http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1132872611012&call_pageid=968256290204&col=968350116795

`Rogue advocates' for GTA's poor speak out
Nov. 25, 2005. 01:00 AM
KATHY HARDILL, DEBRA PHELPS AND MIMI DIVINSKY

Sandra Pupatello seems surprised that social assistance recipients 
weren't more grateful for the 3 per cent raise she granted them last 
year. Now Ontario's Community and Social Services minister scorns the 
anger and dismay at her government's recent decision to drastically 
restrict the special diet benefit for people on Ontario Works and 
Ontario Disability grants.

The Harris government's devastating 21.6 per cent cut to social 
assistance rates 10 years ago translates into 40 per cent today, once 
inflation and the cost of living are factored in.

Today, one in three children in the province's largest city live in 
poverty. We have not seen such a vast network of soup kitchens and food 
banks since the Depression and still people go hungry.

Pupatello characterized us as "rogue advocates" who are "misusing" the 
special diet benefit.

She knows, however, that we are nurses, doctors and dietitians who 
understand there is a dangerous risk to health affecting people all 
across the province. Its name is poverty. As Dr. Dennis Raphael, an 
expert on the social determinants of health, reminds us, the number one 
factor determining whether people stay healthy is income.

According to a 2001 British Medical Journal study, if you are a child 
living in poverty you will carry with you, for the rest of your life, an 
increased risk of heart disease, even if you manage to raise your 
socio-economic status.

Because we understand this, we have been participating in "hunger 
clinics," set up to help low-income people receive the special diet 
allowance.

We have prescribed this as a high-impact health intervention to 
thousands of people, using the language of preventive medicine, and we 
have compelling reasons for doing so. We've learned that, without the 
supplement, the average amount of money social assistance recipients 
have to spend on food is $2.43 a person a day.

The supplement changes that. Mothers are at a loss for words when they 
try to describe what it feels like to send their children to school with 
a healthy lunch every day, to surprise a child with a first-ever 
birthday cake, or to purchase fresh fruit and vegetables. But all that 
is about to end.

Ontario's Liberal government has decided it must stop this rampant 
outbreak of good nutrition and healthy living. So it has cut the special 
diet allowance and replaced it with a miserly version that disregards 
preventive health and attaches serious conditions to the most nominal of 
funds.

It is unclear what a welfare recipient with liver failure is supposed to 
do with the $10 a month she will now receive, but clearly the intent is 
not to improve her health.

Adding insult to injury is the fact that what historically has been held 
in confidence between an individual and her health professional will now 
be revealed to her welfare worker.

As the season of Ebenezer Scrooge approaches, these anecdotes from 
Premier Dalton McGuinty's tight-fisted Ontario will have you channelling 
Charles Dickens in no time. One woman was told by a government case 
worker that if she wanted a better standard of living she "should get a 
man" — Victorian advice if ever there was any.

A mother reported that after the 20th of the month, she and her daughter 
are reduced to one meal a day; a tuna sandwich if they are lucky, a 
"mayonnaise" sandwich if they are not.

So, as we approach the traditional season of high spending and dietary 
excess, the first tangible relief poor people have had in more than a 
decade is being cut.

One Peterborough woman wrote to us:

"Thank you for standing with low-income Ontarians. My children and I 
have done so much better in the last seven months. I am sad and a bit 
scared but I can only hope we can continue to fight."

We join with her and thousands like her in demanding that social 
assistance rates be raised by 40 per cent, and that the special diet 
allowance be restored for everyone whose health is at risk from 
legislated poverty.

Nurses Kathy Hardill and Debra Phelps, and Dr. Mimi Divinsky are 
Toronto-based members of Health Providers Against Poverty.

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