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Rogue advocates' for GTA's poor speak out
Toronto Star, Nov. 25, 2005.
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.

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