Social Assistance Rates Not Adequate

The Observer
Sarnia, Ontario
Wednesday March 26, 2003
EDITORIAL

The status quo is simply not working. Social assistance recipients have been getting a raw deal for a long time on their benefits. In 1995 the provincial government chose to slash benefits for Ontario's most susceptible constituents by nearly 22 per cent, while the cost of living has increased 15 per cent over that same period.

According to Statistics Canada figures, more than four out of 10 city residents are struggling, week to week and day to day, to make ends meet.

Meanwhile, charitable agencies like the Inn of the Good Shepherd are bursting at the seams as numbers attending their soup kitchen and food banks continue to grow.

Yet the province still maintains $525 a month is adequate money for a single person to survive on.

It's a sad state of affairs when the poor and penniless in this province continue to be deprived of their dignity and basic comforts while large corporations continue to reap the benefits of government tax cuts.

Thankfully, Sarnia's Community Legal Assistance office is stepping up to help social assistance recipients increase the paltry pittance the province doles out.

As office community legal worker Karen Matthewson says, the current funding just isn't enough.

And the timing couldn't be better with a provincial election looming.

The legal office, which offers assistance on poverty law issues, will welcome social assistance recipients, agencies, churches and advocates to attend their Pay the Rent and Feed the Kids campaign this Friday from 1p.m. to 4p.m. at the Lochiel Kiwanis Centre, to share their thoughts on the issue.

Matthewson hopes the ammunition provided will help to sway the government.

Nearly 1,800 local welfare recipients are banking on it.

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Housing Issue Unites Mayoral Rivals
All five agree more money for affordable units needed
But racial profiling by police splits the consensus

Toronto Star, March 7/03
Paul Moloney
City Hall Bureau

The first gathering of Toronto's five leading candidates for mayor turned into a freewheeling exchange over police funding, racial profiling by police and tolls on the QEW, as well as the subject at hand — poverty and homelessness.

The mayoral hopefuls — Barbara Hall, Tom Jakobek, David Miller, John Nunziata and John Tory — took turns explaining how they would be the best advocate for the city in wresting cash from provincial and federal governments for affordable housing. Each candidate was given 10 minutes to speak on poverty in front of about 50 people during the mid-afternoon forum at the Daily Bread Food Bank's warehouse on New Toronto St. in Etobicoke.

Hall argued that funding for housing pays off in reduced health care and criminal justice expenses. "It's shocking in the province of Ontario that the federal and provincial governments have not contributed to permanent affordable housing for almost 10 years," the former Toronto mayor said. "There's no civilized society that doesn't understand the need for governments to be involved in supplying housing programs." Asked specifically if she would support an increase in the minimum wage to $10 an hour from the current $6.85, she didn't answer directly. "I believe we need to have a minimum wage which is sufficient for people to live." Miller, a city councillor, said he supports increasing welfare rates and the minimum wage and reinstating rent controls — all matters of provincial government jurisdiction — as well as building more affordable housing.

The candidates singled out Queen's Park for failing to invest in housing and stressed that now is the right time to apply pressure as the Progressive Conservative government gets set to call an election. "This is the time to put their feet to the fire to ensure that they set the right priority as far as public expenditures are concerned," said Nunziata, a former federal MP. Miller said he would be using his city council position to advocate policy changes on the housing front and be involved in devising strategy on city issues for use during the next provincial election and federal Liberal leadership contest. Jakobek, a former city councillor who served as budget chief, said the city needs to better control its own finances to address homelessness. "When you consider the millions upon tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars each year that go out the window because of poor management or mismanagement, folks, there's money to be spent in the areas you want," he said.

If the candidates agreed on the need for more housing money, they differed on the contentious issue of racial profiling by police. Opinions varied on the nature and extent of the problem. Miller said leadership has to come from city hall to address what he called "a very serious problem." Hall said the makeup of the police must reflect the community, adding "we need to make sure where there is evidence of racial profiling ... that it be responded to quickly and toughly." Tory, a Rogers Cable executive, said the perception that racial profiling exists is a problem. "While I think the chief (Julian Fantino) got off to a very rough start in terms of trying to take some steps to address this perception and to meet it head-on, the overall initiatives he's taken to get out and talk to people — and hopefully many more things that are happening in a less public way to address this issue — are steps in the right direction," he said. Nunziata said it's a very complex issue, but the important thing is that police are believed to be acting in an even-handed fashion. "We have to ensure not only that people are being treated equally but that it's perceived as well that they're being treated equally and fairly," he said. "In my view, we should have an independent complaints bureau, a system where police are not investigating themselves ... in order to ensure there is an arm's-length review of any complaints." Jakobek denied racial profiling was a problem and lauded Fantino for conducting a series of town hall meetings, calling him "probably one of the most proactive police chiefs we've had in many years."

City council came under fire from Tory and Jakobek for approving $47.3 million for a police training centre during last week's budget meetings. The facility, to be built in south Etobicoke, is for firearms and other training. Jakobek called it "an excessive capital expenditure," while Tory said it was "almost an inconceivable amount of money" if the main purpose was for firearms training. Miller, as a member of council, supported acquiring the land needed for the facility but said he still has unanswered questions. "It didn't strike me as a justified project," said Miller (Ward 13, Parkdale-High Park). "I thought the project deserved a lot more analysis."

On the subject of slapping tolls on the QEW, pitched as a way to raise money for public transit, the candidates were generally opposed. Miller, however, left the door open to tolls if the provincial and federal governments refuse to hand over a share of their gasoline tax revenues for transit. "If we don't get it, I'm prepared to explore tolls because we can't allow transit to be underfunded," he said.

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'Radical' New Ideas Sought to Fight Urban Poverty
Agencies propose think-tank meeting - Welfare too low for rent reality, they say

The Toronto Star Feb. 18, 2003
PHILIP MASCOLL
STAFF REPORTER

It's almost impossible for a person on social assistance in Ontario to eat and keep a roof over their children's heads, say front line workers at the Daily Bread Food Bank.

So next month, food bank staff and concerned workers from other social agencies are calling for a meeting of "not just the usual suspects" , but anyone from the poor and homeless themselves to Bay St. business people, to come up with radical new ways of dealing with poverty and hunger.

"We have been underwhelmed by the response of politicians around the issue," said Sue Cox, Daily Bread's executive director.

Ontario's opposition parties were just as quiet, she said. This has allowed the inadequacies in the welfare system to drop off the public radar screen, she said.

"We need to create public dialogue around the issue."

Figures from the Pay the Rent and Feed the Kids organization, an Ontario coalition of anti-poverty organizations, bear out the alarm expressed by Cox.

According to a survey by the organization, the shelter portion of a welfare cheque going to a family of three does not cover even half the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Toronto Û or in many other Ontario cities.

In Toronto, the $554 shelter portion of the $1,086 monthly cheque that a single parent with two children receives barely covers half the $1,055 rent for an average two-bedroom apartment. The remaining $532 is also eaten up by rent. This leaves $31 to cover food, clothing, utility bills and school supplies.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. figures show that in 1994, in Toronto, the shelter allowance was $707, while the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $784.

Today, a single person gets a shelter allowance of $554 and the average rent for a bachelor apartment is $733.

In Guelph, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment is $801; in Hamilton $765; in Kitchener $750; in Oshawa $819.

Only in Sudbury, where a two-bedroom apartment was $621, Sault Ste. Marie at $612 and Sarnia at $631 would a single parent be close to paying rent with the allowance.

Cox said research shows it would cost about $190 million to bring the shelter portion of the allowance to a realistic level.

She and the others planning the meeting are looking for a venue and sponsors.

"We need radical new solutions."

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Let's Keep Fighting the System for Kim Rogers' Sake

Michele Landsberg
Toronto Star
Saturday January 25, 2003

We thought we knew her.

All of us had labels summing up Kimberly Rogers' life: welfare cheat, loser, unwed mother-to-be. Suicide. We never heard her own voice or saw her eyes. We all (even the compassionate) had unspoken subtitles to the silent movie of her life, projected fuzzily to us in news stories: Guilty of welfare fraud. Sentenced to six months house arrest in a tiny Sudbury apartment. Then, on Aug. 9, 2001, found dead after a sizzling heat wave sent temperatures in her prison soaring to more than 40C.

But a more touchingly rounded picture of Kim Rogers began to emerge for those who actually attended the inquest into her death.

"Amazingly, you could see attitudes shifting," recalled Jacquie Chic, a lawyer for the Income Security Advocacy Centre in Toronto, who was there. "The jury and even her estranged family weren't sympathetic at first. They seemed to believe the government was right to force welfare rates so low. But as they heard the evidence of how cruel the system is, you could see the shock on their faces."

A working-class woman who struggled all her life against poverty, Kim fled an abusive relationship in Toronto to move home to Sudbury and start fresh.

"To me, she was a hero," Chic said. "She graduated from social services at Cambrian College with high praise for her work with handicapped children."

But how dumb a policy is this: You can't live on Ontario student loans, and yet you're a criminal if you get welfare at the same time. Kim was pregnant, and she needed welfare because, battling ill health, she couldn't work. In Ontario, while inflation leaped 15 per cent and rents by 26 per cent, welfare rates remained frozen for seven years at $520 a month for a single person.

When Kim pleaded guilty to having received $13,000 of welfare over three years, Judge Greg Rodgers ordered her into house arrest, with three hours a week to go out to shop. Shop? She had no income. Her welfare was automatically cut off. The judge was very righteous in denouncing her. "Welfare is there for people who need it," he said, "not for people who ... want things and who want money."

Right. Kim wanted "things" like food to eat while she prepared to give birth to a much-wanted child.

Bravely, although she dreaded the humiliation of public scrutiny and contempt, Kim launched a court Charter challenge of her six-month welfare ban. She told the court about running out of food, with no local agencies able to provide more. She was depressed, sleepless, frightened about her baby's future. I was heartstruck by a handwritten list of desired foods ( yogurt, crackers, fresh veggies ) that Kim Rogers gave her welfare worker. She titled it "foods I like." And she was so diffident, so self-denigrating, that she put the "I" in quotation marks, as though she had no right to use the first person pronoun.

Judge Gloria Epstein of the Superior Court heard her and denounced the welfare ban as "adversely affecting not only the mother and child, but also the public Û its dignity, its human rights commitments and its health care resources."

But even after her welfare was ordered restored, Kim had only $18 left a month after rent and the student loan claw-back. Penned up in her stifling apartment, she was terrified to go outside, even into the backyard, lest authorities punish her by seizing her infant once it was born. (The eight-month fetus, a girl, died with Kim.)

What kind of people harden their hearts so brutishly that it seems a splendid idea to let people starve and despair in the midst of plenty?

The Ontario Tories don't stint themselves. And they don't exercise "zero tolerance" for their own self-indulgent spending. In their first six years in pig heaven, Tory MPPs charged the public purse for lavish steak dinners, fancy hotels, movies, trips to Las Vegas - $2 million total in expenses. One minister was sent to the back benches. Not exactly starvation and death.

Most Ontarians aren't as withered of conscience as their elected members. The Kim Rogers jury, sobered and saddened by the evidence, asked Ontario to raise welfare rates and end the cruelty of "zero tolerance." So far, 15 cities have echoed the demand.

Social Services Minister Brenda Elliott, a former teacher and entrepreneur, was unmoved. She instantly retorted that "zero tolerance" and the lifetime welfare ban "work" and will not be changed.

Ms Elliot has a strange cabinet record. As environment minister, she boasted of taking chauffeured limos instead of the bus for brief trips to the Legislature. She went to the Walkerton inquiry and refused to take responsibility for those deadly decisions in her ministry. ("We're a team.") She hangs tough on refusing treatment for autistic children over the age of 6.

She is especially contemptuous on the subject of Kim Rogers' lonely, anguished death. The minister says she is very satisfied that the "numbers on welfare continue to drop."

Let's put the screws to these callous MPPs even before the coming election. Join the campaign to phone the compassion-challenged minister at 416-325-5225 and insist that she raise the welfare rates to a living level.

This activism will be the only decent farewell we can offer to Kim Rogers.

Michele Landsberg's column appears Saturday in the Life section and Sunday in the A section.

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New Coalition Wants Welfare Rates Hiked

TORONTO SUN, October 31
Steve Kravitz