Folks on this list may be interested in this Ontario-based campaign to raise social assistance rates.

Elaine


Begin forwarded message:

From: Put Food in the Budget <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "Mom, Why are we so poor?"
Date: July 7, 2014 at 10:04:41 AM EDT
To: [log in to unmask]
Reply-To: [log in to unmask]


 


  
 
“Mom, Why are we so poor?”



This is the question Sasha’s son asked her in the grocery store in Atikokan, when she said she couldn’t buy the $3 toy he wanted. Sasha has three children.  She tells me more than 50% of her income goes to rent, utilities and heat. She recites the details of all of her other monthly expenses by memory to show how she doesn’t have enough money to put food for herself in her budget. She eats only one meal a day – dinner. This is to ensure there is enough food for her children. 


Sasha’s story is similar to many we hear in this campaign. She is raising her children alone. She left the children’s father to create a ‘safe’ home. One of her children has multiple learning disabilities and therefore has special needs. Sasha had to fight to get an assessment for her child – and had to make multiple trips to Thunder Bay (2 hours away) in order to get that assessment. When she began to tell the people doing the assessment about her son’s behaviours they said to her – “you are stressed because you don’t have enough money – maybe you need help with your parenting behaviours.” Sasha says this is just one of many ways way in which people who are poor get blamed and shamed.  


Sasha is meeting with me because a local service provider told her I would be in town and would be interested to hear ‘her story’. There are many details to Sasha’s story. The details are heart breaking – and while they are unique to her – they are similar in many ways to the heart breaking stories we hear from people who have participated in our campaign over the last five years. The leadership of our campaign doesn’t want to just gather and publicize heart breaking stories. They want to build from these stories to action and change. 

I asked Sasha two questions.


“What do you think we have to do to make the politicians raise social assistance rates to a level that ensure people can live a life of health and dignity?”  Right away Sasha says “Make them walk in my shoes for a month.  Make them live on my budget for a month”.  (This is what we heard over and over when we held community hearings as part of the Poor People’s Inquiry in November and December of last year). How do we ‘make’ politicians do this?


“What are you doing that makes you feel proud?” – Sasha says “I am proud of how I fight to give my children a good life. They are safe now. They are smart and I am getting them the help they need to succeed in school. And you know what – I am smart, and I am a fighter.”


Our campaign thinks it is important to ask this last question because of the constant shame and humiliation that is directed at people who are poor


The leadership of the Put Food in the Budget campaign has been talking about the strategy of the LGBTQ movement and how important the focus on ‘pride’ is to supporting gay, lesbian and trans people to ‘come out’ as a first step to organizing and challenging public opinion.  So with that in mind our campaign is thinking about supporting people who are poor to assert the things around which they have feelings of pride.


What does this tell us about how do we answer the question “Mom, why are we so poor”?


If Sasha’s mom, or anyone tries to answer that question by explaining their individual circumstances they may find themselves in the position of unintentionally ‘blaming’ themselves. And rather than do that – a person may say nothing – or change the subject – and may feel ashamed.


When hundreds of thousands of people are poor in Ontario it is not an ‘individual’ problem.  When it is happening to so many people it is a symptom of something more ‘collective’ or ‘systemic’ than an individual’s character.  


Why are hundreds of thousands of people in Ontario poor?


There are not enough jobs for everyone.
Too much work is ‘precarious’ – inadequate wages, part time hours, no benefits.
The cost of living – especially housing - is expensive.
Something bad happens - a health crisis, a death in the family, an accident at work or in the community, lay-offs and plant closures, an act of violence - which takes away a person’s ability to work and puts them into long term poverty. No one chooses to be poor, or wants to be poor.
Single parents are unable to raise their children and work without affordable adequate day care.
Politicians  don’t give people who don’t have work enough social assistance for rent and food in part because they don’t really know what it is like to live with so little money.
There is not enough funding for the services, community supports or social assistance to help people get out of poverty.

Sasha’s son is asking a profound question – we need to hear it as a question about a much larger ‘we’ than his family. We need to hear his question as ‘why are so many people in Ontario poor’? Asking why an individual is poor – enables us to avoid our collective responsibility of asking the bigger question – why have we structured our society to put so many people into poverty?


Thank you Sasha’s son for your challenging question. We need to take it seriously.


 
Mike Balkwill

Provincial Organizer

Put Food in the Budget campaign.


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"The economic system may not infringe anybody’s individual rights, but the whole machine ends up reproducing enduring types of social inequality…

What about the economic insecurity of our poorest fellow citizens?  Why can’t our politics address this? 

It can’t be because everyone has shared the fruits of our recent economic boom. It can’t be because the poor don’t exist. 

 It must be because they have become invisible."

- Michael Ignatieff

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