Edmonton Journal July 9, 2000
Our affluent society forgets the poor

Fred Douglas
Freelance

The headline on your June 30 article, "Canada
still best place to live -- for the wealthy" said
it all. All, except why that is, and why Canada
fell to 11th place (from eighth) on the United
Nations' overall poverty scale.

Our country is 17th out of 23 industrialized countries
on "child" poverty, meaning family poverty, according
to UNICEF.

That's an ethical disgrace, a moral outrage given
our astounding and concentrated abundance. Poverty
 -- degrading, ugly and evil -- should concern the
complacent middle class, those who earned between
$24,500 to $65,000 per annum in 1996 dollars. In
1973, 60 per cent of Canadians were middle class. That
number shrunk to 44 per cent in 1996.  And here in
Alberta, the rich are getting richer and the poor
poorer faster than in any other province.

Poverty is not a law of nature, but it is the common
denominator of most of our other social ills.
Industry won't manufacture a solution to it and charity
and volunteerism can't solve it.  Honest governments
dedicated to the common good can. Poverty directly
affects some 20 per cent of the population
and indirectly affects everyone else.
Its cost to society is colossal.

The 2000 It's Up To Us Report of the Progressive
Conservative National Task Force on Poverty states,
"Poverty hurts growth -- both for individuals and for
the country as a whole -- and entails significant
economic costs ... each dollar invested today in
programs to reduce and eliminate poverty among
children could result in future savings of up to
seven dollars."

Professor Dennis Raphael, of the University of
Toronto, in a recent issue of the Canadian
Review of Social Policy writes, "Economic inequality
appears to affect the health of all citizens."

Highly unequal societies, he says, show "symptoms
of disintegration ranging from increasing levels of
sickness and premature death to declines in civil
commitment and participation." Economic inequality,
he concludes, is a significant threat to the Canadian
values of peace, order and good government.

Statistics can't convey the sense of frustration,
despair and the loss of self-esteem that occur when
people are marginalized in an affluent society. The
poor often don't have enough money to meet their basic
needs, let alone opportunity to earn a decent standard
of living for themselves and their families.
"Equality of opportunity" is a myth, because it
presumes that everyone has equal access to resources.

Poverty also means having no friends, fearing your
financial "benefits" worker and, not being competitively
employable, losing hope. Some people are just unlucky,
said our prime minister. But, low unemployment invariably
results in budget surpluses.

Not a choice

The sacred, and publicly unaccountable private sector,
supposedly the engine of job creation, assigned that
problem to government, whose response was to cut EI. There
are over one million Canadians "officially" unemployed.
Even if all of the 20- to 40,000 job vacancies were filled,
there would still be well over 900,000 humans out of work.
You are counted as employed if you worked as little as one
hour in the week prior to the labour force survey.

Poverty is not a choice made by the poverty-stricken. It
exists because of decisions made by elites who own and control
most of the scandalous wealth of the country.

In 1989, the House of Commons unanimously passed a
motion to eradicate child poverty by 2000. Governments
do have the power to abolish it by legislating a fair
distribution of the wealth, through a decent guaranteed
income for example, but have not had the moral courage to
do so. Spineless MPs take marching orders from their party
-- to first serve power and privilege. That's democracy?

We were lied to again. That doesn't seem to bother very
much those envious of the rich. In Canada, apathy is
worn as a badge of honour, especially by people in
the comfortable "helping" professions.

Assuming relative free speech and a responsive national
government, a public policy designed to eradicate poverty
could be implemented, but only after the population has
been educated to the necessity for it. However, changing the
public mind won't be easy, considering the commercial
propaganda that militates against it.

Fred Douglas is an Edmonton social worker and employment
counsellor.







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  Long have I looked for the truth about the life of people together.
  That life is crisscrossed, tangled, and difficult to understand.
  I have worked hard to understand it and when I had done so
  I told the truth as I found it.

  - Bertolt Brecht
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Dennis Raphael, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Public Health Sciences
Graduate Department of Community Health
University of Toronto
McMurrich Building, Room 101
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA M5S 1A8
voice:    (416) 978-7567
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