Alan Pickersgill - The View From Here

(04 December 2007) - It is not uncommon for governments to engage in periodic wars on poverty. They do it quite often. They never win, but that’s not the point. It makes great content for speeches. Wars on poverty are like the war on terrorism. Always noisy but seldom effective. This one is being waged by Dalton McGuinty. We know he knows how to do it. He already ended politicians’ poverty when he gave himself and his cronies a whopping raise last summer. In last week’s Throne Speech, he announced he was bringing the fight out of Queen’s Park and into the province.

To prove he is serious, he is setting up a new cabinet committee. It is going to “begin work developing poverty indicators and targets and a focused strategy for making clear-cut progress on reducing child poverty.” I’ve always thought a poverty indicator was easy to spot. You don’t need a room full of politicians and their assistants sitting around brainstorming about it. The lead indicator: it’s all about money. Poor people don’t have enough of it to pay their bills, bring in a decent load of groceries and keep a dry roof over their heads. As for developing a strategy to reduce child poverty, this shouldn’t take long. The only way to reduce child poverty is to reduce parent poverty.

The problem with this “activist agenda”, as the provincial Liberals like to portray it, is that it is not very active at all. It fails to address the biggest problems facing poor families. For the working poor, the minimum wage is much too minimum. At the moment, it is $8.00 an hour. For a 40 hour work week, today’s minimum wage earners get $320. Gross.

For those who are not working, a big irritant is still the claw back of the National Child Benefit Supplement. This is a payment of about $115 per month per child for families with an annual income below $22,000. If the family is living on either Ontario Works or Ontario Disability Support Program (ODSP) benefits, our provincial government takes this supplement from them. Last week’s Throne Speech said nothing about ending this injustice. Manitoba and New Brunswick don’t do it. Ontario shouldn’t.

During the 2003 provincial election campaign, ending the claw back was part of the Liberal platform. Within six months of winning, it became another one of McGuinty’s broken promises. Then it came back in 2007. At an all-candidates’ meeting during the last election campaign, Liz Sandals agreed that the claw back was wrong and should be ended. It’s still with us. Poor families in Guelph would have been better electing someone who will stand up for them.

To give the problem of poverty in Ontario some added perspective, consider the minimum wage again. The federal government set the level at which poor families needed a supplementary payment of child benefits. It is $22,615. A person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year at $8 an hour will earn, before taxes, $16,640 per year. In March 2010, it will go up to $10.25 an hour. That’s $21,320 per year, still below today’s threshold.

The most reliable vehicle for lifting the working poor out of their desperate straits is a union. Once they have one, their wages and benefits start improving and their work starts getting safer. Before McGuinty found himself in the driver’s seat four years ago, the Harris Tories gutted the labour laws and made it more difficult for workers to choose a union. The Liberals have done nothing to level the industrial relations playing field.

Raise the minimum wage. End the claw back. Lift the road blocks to joining unions. These are easy targets to get a war on poverty off to a good start, but McGuinty takes aim at none of them. If our minimum wage earner took her pay and spent it on lottery tickets, she would still be poor. The only way to win on a lottery is to keep your money in your pocket. But at least she would have her dreams. When Dalton McGuinty gets ready for his next election campaign, poor families will still be poor. If we can use the past to predict the future, there will be even more families living in poverty. McGuinty will not only have taken their child benefit supplement. He will also have taken their dreams.

# posted by Alan Pickersgill @ 1:37 PM