April 1, 2005
Subversive way to fight hunger
CAROL GOAR
Robin Hood would have grinned.
For six weeks, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty has been holding
special dietary clinics across the city. The purpose is to register welfare
recipients for a special food allowance available to clients with
health-related nutritional needs. Doctors, nurses and midwives are on hand
to sign forms saying that applicants require the $250-a-month supplement.
Most people on social assistance have no idea this benefit exists and their
caseworkers aren't eager to point it out. But once they have a note from a
medical professional saying they need the extra money, the government has
no choice but to provide it.
So far 250 people have applied. More sign-up sessions are planned.
The two-hour clinics are the brainchild of Jonah Schein, a York University
social work student on placement at the Queen West Community Health Centre.
Combing through Ontario's welfare regulations, he came across the
little-known diet allowance, intended for individuals with food allergies,
digestive problems and chronic diseases.
That got him thinking: wasn't hunger a health-related nutritional need?
Weren't social assistance recipients too poor to eat properly? Wouldn't it
be possible to find doctors and nurses who'd attest that anyone living on
welfare has a "dietary need"?
Working with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), he devised a
plan. The coalition would approach sympathetic medical professionals and
ask them to help welfare recipients apply for the food supplement.
This would put more money into the hands of Ontario's poorest citizens,
make poverty a health issue and put pressure on Queen's Park to raise
social assistance rates.
The campaign is still in its early stages, but it has the support of more
than 30 local medical practitioners.
Schein is the first to admit that setting up dietary clinics is an
extremely inefficient way to raise welfare incomes. It takes about two
hours to register 50 applicants.
There are 670,000 people living on welfare in Ontario.
"But this campaign will bring issues of food insecurity into the public eye
and highlight the real health barriers faced by people struggling to
survive on social assistance," Schein says.
The way he figures it, the extra $250 a month that successful applicants
will get should just about bring their incomes back to where they were in
1995, when former premier Mike Harris chopped welfare rates by 21.6 per
cent.
There are risks to this approach:
It could alienate a significant chunk of the population. Like many of
OCAP's tactics, this one breaches the spirit of the law without quite
breaking the letter. (The coalition has stormed public meetings, taken over
empty buildings, organized less-than-peaceful demonstrations and joined
logging blockades.) Some taxpayers find such forms of advocacy offensive.
It could jeopardize the prospects for genuine welfare reform. Many social
activists want nothing to do with OCAP, fearing that its confrontational
style and desire for quick wins will subvert their efforts to lay the
groundwork for a modern income security system.
It could convince the cash-strapped provincial Liberals that there is no
political percentage in including modest improvements in social assistance
in their spring budget.
And it could gum up the province's notoriously balky welfare machinery so
badly that people who urgently need benefits don't get them.
Over its 15-year history, OCAP has forced Ontarians to wrestle with some
tough moral questions. Will poverty ever be beaten by lobbying and
negotiation? Should welfare rules that keep families below the poverty line
be respected? Do governments respond to reason and patience or defiance and
militancy?
All of these issues arise in the case of the dietary clinics.
Premier Dalton McGuinty is unlikely to raise welfare rates by anything
close to $250 a month this year. What anti-poverty activists have to decide
is whether to accept that he is constrained by a $6 billion deficit or
fight aggressively for a larger share of the budgetary pie.
Schein has come up with a clever way to exploit a loophole in the social
assistance system. What welfare recipients have to decide is whether to
claim money that wasn't meant for them or be scrupulously honest and skimp
on groceries.
One out of every seven youngsters in Ontario is growing up in poverty. What
children's advocates have to decide is whether to keep putting forward
constructive suggestions or start making trouble.
Guerrilla-style social justice isn't pretty. But neither is hunger.
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