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-------- Original Message --------
Subject: NDP Motion on Poverty Debated and Voted in the House Today
Date: Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:33:20 -0500
From: Tony Martin, MP Sault Ste. Marie <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
The NDP Opposition Day Motion will be voted on in the House of Commons
this evening:
That, in the opinion of the House, there is a growing prosperity gap in
Canada that is making it harder for working and middle-class families to
make ends meet and sees more and more Canadians, including women,
children, seniors, aboriginal people in Canada, and people with
disabilities, slipping into poverty and therefore calls on the
government, in cooperation with the provinces and territories, to
implement a national anti-poverty strategy beginning with the
reinstatement of the federal minimum wage to be initially set at $10 per
hour.
The following transcript is from Tony Martin, NDP Social Policy Critic
on opening debate on this motion:
Feb. 20, 2007
(Opening the full-day debate)
Mr. Tony Martin (Sault Ste. Marie)
Thank you, Mr. Speaker:
It is an honour to stand in the House today to move our party’s motion
that calls for a national anti-poverty strategy beginning with the
reinstatement of the $10 dollar minimum wage. (I will be sharing my time
with the Member from Parkdale High Park)
Over the course of today my party will lay out what we see as the
elements of a national anti-poverty plan.
Before I got into politics in 1990, I was a soup kitchen director.
I got into politics to fight poverty.
Seventeen years later, I am still fighting. I wish I could say the fight
was over.
As I traveled across Canada over the past two years, first on a tour
looking at early learning for children and most recently meeting with
people about poverty and the growing prosperity gap, I was struck by the
deep level of compassion and caring that exists. However, people are
clearly increasingly uneasy about the disparity they see around them and
their own tenuous grip on some security for themselves and their
families. They remember a time when community mattered and government
could and did make a difference. Canada has a rich tradition and history
of gathering together as community against geography, distance and
weather to insure that no one got left behind or was forgotten. People
are looking for a vision consistent with the Canadian story, where we
wove a safety net of basic income, health care, education, unemployment
insurance and pensions for all. The kind of vision that Canadians today
still remember… It was no accident that Tommy Douglas was voted the “Gr!
eatest Canadian”.
Today there is a competing vision. One vision playing itself out over
the last 15 years, rooted in the Margaret Thatcher thesis, is that there
really is no such thing as society -- rather a world of individuals. It
sees money and the market as the driving force behind all human
activity. The result is a growing uneasiness and dissatisfaction. There
is a poverty and inequality that are symptoms of a structural
dysfunction affecting more and more of our citizens and newcomers to our
land.
Mr. Speaker, Thomas Walkom wrote recently in the Toronto Star,
“The poor are the canaries in the coal mine. The deliberate attempts to
reconfigure Canada over the past 30 years by gutting social programs,
dismantling national institutions and insisting that market forces alone
can solve every problem have affected everyone. But they have hit the
poor first and hardest.”
Mr. Walkom goes on to say: “We should not care about poverty just to be
nice. We should care about poverty because, in the end, this story isn’t
about the 11% or 16% of the population (depending on your statistical
source) officially designated as low income. It is about the deliberate
erosion of middle class Canada. It is about us too.”
Mr. Speaker, over the past nine months I have traveled across the
country to communities big and small. I have seen and heard the stories
of misery and hurt and the tremendous efforts of good people with little
resource trying to make a difference. It is what I call a Bad News, Good
News, and yet more Bad News story.
The Bad News is the statistics flowing from institutions like the
National Council on Welfare (August 2006) that indicates that poverty is
more pervasive and deeper than ever.
The Good News is that we are hearing about it again. For too long it has
been hidden and invisible. National newspapers are writing about
poverty. People are willing to come to meetings to talk about it.
The even more Bad News is why we are hearing about poverty again. The
number of homeless is estimated as high as 250,000 and in places that we
would never expect. Studies are showing alarmingly high numbers of
people working full time all year yet not earning enough to make ends meet.
Mr. Speaker, I have been traveling on an anti-poverty campaign to learn
firsthand about its reality in our country. I made a commitment to bring
those stories, hopes and recommendations back to Parliament.
•In Calgary and Victoria, two communities where the economy is booming,
there is no affordable housing. Alarming numbers of people are living on
the street as shelters, church halls and warehouses prove insufficient.
The homeless are in the very shadows of the prosperous oil companies
with their tax breaks.
•In Calgary I visited a shelter that beds down on floor mats 1,000 to
1,200 of the 3,500 plus homeless living in that city. I watched as two
city buses took another 100 or so to the suburbs to be bedded down on
mats in warehouses. The rest find refuge where they can, most under
bridges and in parks while city hall passes laws making it criminal
behaviour to do so. A few will turn to Crack and Crystal Meth since I am
told by street-workers it takes away any feeling of hunger, cold and
fear. But that lasts only five to ten minutes and then you need another
one which in turn leaves our streets dangerous places.
Mr. Speaker, other stories emerge:
• In Halifax I was told of the disproportionate number of women facing
poverty. “Women who go hungry to feed their children.”
• The disappearance of good, well paying jobs in the manufacturing
sector in the Niagara/Hamilton corridor of Ontario.
• The overwhelming aboriginal face of truly destitute poverty in
Thunder Bay Ontario.
• The huge increase in health issues for people living in the poorer
neighbourhoods of Saskatoon Sask.
• Whole families living in Motel rooms through the winter in the
Penticton area of BC then disappearing with children gone from schools
when the tourists arrive in the spring. It is thought they live in the
mountains and camp grounds while picking fruit and working on farms to
make a living.
• The more than 50 disabled people that I was told about living on the
streets of Victoria.
• The deteriorating and diseased stock of affordable housing in Toronto
and Vancouver (there has not been a national affordable housing program
in Canada for over 15 years) and what does exist is being torn down and
replaced with expensive condos at an alarming rate.
• About 175 people gathered in Castlegar B.C. and told me of struggles
to get ahead, the road blocks and the lack of resources and cut backs,
in particular to early learning and childcare.
• At Brock University in St. Catharines students told me the challenges
they face trying to access post secondary education, ever increasing
tuition and ancillary fees, the cost of housing and living expenses
while summer work gets harder to get and pays more and more only minimum
wage that does not keep pace with inflation.
Mr. Speaker, poverty is debilitating and mind numbing. Poverty can
paralyze and kill the spirit. Combined with thoughtless, harmful public
policy poverty can rip your heart and soul out. Poverty can actually kill.
I remember the summer of 2001 and the story of Kimberly Rogers. Kimberly
lived on social assistance and decided to go to College to better her
situation. She was in her third year, soon to graduate when she
successfully applied for a student loan. What she didn’t know was that
the Mike Harris government in Ontario at that time had passed
legislation to make it illegal (criminal behaviour) to be in receipt of
social assistance and also collect a student loan. She was charged,
pleaded guilty and sentenced to house arrest. In the hottest day of
August in the summer of 2001 Kimberly Rogers and her unborn child died
in that apartment living out her sentence. That should never happen in
this country. We should never let it happen again.
Today we are calling for a national anti-poverty strategy starting with
the reinstatement of a federal minimum wage of $10.00 an hour. We do not
have to reinvent the wheel here. Jurisdictions in the European Union and
elsewhere are proposing national plans to combat poverty. They are doing
this with noticeable early success and are now joined by a couple of
our own provinces with an anti-poverty law in Quebec and a poverty
reducing strategy in Newfoundland. . The National Council on Welfare has
presented a framework for action – a poverty plan with targets and
timelines, budget, accountability and establishing official poverty
indicators. Groups across the country are doing some very creative
things. They are looking for national leadership. Let’s take advantage
of this opportunity in this minority government to do the right thing
for our families, for our neighbours, for working men and women, for the
“at risk” and marginalized.
We have in many parts of our country an economic boom.
Sadly, we also have a Poverty boom.
We can do better.
We must do better, for each and every Canadian and newcomer – for our
poor on assistance and 650,000 working poor in our country, for women,
children, seniors, veterans and persons with disabilities who all
struggle with unacceptable levels of poverty.
We must fundamentally right the wrongs and honour the obligations for
our First Nations, Métis, and Inuit.
It is all about human rights, justice and fairness.
Mr. Speaker, people are watching us today to see if we can find the
political will to win this fight.
For their sake, for our sake, for Canada’s sake, we must.
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