorporate, invest, retire, do whatever they need to do with the business to help them earn an income. Because until the government is ready to do real social assistance reform, which is not going to cost a whole lot more than what it does now, the vast majority of OW and ODSP recipients are better off sitting at home.
Normally, The Agenda can present some interesting topics that people want to hear and they do bring in guests that can speak intelligently on these issues. This show is a refreshing change to what is usually found online where people blame the poor for their own circumstances and propose even more rules on them to keep them apart from others. It is somehow believed by the "average Joe" that poor people are more likely, for example, to have addictions, but the research on the issue does not bear this out. Chances are greater that one's colleague at the next desk or their boss is likely to be addicted, when compared to welfare recipients. Why isn't anybody proposing to test these people for drug use?
The Agenda first had Frances Lankin and Munir Sheikh, the authors of the quintessential social assistance review report, to discuss their final report and what they felt it would mean. As you are aware, I am no fan of this report and feel that even if it were fully implemented, not a single person on assistance affected by the report will ever get out of poverty. Unfortunately, I feel that both Lankin and Sheikh swallowed too much of the same Kool Aid that is being distributed among people in coffee shops, people driving stop and go on the Gardiner Expressway and people that feel that "if I work, why should THEY be allowed to sit at home?"
This is so frustrating, as the crux of their report essentially pits the so called working poor against those receiving either Ontario Works (OW) or Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) benefits. Apparently, they think there are too many people on ODSP and want to stem the tide of people getting on. They also want to get some people off it through their own version of workfare that will theoretically cover everyone, including those with severe disabilities and even terminal illnesses (similar to the way they do in the UK). They further want to put more responsibilities and management on the municipalities, which over time will ensure major cuts to programs for the poor because municipalities do not have the same taxing power that the provincial and federal government have. Because most municipalities are loathe to increase property taxes and user fees, they will look to cuts first and benefits for the poor are low hanging fruit.
The current situation with municipalities where people living in some communities can access a rich array of benefits, while others in other communities can only get the bare bones will only be further enhanced with the province's choices of its own priorities, such as: giving rich people tax cuts, giving rich seniors a "healthy home tax credit" to do repairs they will probably do anyways without the tax credit, and pouring more money in corporate welfare to various companies with the hope -- even the faintest hope -- that these companies will hire people off the welfare and disability rolls. Even companies that want to "champion" people with disabilities don't know the first thing about the true potential of people with disabilities. A government office will hire people with disabilities to water plants. An insurance company will hire a few in their mail room. A publisher/newspaper will hire some to deliver their publications. Higher level jobs that involve higher skills and higher pay will still be remote for people with disabilities, even among those that have the required skills for these jobs.
Barriers to employment will persist even with the report's full implementation. As one person told Steve Paikin's producer at The Agenda, "There are no other working people in Ontario that have fifty percent of their wages taken off, even though we pay the same taxes that everybody else does". The report recommends scrapping the $100 work allowance and raising the "earnings exemption" to $200 per month for both OW and ODSP recipients. I bet it cost YOU much more than $200 a month to keep your job, let alone even get one in the first place. Thank about the price of gas, car insurance, work clothing, lunches, coffee breaks, dry cleaning, haircuts, and in some cases, cell phone and internet access if required. The total bill for these basic items exceeds $500 - $600 per month for most people. You might not think so, but for those of you that have retired, you will note that you don't have to drive as much, don't need to dress up, can eat at home and can throw away the cell phone.
If you went to work and paid the normal taxes and deductions you normally do, plus lost fifty percent of what is left over, how much more willing would you be to work more hours, take on a second job, especially if your job does not provide much security and benefits? For those who are self employed, it is worse. Anybody in Ontario can start and run a business of their own. Canada Revenue Agency has rules that allow for certain deductions and tax rates for base levels of income, and depending on how your business is set up, Canada Revenue Agency is fairly permissive around such issues as hiring staff, investing in equipment, work related clothing, mileage and even something called "business meals". That is, if you have to work long hours and need to grab a bite to eat, or you are meeting with a potential client over lunch, the cost of this can be written off by fifty percent. The situation is totally different for self employed also in receipt of OW or ODSP.
Self employed people on OW or ODSP are not permitted to hire staff, so the business owner has to do absolutely everything in their business by themselves, which often means cutting into the time they could have to actually grow the business and make money. The government appears to believe that people with disabilities are only capable of running low skill, low cost home based businesses, such as dog walking, baby sitting, or envelope stuffing. After all, this is what employers would hire them to do anyways. This same thread of ignorance that crosses over for prospective employees with disabilities also affects the kind of businesses one can have. When somebody shows or demonstrates that they can operate a business that has more skill required, as well as a potential to get them completely off benefits altogether, OW and ODSP rules sabotage any attempt on the business owner to get ahead.
They are not allowed to hire staff. If their company is incorporated, the income the corporation receives (as opposed to the individual) is counted as income, which leads to the corporation being unable to retain earnings and keeping a base from which to pay taxes and other bills that only come periodically. The person is not allowed their CRA deductions, such as "business meals", work clothing or transportation beyond what is considered "reasonable". They cannot go to conferences and conventions unless the person is earning an income from this attendance, even if their profession or business requires this attendance. The OW or ODSP recipient has to choose to pay their business taxes or eat each month, or pay their commercial rent or to purchase clothes for their kids. There is no distinction made between the person with the business and the business itself, which leads to loss. Even the monies that are "left over" after approved expenses are ravaged and cannot be set aside to pay taxes later or to save for a large expense, or even contribute to a meaningful retirement plan. Nope. These people are not allowed to retire, unless they are satisfied with the dumpster diving level of income people without a private pension will likely get when they hit 67.
The social assistance review report ignored this issue entirely even though they claimed to be in favour of work incentives. Yet at the same time, I speak to many business owners as well as people on OW and ODSP that have paying jobs that actually quit because it is more financially beneficial for them to sit at home and pick their nose. When I raise the issue of treatment of business income, I get the same runaround that somehow OW and ODSP doesn't cover the business, just the person. Hello? Since when did OW or even ODSP cover all the basic needs of the person? Does ODSP even cover the full cost of one's housing, including utilities? Most people are paying between 70 - 80% of their entire month's income on shelter. To say that a business run out of one's home cannot write off part of the housing costs is ridiculous, as ODSP does not cover all the housing costs. This applies to food too. I am not aware of anybody that works and receives benefits that actually get INCREASED benefits to cover the cost of working, etc. True, they get a $100 "work allowance", but this is soon negated by the 50% claw back of everything else a person earns.
Further, the argument that this is taxpayers' money doesn't sit with me either, especially when governments hand out billions of dollars in corporate welfare and tax breaks to companies year over year that contribute little to the economy, and few have actually used these breaks to create new jobs. If we want to cut welfare, let's start cutting from the rich first. At least, they won't feel it as much. They may have to give up their fourth vacation and cruise to the Carribean or give up one of their Mercedes or rent out one of their five homes they own, but these people are still eating and living somewhere safe -- even without a penny in tax cuts or corporate welfare.
Another argument often given is that everybody is assessed on family income and it affects their tax credits. Guess what? Earned income affects the tax credits of OW and ODSP recipients too. The more they earn from employment or self employment, the less that family receives in tax credits, while at the same time, their total household income actually drops that more that they do work. If millionaires had to follow the same rules, they would have moved to Aruba a long time ago!
At the same time, poor people are told to accept charity. I haven't met anybody that has used a charity that was helped to escape poverty through that charity. The charities in question benefit from the poverty of its users. If nobody lived in poverty, the directors of these charities wouldn't have a job, nor would anybody have a reason to go crying to the papers about stocking their shelves with old, sub-nutritious processed foods that to be honest, few would even feed their pets. Charities are also uneven and do not follow any set of rules when determining eligibility for services. Privacy is compromised against its users all the time, while the agency just writes it off as a "mistake" (despite the fact this 'mistake' in question could have cost somebody their job or custody of their children). My advice to the poor -- stay away from charities, unless they allow for anonymity and do not use a means test.
What is needed for people living in poverty is to be included and be supported in this inclusion. Inclusion means different things to different people. For some, it means getting their food at the same places that others get their food. For others, it means being able to get to community events and meetings without having to beg or to depend on others for a ride. Niagara Region is bad for this sort of thing. It recently held a high profile conference on accessibility issues for people with disabilities at yet another location that one has to drive to in order to be included. If you do not drive, or do not own a car, then you are not included, despite the fact this conference was theoretically set up to discuss issues related to accessibility. The less people feel included, the less they feel they are valued as a member of the community.
This feeling of value of oneself, of one's own person, does not come from handouts of aged, rotting food from a food bank, a lice laden homeless shelter or some kind of afterthought given to people that don't drive in arranging rides to a meeting. I've experienced it in Niagara, where even when a ride has been arranged to get to a meeting, one has to find their way back -- usually about another $100 in taxi fares, because most areas of Niagara are not accessible to people with disabilities that do not have their own means of transportation. Niagara's only so called poverty group also meets in an inaccessible location, which again excludes many people that can provide input around that table. As a result, the voices of the non poor and service providers are the only ones that get heard, once again somebody else that gets paid to "help" the poor determining what poor people need.
We have to protest against downloading to the municipalities. Doing this will only encourage future cuts of greater depth with little or nothing that can be done to reverse them. Already the so called program that is going to replace the provincial Community Start Up and Maintenance Benefit in Niagara will only be available to people on OW. I get told to protest this to the region. Many people already have, but our region has its own priorities, which usually involve goods and services that benefit the non poor and the police services (e.g. a $100 million new police palace in Niagara Falls, for one). Our region talks about the GTA Expressway, as though this is going to encourage thousands of new jobs ... even if it does, not one of these jobs will be available to the poor, as most of the poor do not have vehicles. These jobs will likely be located along this new highway, where one would need a car to get to anyways. Why did I have to file a lawsuit against this region just so they can set up some type of starter regional transit between the three main cities (but nowhere else), in order to get them to move on it as opposed to continuing to talk for another forty years? Now, some regional councilors are attempting to sabotage this pilot project by pushing for its discontinuation. It is a safe bet that none of these dinosaurs would be willing to drive me between cities when I need to go outside of my own city to work on different files, etc. if they got their way. It is also a safe bet that not a single one of these regional councilors are without a personal vehicle. Chances are they each have three or four of them in their driveway.
Privilege breeds ignorance. People who live in privilege have no idea what others that live with less privilege or without privilege altogether actually live like, or what they need. Privileged people should not be in a position to make decisions about people without privilege, because of this willful blindness most of them tend to have. I notice that our regional councilors and city councilors cry poor and whine about seniors that cannot pay more property taxes, as a reason for them to cut essential services further. Yet these same seniors are the ones that miraculously can afford to upgrade and renovate their homes and will now, thanks to Dalton McGuinty, receive a tax credit for it too. The so called "poor seniors" or the truly poor seniors are already unable to live in their own homes and have had already moved to subsidized housing, the home of a child or sibling, or even to a nursing home, and very little of this has to do with property taxes ... it has to do with their income in general. With a net retirement income of approximately $1,300 a month for a single senior that no longer has coverage for dental, assistive devices, etc. cannot afford to live in their own home - period! While this is not the fault of the municipalities, I wish our local politicians would stop lying to the people about this, because most of the retirees that are able to live in their own homes have private pensions, thanks the generation before me that actually had job opportunities that meant something.
The province needs to UPLOAD, not to DOWNLOAD. Municipalities should not be in the business of delivering social services of any kind. Municipalities should be only responsible for predictable programs, services and infrastructure that do not ebb and flow wildly with the economy like social services do. Services like libraries, public transit, road maintenance, sewage and water treatment, bridges, community centers, certain recreational programs, police and fire departments, are examples of municipal services that should be run locally. Social assistance of any kind, including OW, ODSP, social housing, employment support services, health and addiction services, senior's support services and so forth, should be run and paid for provincially, even though local offices can operate programs at the local level. This way, expenses that fluctuate can be covered as required without having to raise property taxes, which by the way, impacts on the supply of affordable housing in any local area.
Most of the rules that govern OW and ODSP need to be eliminated if they actually expect people to work, or accept any kind of employment. Stop clawing back half the income of people when they take a job. Stop counting the income and assets of spouses and older children when they take a job or run a business. For those interested in starting a business, they should have no more rules to follow than anybody else that runs a business and in fact, they should be able to hire, fire, incorporate, invest, retire, do whatever they need to do with the business to help them earn an income. Because until the government is ready to do real social assistance reform, which is not going to cost a whole lot more than what it does now, the vast majority of OW and ODSP recipients are better off sitting at home.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
A POVERTY-REDUCTION PLAN THAT ISN'T...
The federal budget was what I predicted it to be.
A mish mash of handouts to big corporations, tax cuts, as well as billions of dollars in spending on so-called infrastructure. There was some promise of reform to EI, which it seems fewer and fewer people get each year, but this came up short whereby people are essentially getting nearly what they got ten years ago from EI and the same stringent criteria continues on. In my view, this budget does not put one more meal on anybody's table or another penny in anybody's pocket, other than those who already do okay.
I learned one so-called bright light yesterday as I watched Prime Minister Stephen Harper with his full set of teeth, sans blue sweater and hair greyer than it was before Christmas ... side by side with Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty, appearing skinnier and geekier than he ever was, both announcing new funds for better GO Train service in the Metrolynx boundaries, which of course do not go as far as Niagara.
Henceforth, when I attempted last year to get some answers as to why the GO Train is not even being considered for Niagara, the answers were sort of what I expected. First, you need to have a strong transit infrastructure, as well as convenient parking spaces for GO users. If you lived in Welland, for instance, and didn't drive, a GO Train service leaving Niagara Falls or St. Catharines would be useless to you. How are you going to get to the GO station? Even if the powers that be insisted on putting GO service here, they would defeat its purpose and not take a single car off the road, as there will still be too many of them, zinging from all points of the region to get to the GO station. This still does not change the fact that Niagara is more expensive to live in because having a car and driver's license is still your sole ticket to citizenship.
Poverty activists want to focus on the "housing" announcements. As I stated before, I see no point in making housing a social service. Housing is a necessary commodity, much like food, clothing and clean air. Unfortunately, "housing" in the eyes of many of these people comes attached to social workers that want to control the lives of more people who end up living in this "housing". To me, the less control you put into somebody's life, the better quality of life they have, but then I never have the final say in these things.
Further, others cry for "subsidized" housing or rent-geared-to-income housing. I have tried, but have been unsuccessful, in getting these folks to tell me how this takes people out of poverty. As one fellow blogger under the name of co-opcracy writes, working is counterproductive if one is living in subsidized housing and receiving some type of benefit, such as social assistance or even ODSP. First, ODSP chops your net earnings in half from the very first dollar and then "housing" increases the rent to a point of an additional clawback of thirty five cents on every dollar. Once the earnings are grossed up at the end of a year, even more money is lost. The intelligent and prudent thing to do when in this situation is to stay at home and eat your bonbons.
Further, because subsidies are calculated at far below the maximum "shelter" allowance given for social assistance and ODSP incomes, one would receive far less benefits from social assistance or ODSP than they would if they were housed in the free market. This means one's income would continuously remain under the so-called "poverty line". While housing costs are lower, this does not stop other costs such as food, clothing, transportation, telephone and other costs from skyrocketing. How subsidized housing reduces poverty has always been a trouble spot for me, possibly because of my background as a policy analyst as well as lived experience.
Thinking from the centre is not mediocre for sure. I get attacked from both the left and the right for my views, instead of either/or. I ask questions, but don't get answers. I own my own home, but still I am flat broke. What help is there for me? Certainly, me, my family and thousands of other homeowners in the same boat are not going to sell and move to some unit where they will be under the thumb of some crazy bureaucracy. People need to be as independent as possible, as well as free to advance their circumstances, or else poverty will become a permanent fixture in our society -- bringing even potentially middle-class families down with it.
I would tell the government to save the billions of dollars they would otherwise spend to build units of this type, but instead use it to increase the money in the pockets of individuals and families, so that people actually have choices. Right now, the low-income contingent of our society has no choices. They are told to live as their social worker tells them to, which is to never make a mistake ... therefore, never learn from them. They are told to live within their means, but are never given the means to live. They are told to "get a job", but employers are not told to hire such persons or to pay the people they have decently. As usual, society wants the poor to play a single handed tango, while the other partner can watch and criticize. How can we as a society possibly value people who have been so disadvantaged that we have to instinctively reach out and control their lives, as opposed to giving them choices and opportunities ... yes, some of these folks will fail, but then again -- many of us who have never been in this situation have also failed, many of us miserably.
How many so-called "normal" people have bankruptcies on their record? How many so-called "normal" people can't seem to ever lose weight? What about all those successful professionals that turn to drugs and alcohol to deal with the stress of it all? What about so-called "normal" people who drive a car one day and forget to do the all-important shoulder check and get into a horrible motor vehicle accident? How many "normal" people are smokers? How about the typical friend of ours that always seems to "pick" abusive partners? The rest of us herein do not have strangers telling us what we should be spending our money on, whether or not we should be driving a car, or whether we can manage our own bank accounts. So why are we allowed to pass judgment on those less fortunate than we are? Are we trying to block the way for the poor from becoming less poor, and perhaps, grabbing a bit of dignity while they're at it?
To me, there is maximum dignity in having choices and opportunities. Those of us who have had these things take them for granted. We "assume" that everybody else also has these things, or had them at one time. Then, we bash them for making "bad choices" or "failing to take advantage of opportunities" (even though they were likely never given any). This is not a leftist rant here. I have a legal practice full of people from all walks of life, some of whom were very advantaged and cultured, others that cannot understand what life would be like for them if they could make their own basic choices. The latter have had the system make choices for them all their lives: they were told where to live, had their money spent for them, what to wear and who to be friends with ... never being allowed to choose is tantamount to imprisonment.
I grew up in a rough kind of way. As a young adult, just before securing my post-secondary education and so-called empowerment as a professional person, I knew two things. One, people must have the right to make choices, even bad choices. Two, people have the right to have access to opportunities to advance themselves and improve their quality of life. I got into a lot of trouble for my beliefs. Many social work types tried to downplay my ideas and tell me to be more "realistic" and insist a certain portion of the population continue to be spoon-fed (while the social worker types continued to get good pay cheques for doing so).
When somebody is living on ODSP and in subsidized housing, they do not have the opportunity to advance themselves and improve their financial situation. Their efforts become like a hamster on a spinning wheel, whereby they work harder and harder but end up in the same place. For every dollar they earn, they lose just as much. People in "housing programs" have even less choices, as many of these programs disallow overnight guests, alcohol use, earning money from a home-based business, etc. I've seen people evicted from so-called "mental health housing" for stopping their own medications. This leaves people with no choice. When you can only make the "right" choice, you cannot make ANY choices.
When you take away the choices of people, you take away their dignity. You also reduce the value that society will have of that person. When people feel we have to make decisions for others for whatever reason, we are not valuing that person's own opinion, own tastes or own desires, nor are we allowing that person to fully develop as a mature human being. When we don't value somebody in this way, these folks DO feel it. They feel it when they have to go to the food bank to get their groceries. They feel it when somebody tells them where they have to live and what they can do and can't do when they live there. They feel it when nobody appears concerned about their lack of opportunities and options.
I meet people who want to move out of subsidized housing all the time. This is very difficult to do. Several relatives of my husband were living in subsidized housing twenty-five years ago when I met him and despite marriage, children growing up, etc., they continue to live that way today, as do their children. Enforced poverty breeds enforced poverty. This provincial government promises to "break the cycle" in one breath and even names its poverty reduction plan the same thing, while at the same time, wants to entrap more people ... this makes no sense to me. Open the doors, I want to say ... and make employers open them too.
Today, the employment standards development draft went to public review. This is from one of the committees I sit on, except with the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario ... where for the better part of a year, three dozen people worked hard to put together a set of standards we will be expecting of employers, spanning between one and five years from now, with respect to the hiring, retention, training and accommodations for persons with disabilities. To me, the standards don't go far enough, but we were working within a certain regulatory framework ... a framework that has to fit within the province's business model as well as reach the goal of bringing more qualified persons with disabilities into the paid labour force.
I am hoping that folks reading this will review the proposed standard on its website and send their input to the stated body on how our standard can be improved to meet the needs of persons with disabilities and get more of them into the workforce. The standard can be found by clicking here to the website. Your input must be given by April 15, 2009, in any of the given ways provided by the webmaster.
While access to employment and business opportunities will help improve the outcomes for people with disabilities, we also need to focus on bringing them out of poverty. Poverty is the killer of the soul. It is punishment for a crime one never committed. It kills any initiative one might have even had before they became poor. Both a focused effort on reducing and eventually eliminating poverty through the development of opportunity and increased access to meaningful choices in improving one's well being and quality of life, is what is needed. This would envelope both the needs of persons that can and want to work, as well as those that cannot.
We have to defeat the poverty industry, the set of organizations, leaders and spokespersons, that make a living or gain personal notoriety on the backs of the poor. These are the people that run the food banks, the homeless shelters, the "housing" programs, vouchers, consumer/survivor drop-in centres, etc. without considering that the people they are "helping" should learn how to fish some day and be given the tools and the right to do so. If this means some of the people in the poverty industry lose their jobs, so be it ... if one were an effective leader in a sense, this would not be a worry for them whatsoever.
I am very concerned that some of these organizations are now asking for government money. Should taxpayers be funding food banks, or should they be financing programs that allow people to choose and purchase their own food? Should taxpayers be funding homeless shelters and "housing programs" or should we be funding initiatives that help put money into people's pockets to the point they can reasonably choose where and how to live (within reason, of course ... not everybody's going to move to Forest Hill or Bridal Path).
What is really needed when the day is done are ideas on how to make this happen, not how to bolster the status quo, which we all know has failed us miserably. Your thoughts?
A mish mash of handouts to big corporations, tax cuts, as well as billions of dollars in spending on so-called infrastructure. There was some promise of reform to EI, which it seems fewer and fewer people get each year, but this came up short whereby people are essentially getting nearly what they got ten years ago from EI and the same stringent criteria continues on. In my view, this budget does not put one more meal on anybody's table or another penny in anybody's pocket, other than those who already do okay.
I learned one so-called bright light yesterday as I watched Prime Minister Stephen Harper with his full set of teeth, sans blue sweater and hair greyer than it was before Christmas ... side by side with Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty, appearing skinnier and geekier than he ever was, both announcing new funds for better GO Train service in the Metrolynx boundaries, which of course do not go as far as Niagara.
Henceforth, when I attempted last year to get some answers as to why the GO Train is not even being considered for Niagara, the answers were sort of what I expected. First, you need to have a strong transit infrastructure, as well as convenient parking spaces for GO users. If you lived in Welland, for instance, and didn't drive, a GO Train service leaving Niagara Falls or St. Catharines would be useless to you. How are you going to get to the GO station? Even if the powers that be insisted on putting GO service here, they would defeat its purpose and not take a single car off the road, as there will still be too many of them, zinging from all points of the region to get to the GO station. This still does not change the fact that Niagara is more expensive to live in because having a car and driver's license is still your sole ticket to citizenship.
Poverty activists want to focus on the "housing" announcements. As I stated before, I see no point in making housing a social service. Housing is a necessary commodity, much like food, clothing and clean air. Unfortunately, "housing" in the eyes of many of these people comes attached to social workers that want to control the lives of more people who end up living in this "housing". To me, the less control you put into somebody's life, the better quality of life they have, but then I never have the final say in these things.
Further, others cry for "subsidized" housing or rent-geared-to-income housing. I have tried, but have been unsuccessful, in getting these folks to tell me how this takes people out of poverty. As one fellow blogger under the name of co-opcracy writes, working is counterproductive if one is living in subsidized housing and receiving some type of benefit, such as social assistance or even ODSP. First, ODSP chops your net earnings in half from the very first dollar and then "housing" increases the rent to a point of an additional clawback of thirty five cents on every dollar. Once the earnings are grossed up at the end of a year, even more money is lost. The intelligent and prudent thing to do when in this situation is to stay at home and eat your bonbons.
Further, because subsidies are calculated at far below the maximum "shelter" allowance given for social assistance and ODSP incomes, one would receive far less benefits from social assistance or ODSP than they would if they were housed in the free market. This means one's income would continuously remain under the so-called "poverty line". While housing costs are lower, this does not stop other costs such as food, clothing, transportation, telephone and other costs from skyrocketing. How subsidized housing reduces poverty has always been a trouble spot for me, possibly because of my background as a policy analyst as well as lived experience.
Thinking from the centre is not mediocre for sure. I get attacked from both the left and the right for my views, instead of either/or. I ask questions, but don't get answers. I own my own home, but still I am flat broke. What help is there for me? Certainly, me, my family and thousands of other homeowners in the same boat are not going to sell and move to some unit where they will be under the thumb of some crazy bureaucracy. People need to be as independent as possible, as well as free to advance their circumstances, or else poverty will become a permanent fixture in our society -- bringing even potentially middle-class families down with it.
I would tell the government to save the billions of dollars they would otherwise spend to build units of this type, but instead use it to increase the money in the pockets of individuals and families, so that people actually have choices. Right now, the low-income contingent of our society has no choices. They are told to live as their social worker tells them to, which is to never make a mistake ... therefore, never learn from them. They are told to live within their means, but are never given the means to live. They are told to "get a job", but employers are not told to hire such persons or to pay the people they have decently. As usual, society wants the poor to play a single handed tango, while the other partner can watch and criticize. How can we as a society possibly value people who have been so disadvantaged that we have to instinctively reach out and control their lives, as opposed to giving them choices and opportunities ... yes, some of these folks will fail, but then again -- many of us who have never been in this situation have also failed, many of us miserably.
How many so-called "normal" people have bankruptcies on their record? How many so-called "normal" people can't seem to ever lose weight? What about all those successful professionals that turn to drugs and alcohol to deal with the stress of it all? What about so-called "normal" people who drive a car one day and forget to do the all-important shoulder check and get into a horrible motor vehicle accident? How many "normal" people are smokers? How about the typical friend of ours that always seems to "pick" abusive partners? The rest of us herein do not have strangers telling us what we should be spending our money on, whether or not we should be driving a car, or whether we can manage our own bank accounts. So why are we allowed to pass judgment on those less fortunate than we are? Are we trying to block the way for the poor from becoming less poor, and perhaps, grabbing a bit of dignity while they're at it?
To me, there is maximum dignity in having choices and opportunities. Those of us who have had these things take them for granted. We "assume" that everybody else also has these things, or had them at one time. Then, we bash them for making "bad choices" or "failing to take advantage of opportunities" (even though they were likely never given any). This is not a leftist rant here. I have a legal practice full of people from all walks of life, some of whom were very advantaged and cultured, others that cannot understand what life would be like for them if they could make their own basic choices. The latter have had the system make choices for them all their lives: they were told where to live, had their money spent for them, what to wear and who to be friends with ... never being allowed to choose is tantamount to imprisonment.
I grew up in a rough kind of way. As a young adult, just before securing my post-secondary education and so-called empowerment as a professional person, I knew two things. One, people must have the right to make choices, even bad choices. Two, people have the right to have access to opportunities to advance themselves and improve their quality of life. I got into a lot of trouble for my beliefs. Many social work types tried to downplay my ideas and tell me to be more "realistic" and insist a certain portion of the population continue to be spoon-fed (while the social worker types continued to get good pay cheques for doing so).
When somebody is living on ODSP and in subsidized housing, they do not have the opportunity to advance themselves and improve their financial situation. Their efforts become like a hamster on a spinning wheel, whereby they work harder and harder but end up in the same place. For every dollar they earn, they lose just as much. People in "housing programs" have even less choices, as many of these programs disallow overnight guests, alcohol use, earning money from a home-based business, etc. I've seen people evicted from so-called "mental health housing" for stopping their own medications. This leaves people with no choice. When you can only make the "right" choice, you cannot make ANY choices.
When you take away the choices of people, you take away their dignity. You also reduce the value that society will have of that person. When people feel we have to make decisions for others for whatever reason, we are not valuing that person's own opinion, own tastes or own desires, nor are we allowing that person to fully develop as a mature human being. When we don't value somebody in this way, these folks DO feel it. They feel it when they have to go to the food bank to get their groceries. They feel it when somebody tells them where they have to live and what they can do and can't do when they live there. They feel it when nobody appears concerned about their lack of opportunities and options.
I meet people who want to move out of subsidized housing all the time. This is very difficult to do. Several relatives of my husband were living in subsidized housing twenty-five years ago when I met him and despite marriage, children growing up, etc., they continue to live that way today, as do their children. Enforced poverty breeds enforced poverty. This provincial government promises to "break the cycle" in one breath and even names its poverty reduction plan the same thing, while at the same time, wants to entrap more people ... this makes no sense to me. Open the doors, I want to say ... and make employers open them too.
Today, the employment standards development draft went to public review. This is from one of the committees I sit on, except with the Accessibility Directorate of Ontario ... where for the better part of a year, three dozen people worked hard to put together a set of standards we will be expecting of employers, spanning between one and five years from now, with respect to the hiring, retention, training and accommodations for persons with disabilities. To me, the standards don't go far enough, but we were working within a certain regulatory framework ... a framework that has to fit within the province's business model as well as reach the goal of bringing more qualified persons with disabilities into the paid labour force.
I am hoping that folks reading this will review the proposed standard on its website and send their input to the stated body on how our standard can be improved to meet the needs of persons with disabilities and get more of them into the workforce. The standard can be found by clicking here to the website. Your input must be given by April 15, 2009, in any of the given ways provided by the webmaster.
While access to employment and business opportunities will help improve the outcomes for people with disabilities, we also need to focus on bringing them out of poverty. Poverty is the killer of the soul. It is punishment for a crime one never committed. It kills any initiative one might have even had before they became poor. Both a focused effort on reducing and eventually eliminating poverty through the development of opportunity and increased access to meaningful choices in improving one's well being and quality of life, is what is needed. This would envelope both the needs of persons that can and want to work, as well as those that cannot.
We have to defeat the poverty industry, the set of organizations, leaders and spokespersons, that make a living or gain personal notoriety on the backs of the poor. These are the people that run the food banks, the homeless shelters, the "housing" programs, vouchers, consumer/survivor drop-in centres, etc. without considering that the people they are "helping" should learn how to fish some day and be given the tools and the right to do so. If this means some of the people in the poverty industry lose their jobs, so be it ... if one were an effective leader in a sense, this would not be a worry for them whatsoever.
I am very concerned that some of these organizations are now asking for government money. Should taxpayers be funding food banks, or should they be financing programs that allow people to choose and purchase their own food? Should taxpayers be funding homeless shelters and "housing programs" or should we be funding initiatives that help put money into people's pockets to the point they can reasonably choose where and how to live (within reason, of course ... not everybody's going to move to Forest Hill or Bridal Path).
What is really needed when the day is done are ideas on how to make this happen, not how to bolster the status quo, which we all know has failed us miserably. Your thoughts?
Thursday, December 25, 2008
AND MAY YOUR CHRISTMAS BE A CHARMED ONE ...
Christmas was always one of my favourite times of the year. It is not so much the giving and receiving of presents, but the presence of others that saves me from myself. After all, Christmas is one of the few times of the year I can truly take time off, as others are more involved in other aspects of their lives and are less concerned with legal hassles, except for the few odd emergencies I worked through in previous years.
While I love Christmas and always look forward in anticipation with the lights, the music and the whole idea of starting off fresh in a new year, it is also a time of year when my cynicism reaches fever pitch. The Salvation Army commercials come on about this time of the year, flashing their statistics on your TV screen, asking you to give, give, give. Food banks are forever predicting a "crisis" of sorts if some white knight or white knights do not come to the rescue with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the homeless shelters promise to feed the hungry a turkey dinner.
This is a "feel good" time of the year for people who are comfortable. Giving money to a food bank, or a financial donation to a shelter seems to be the thing to do to ease oneself of the guilt of never having to have been a recipient of such a service. For those among us that give very large donations, most do not mind the press coverage - especially a company, as it shows "good corporate citizenship" (even though the same company receiving the heaps of good press may actually be one that pays low wages and treats their workers badly -- but how do we know?). Despite the "good citizenship" deeds that tend to be performed at this time of the year, we hardly give a thought about how the people at the receiving end feel about being at the receiving end. Has anybody ever asked them?
The charitable sector has become ingrained into our political culture to the point whereby we do not really think of those that receive our help, as any more than people who are needy, dependent and in some way, damaged goods. While this is certainly not a conscious assumption, nor is it present in every case of giving ... as I do know personal friends who have formed more reciprocal relationships with the people they set out to help. Unfortunately, this is an exception, not the rule.
When I speak to people who have gone to food banks or other charitable services on a regular basis (as opposed to going only for that one year when times were tough), I learn most of these folks have a very low self-esteem. Some do not believe they are "deserving" of a better life, such as a life where they would have enough resources to reasonably make choices. While they are thankful for the help, they do not see themselves as empowered human beings that are viewed by others as individuals with capabilities, talents and resources of their own. A portion of this group try to steer themselves away from charitable services, thinking they would "rather starve" than accept this help from anyone.
When prospective donors hear about this subset of people who refuse help, they are viewed as "mentally ill" or simply possessing "pride". However, when donors to these services are asked about the people they are "helping", once again - this population is viewed as somewhat helpless, dispossessed and unwanted, although they do acknowledge that some people are getting help as a result of "falling on hard times through no fault of their own". The complicated pseudo-relationship and inherent schema that is developed between the donor and the recipient is rarely considered in how recipients come to view themselves, or their own futures - when in my view, it has EVERYTHING to do with this attitude.
This is not about the people that provide services in this field, the thousands of volunteers that toil daily to sort through donations, others that appeal to the media for more donations and other persons, usually paid personnel that provide direct service to the recipients. It is more about the schema produced and not challenged by these same thousand points of light and the media that backs them about the necessary dichotomy between the helpers and the recipients, roles that are not portrayed as interchanged or interdependent. This role is further entrenched by the screening processes used by such charities to ensure each recipient is "deserving" of help.
Similar to any targeted welfare scheme, prospective recipients are encouraged to disengage themselves as actors and potential participants in their futures, but to focus on everything that is wrong with their lives ... in fact, as with many welfare schemes, one has to prove they have depersonalized themselves and spoiled their identity to the point that the helper is satisfied they have done all they can to reduce themselves to nothing. At the same time, nothing is offered up to address the situation that brought the recipient through their doors in the first place. Many trained in the service delivery model identify with the "spoiled identity" or "damaged goods" version of their entrails, as opposed to questioning why there appears to be a greater number of people each year in similar given circumstances.
While even the social work model professes to work against systemic barriers in favour of progressive social change, this is not what happens when people check their identities at the door to get the so-called "help" they need. The helper is there to "correct" supposed personal deficits of the disadvantaged, as opposed to helping them break barriers to join the "advantaged" part of society. For many social workers and others in related helping professions, they cannot even imagine their clients qualifying to do their jobs, for example.
While most helpers do not necessarily "blame the victim", they do nevertheless, view the victim as somewhat defective. The homeless man is "mentally ill". The single parent with two children in tow is always in abusive relationships. The single man who lost his apartment needs to learn how to balance his budget. The chronically unemployed are there because they are illiterate, lack high school and likely, do not have any skills. When other statistics are presented that show that recipients as a group look more similar to the group of "helpers" than they are dissimilar, helpers resist this interpretation.
I have focused some of my time over the years to talk to people who do not visit food banks, go to homeless shelters or seek other types of counseling assistance - even though their life circumstances and their needs may be identical to those that do use such services. While my observations may be anecdotal in nature, the same themes have emerged over time through different voices. What I have learned from these folks is instrumental and should be not only acknowledged by those that deliver services, but incorporated in their overall philosophy and structure of how they approach anybody coming through their door.
1. People want to be viewed as capable and willing to do for
themselves. A hand out in any way, shape or form makes
the person feel they are viewed as dependent and incapable
of doing for themselves, that somebody with "capability"
must do these things for them.
2. People want a hand up, not a hand out. Traditional charities
are very bad at recognizing that people want out of the
"welfare trap" more than they may believe they need
immediate help. People refusing services know they will not
get a job, get out of poverty or get into decent (and
independent) housing through the charitable service. In
other words, their programs do not work.
3. Even if the service is successful in getting the recipient
"housing", for example, the roof over their head becomes
a social service and not just a necessary product for living
in the community. Homeless people are assumed to be
incapable of living on their own and keeping their housing.
People with mental health issues are assumed to have
issues, outside the fact they are poor and nobody will hire
them, which led to them becoming homeless. Everybody
is deemed to want and need "subsidized" housing, despite
the fact the rules for this program tend to cripple initiative
and force people to remain in poverty.
People that do not want these services may need help to
secure an apartment, but after that, they do not want to
be fodder and continue to be a "cause" for ongoing income
for the charity. (The fact of this matter is those that can
live independently are often falsely assumed to not need
ANY help at all).
4. People want help to reach their full potential, not to
cripple it. Most of those refusing help do not want to
work in low-wage, insecure and low-skilled employment.
They want assistance in developing their career potential,
even though doing this may require funds for retraining,
partial employer subsidies and innovative partnerships
in one's respective community. Charities get paid to
"place" people, not get them out of poverty.
5. People want to work with their helpers as partners in
making systemic change. They want their helpers to
challenge employers that appear to not want persons
with disabilities working for them, or only want them if
the person is happy at working for half-wages. They
want to work with the helpers at making changes so that
the services of charities become less and less necessary.
6. Many of those refusing help feel that their presence as
"clients" of these agencies only "proves" demand and
thus, continues to generate ongoing funding for these
charities, regardless if their personal situation improves.
7. With regards to being given food, clothing, housing, etc.
- people feel they are not allowed to make choices. Why
is nobody giving those in need the necessary RESOURCES
to make these choices on their own, as opposed to making
these choices for them?
The very presence of these charities and the encouragement through the media, community influences and other forces, encourages those that want to "do good" to continue to donate and to otherwise continue to "prove" the legitimacy of these charities, as well as to continue to ignore and disregard the need for true systemic changes that would negate the need for the same.
We go ahead and have our Christmas with our families, go to work the next day or day after, and give to some charitable donation because society expects us to pick up the slack from the government. We do not think about the fact that continuing to support the status quo is taking away choices from those that can otherwise handle them with the resources given directly to them, instead of through an expensive and controlling bureaucracy. We do not think that we may be contributing to the continuation of the problem, not necessarily because we want to, but by donating to the charities, there is still no way any donor can reasonably review the success of any such charity in actually changing things for the people they serve.
Except next year at this very same time, even more people will be knocking on the doors of these same charities, many more in even more desperate circumstances. By continuing this cycle, we have to ask ourselves why we are not asking the correct questions and demanding to know why the more people give, the greater number of people end up in need ...
Think about what you are going to do in 2009, whether what you do will actually make a difference (systemic change) or just continue the same old, same old. If you ask me what I want to do, it is the former -- hands down!
Your thoughts?
While I love Christmas and always look forward in anticipation with the lights, the music and the whole idea of starting off fresh in a new year, it is also a time of year when my cynicism reaches fever pitch. The Salvation Army commercials come on about this time of the year, flashing their statistics on your TV screen, asking you to give, give, give. Food banks are forever predicting a "crisis" of sorts if some white knight or white knights do not come to the rescue with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the homeless shelters promise to feed the hungry a turkey dinner.
This is a "feel good" time of the year for people who are comfortable. Giving money to a food bank, or a financial donation to a shelter seems to be the thing to do to ease oneself of the guilt of never having to have been a recipient of such a service. For those among us that give very large donations, most do not mind the press coverage - especially a company, as it shows "good corporate citizenship" (even though the same company receiving the heaps of good press may actually be one that pays low wages and treats their workers badly -- but how do we know?). Despite the "good citizenship" deeds that tend to be performed at this time of the year, we hardly give a thought about how the people at the receiving end feel about being at the receiving end. Has anybody ever asked them?
The charitable sector has become ingrained into our political culture to the point whereby we do not really think of those that receive our help, as any more than people who are needy, dependent and in some way, damaged goods. While this is certainly not a conscious assumption, nor is it present in every case of giving ... as I do know personal friends who have formed more reciprocal relationships with the people they set out to help. Unfortunately, this is an exception, not the rule.
When I speak to people who have gone to food banks or other charitable services on a regular basis (as opposed to going only for that one year when times were tough), I learn most of these folks have a very low self-esteem. Some do not believe they are "deserving" of a better life, such as a life where they would have enough resources to reasonably make choices. While they are thankful for the help, they do not see themselves as empowered human beings that are viewed by others as individuals with capabilities, talents and resources of their own. A portion of this group try to steer themselves away from charitable services, thinking they would "rather starve" than accept this help from anyone.
When prospective donors hear about this subset of people who refuse help, they are viewed as "mentally ill" or simply possessing "pride". However, when donors to these services are asked about the people they are "helping", once again - this population is viewed as somewhat helpless, dispossessed and unwanted, although they do acknowledge that some people are getting help as a result of "falling on hard times through no fault of their own". The complicated pseudo-relationship and inherent schema that is developed between the donor and the recipient is rarely considered in how recipients come to view themselves, or their own futures - when in my view, it has EVERYTHING to do with this attitude.
This is not about the people that provide services in this field, the thousands of volunteers that toil daily to sort through donations, others that appeal to the media for more donations and other persons, usually paid personnel that provide direct service to the recipients. It is more about the schema produced and not challenged by these same thousand points of light and the media that backs them about the necessary dichotomy between the helpers and the recipients, roles that are not portrayed as interchanged or interdependent. This role is further entrenched by the screening processes used by such charities to ensure each recipient is "deserving" of help.
Similar to any targeted welfare scheme, prospective recipients are encouraged to disengage themselves as actors and potential participants in their futures, but to focus on everything that is wrong with their lives ... in fact, as with many welfare schemes, one has to prove they have depersonalized themselves and spoiled their identity to the point that the helper is satisfied they have done all they can to reduce themselves to nothing. At the same time, nothing is offered up to address the situation that brought the recipient through their doors in the first place. Many trained in the service delivery model identify with the "spoiled identity" or "damaged goods" version of their entrails, as opposed to questioning why there appears to be a greater number of people each year in similar given circumstances.
While even the social work model professes to work against systemic barriers in favour of progressive social change, this is not what happens when people check their identities at the door to get the so-called "help" they need. The helper is there to "correct" supposed personal deficits of the disadvantaged, as opposed to helping them break barriers to join the "advantaged" part of society. For many social workers and others in related helping professions, they cannot even imagine their clients qualifying to do their jobs, for example.
While most helpers do not necessarily "blame the victim", they do nevertheless, view the victim as somewhat defective. The homeless man is "mentally ill". The single parent with two children in tow is always in abusive relationships. The single man who lost his apartment needs to learn how to balance his budget. The chronically unemployed are there because they are illiterate, lack high school and likely, do not have any skills. When other statistics are presented that show that recipients as a group look more similar to the group of "helpers" than they are dissimilar, helpers resist this interpretation.
I have focused some of my time over the years to talk to people who do not visit food banks, go to homeless shelters or seek other types of counseling assistance - even though their life circumstances and their needs may be identical to those that do use such services. While my observations may be anecdotal in nature, the same themes have emerged over time through different voices. What I have learned from these folks is instrumental and should be not only acknowledged by those that deliver services, but incorporated in their overall philosophy and structure of how they approach anybody coming through their door.
1. People want to be viewed as capable and willing to do for
themselves. A hand out in any way, shape or form makes
the person feel they are viewed as dependent and incapable
of doing for themselves, that somebody with "capability"
must do these things for them.
2. People want a hand up, not a hand out. Traditional charities
are very bad at recognizing that people want out of the
"welfare trap" more than they may believe they need
immediate help. People refusing services know they will not
get a job, get out of poverty or get into decent (and
independent) housing through the charitable service. In
other words, their programs do not work.
3. Even if the service is successful in getting the recipient
"housing", for example, the roof over their head becomes
a social service and not just a necessary product for living
in the community. Homeless people are assumed to be
incapable of living on their own and keeping their housing.
People with mental health issues are assumed to have
issues, outside the fact they are poor and nobody will hire
them, which led to them becoming homeless. Everybody
is deemed to want and need "subsidized" housing, despite
the fact the rules for this program tend to cripple initiative
and force people to remain in poverty.
People that do not want these services may need help to
secure an apartment, but after that, they do not want to
be fodder and continue to be a "cause" for ongoing income
for the charity. (The fact of this matter is those that can
live independently are often falsely assumed to not need
ANY help at all).
4. People want help to reach their full potential, not to
cripple it. Most of those refusing help do not want to
work in low-wage, insecure and low-skilled employment.
They want assistance in developing their career potential,
even though doing this may require funds for retraining,
partial employer subsidies and innovative partnerships
in one's respective community. Charities get paid to
"place" people, not get them out of poverty.
5. People want to work with their helpers as partners in
making systemic change. They want their helpers to
challenge employers that appear to not want persons
with disabilities working for them, or only want them if
the person is happy at working for half-wages. They
want to work with the helpers at making changes so that
the services of charities become less and less necessary.
6. Many of those refusing help feel that their presence as
"clients" of these agencies only "proves" demand and
thus, continues to generate ongoing funding for these
charities, regardless if their personal situation improves.
7. With regards to being given food, clothing, housing, etc.
- people feel they are not allowed to make choices. Why
is nobody giving those in need the necessary RESOURCES
to make these choices on their own, as opposed to making
these choices for them?
The very presence of these charities and the encouragement through the media, community influences and other forces, encourages those that want to "do good" to continue to donate and to otherwise continue to "prove" the legitimacy of these charities, as well as to continue to ignore and disregard the need for true systemic changes that would negate the need for the same.
We go ahead and have our Christmas with our families, go to work the next day or day after, and give to some charitable donation because society expects us to pick up the slack from the government. We do not think about the fact that continuing to support the status quo is taking away choices from those that can otherwise handle them with the resources given directly to them, instead of through an expensive and controlling bureaucracy. We do not think that we may be contributing to the continuation of the problem, not necessarily because we want to, but by donating to the charities, there is still no way any donor can reasonably review the success of any such charity in actually changing things for the people they serve.
Except next year at this very same time, even more people will be knocking on the doors of these same charities, many more in even more desperate circumstances. By continuing this cycle, we have to ask ourselves why we are not asking the correct questions and demanding to know why the more people give, the greater number of people end up in need ...
Think about what you are going to do in 2009, whether what you do will actually make a difference (systemic change) or just continue the same old, same old. If you ask me what I want to do, it is the former -- hands down!
Your thoughts?
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