This is a statement by Kathy Hardill, a street nurse in Toronto, Ontario.
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Raise the Rates Town Hall - December 15, 2005

Good evening everyone.  So good to be here tonight.  I would like to take a
moment to acknowledge the participation of my professional organization,
the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario.  Joan, thank you so much for
being with us tonight, but more importantly, I want to express how much it
has meant to us to have RNAO's support throughout this campaign, from the
moment we asked for it.  I applaud you for standing up against poverty and
I thank you.

I think a convincing argument has been made tonight that the link between
low income and illness is strong.  It is, of course, not a new argument.
19th century German doctor and pathology professor Rudolf Virchow said this
more than a hundred years ago:  "All diseases have two causes:  one
pathological, the other political."  And of course he was correct.

Under the Mike Harris Conservative government, social assistance rates were
deeply slashed by 21.6%.  Ten years later, factoring in inflation, this cut
has become roughly 40%.  In addition, the Conservatives created legislation
which made it easier to evict people and removed rent controls, making
housing more expensive - and frankly, out of the reach of many people.
During the same time period, federal income support programs such as CPP,
WSIB and EI became significantly more difficult to qualify for.

The result, over the last ten years, is an exponential increase in
homelessness, poverty, hunger and illness.  There are many complex things
in the world.  This is not one of them.  If people don't have enough money,
they will be unable to afford food or housing.

When the Liberals won the last Ontario election, many people believed that
such regressive policies would be mitigated in some way.  But this turned
out to be false hope.  The Liberals raised social assistance rates by a
miserly three percent last year, which is just barely enough to be able to
say they actually did it.  But it is not a meaningful increase - it's
merely an insulting political gesture.
Early this year, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty began the special
diet campaign.  I want to take this opportunity to say, on behalf of Health
Providers Against Poverty, just what a privilege it has been to work with
OCAP this past year.  OCAP ran dozens of clinics all across the city.  They
did so with a high degree of enthusiasm, including a massive, meticulously
well organized clinic with over forty health providers on the front lawn of
Queen's Park.  They took responsibility for all the work.  They treated
recipients unfailingly with dignity and compassion, and they have advocated
and continue to advocate doggedly on behalf of people being stonewalled by
welfare bureaucracies.  So thank you, OCAP, you've been energizing and
inspiring.

Social assistance recipients were astonished that they could actually
receive this additional money.  It made an unbelievable difference to
people.  I began hearing from people who would leave voice messages saying
not only "thank you for helping my family," but also "thank you for
standing up, thank you for standing with us" in this struggle.

And then, in November - the special diet benefit was cut by the Liberals,
eliminating virtually all preventive, healthy diets and leaving only
nominal benefits for those who already have serious health problems.  If
you have HIV infection, you will only qualify for additional monies once
you've begun wasting away and have lost a percentage of your body weight.
Clearly there is no desire on the part of the government to assist people
with HIV to protect their immune systems and avoid becoming ill.

Further, under the new changes, what has traditionally been held in
confidence between a person and her health provider must now be disclosed
to one's welfare worker in order to receive the benefit.  If your food
money depends on it, how can consent to release your medical information be
truly voluntary?   Health Providers Against Poverty has launched a
complaint with the privacy commissioner to this effect.

Essentially, it comes down to this.  People on social assistance in Ontario
do not receive enough money to pay rent and buy groceries.  But when we
began this campaign, we never expected to prescribe the special diet
benefit to everyone on assistance in the province.  What we want is for low
income people to have enough money to survive without hunger and
homelessness and preventable illnesses.

Some people have blamed the campaign for the loss of the special diet
benefit.  I say to those people:  how are we responsible for a government
whose base rate of social assistance for a family of four is more than
$20,000 below the low income cutoff?  How are we responsible for a
government's decision to give food money to people with HIV only after
they've begun wasting away?  Or to give people with heart disease - a
condition whose treatment is heavily linked to diet - ten extra dollars a
month?

We are NOT responsible for those decisions.  Dalton McGuinty and Sandra
Pupatello are responsible for those decisions.  A month ago, Sandra
Pupatello admitted in The Medical Post that "Not one of us could probably
safely live on welfare."  She and Mr. McGuinty can choose to increase
social assistance rates by a meaningful amount.  If they don't, they are
basically choosing who gets to be healthy and who does not.  That was true
before the campaign started and it remains true.  Here in Toronto, for
example, 1 in 3 children lives in poverty.  That is exactly like saying 1
in 3 Toronto kids do not deserve to be healthy.  Does the Ontario
government have the right to make that choice?  I don't think they do, not
ethically.  But lest we get mired in pointless debate about the ethical
obligations of governments, the more salient question is this:  do we, as
people of conscience, have an obligation to challenge such criminal neglect
on a massive scale?  I think we do.

There is a story, sometimes called a parable, that many of the health
providers here will have heard before.  In it, a health worker, let's call
her a nurse, is sitting by a river, trying to relax, by fishing.  And as
she's sitting on the riverbank, with her fishing line in the water, she
notices something floating down the river.  She realizes that it is a
person, a person in trouble, and so she jumps up and goes to rescue the
person.  Then, just as she sits back down to resume fishing, she sees
another body in the river.  She goes to rescue this person as well.
Unbelievably, all afternoon, the bodies keep coming and she is so
overwhelmed with rescuing people that she has no chance to go upstream to
find out why everyone is ending up in the river.

Me, I have been situated most of my nursing life way, way downstream -
pulling bodies out of the river.  I could do that 24/7 if I wanted to. But
what I have learned after almost twenty years of nursing is that the most
important work I can do is to extract myself from that place, downstream,
and to go upstream to fight for changes which prevent people from ending up
in the river in the first place.

Rudolf Virchow also said this:  "If medicine is to fulfill her great task,
then she must enter the political and social life.  Do we not always find
the diseases of the populace traceable to the defects in society?"
Of course we do.

And so I call on you to work with us upstream.

"     Spread the word to your friends and people you know across the
province about this crucial campaign.  Invite us to come and speak to your
unions and churches and organizations.

"     Write to Sandra Pupatello and Dalton McGuinty.  Tell them that social
assistance rates must be raised by 40%, or the special diet benefit must be
reinstated.  Do the same with your Liberal MPP if you have one.

"     If you are a health provider, join Health Providers Against Poverty
as we use our positions of social privilege to speak out about this issue.

"     Give money to the driving force behind this campaign:  the Ontario
Coalition Against Poverty, which does a phenomenal amount of work, most of
which you never hear about, day in, day out, with virtually no ongoing
sources of funding.  OCAP doesn't even have a photocopier, for heaven's
sake, and yet I cannot think of any other organization that does so much
critical work with so little money.

"     Join us on the streets when we demonstrate our objections to
legislated poverty - as we turn up the pressure on the Liberals to raise
the rates, not by a miniscule three percent, but by a meaningful amount
that will make a difference in people's lives.

We have an unprecedented opportunity right now.  The last thing we should
do is to give up pressuring.  We need thousands and thousands of people
standing together on this issue, all across the province.  We have a chance
to push this further than we ever have.  We have a chance to win a
significant increase.  We must stand up and fight.  Please join us.

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