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Poor bashing:
blaming the weak for society’s problems
by Jamie Swift [article
in ISARC e-newsletter, December 2009]
Jamie is a member of ISARC’s Steering Committee and works as the Director, Office of Justice, Peace and Integrity of Creation, The Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul, Kingston.
Here are some sobering facts.
One:
Our most vulnerable neighbours, relying on social assistance, would
need a 55 per cent benefit increase to regain the meagre incomes that
public provision offered in 1993. Even back then, Ontario’s social
assistance incomes languished below the poverty line.
Two: The welfare system has over 800 rules and regulations that by law must be applied before a
needy person’s eligibility and benefit level can be determined. The
system, far too complicated to explain to clients, requires years of
training for overburdened caseworkers. Ontario’s former poverty
reduction minister reported that the maze is “expensive to administer,”
many of its rules “punitive.”
Three: In 2003 a report for
Ottawa’s Justice Department pointed out that every year corporate
crime, white-collar fraud and tax evasion cost Ontario more than its
entire welfare system. It added, “More people cheat on their income
taxes and lie about their cross-border shopping than defraud the
welfare system.”
So why did Ontario’s Auditor General recently
claim that the province had misspent $1.2 billion on welfare
overpayments? And why did some media and mean-spirited citizens use the
report to hop on the decrepit poor bashing bandwagon?
I can’t
answer the first question, since I don’t know what makes Jim McCarter
tick. I do know that his apples-and-oranges calculations help get that
poor bashing bandwagon back on the road.
The Auditor General
pegged the annual cost of Ontario’s welfare system at $5 billion. The
“overpayments” – most generated by the system’s own red tape – were a
cumulative $1.2 billion total going as far back as the early 1990s. But
the annual overpayments were reported at $26 million, 1.4 per cent of
the provincial spending total.
Yet the $1.2 billion grabbed
headlines. Just as the Ontario Association of Food Banks reported a
whopping 19 per cent increase in people using food banks since last
year, Conservative leader Tim Hudak used the Auditor’s report to claim
welfare system abuse amounted to “a new $1 billion boondoggle.”
Mr.
Hudak served as a minister in the government of former Premier Mike
Harris, who drove the poor bashing bandwagon to power in 1995. He also
cut welfare payments and introduced the incomprehensible maze of rules
that still governs the system.
The media followed suit. The
Globe and Mail, scarcely interested in feature stories on the ways
Ontario’s social assistance system perpetuates poverty, ran a front page report on a Toronto
physician alleged to be too generous in prescribing Special Diet
Allowance benefits for poor people who are sick.
In my local
Kingston paper, now owned by Sun Media, Christina Blizzard – Queen’s
Park columnist for the Sun chain – got into the poor bashing spirit by
publishing unproven tales from anonymous tip lines of welfare cheats
driving “imported” SUVs. She finished up with instructions to the poor:
“Scammers and fraud artists…Get a life, get a job – and stop sucking us
dry.”
One newspaper correspondent said that welfare recipients
need to be cut off after six months and their children marched off to
foster homes.
“Are there no prisons?” asked Ebenezer Scrooge when business colleagues solicited a seasonal donation.
How to account for such Scrooge like attitudes today?
Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, the year before the
British government’s Poor Law Commission attempted to put an end to
assistance to the destitute outside of the grim walls of the workhouse.
It was a time of uncertainty and change, and the propertied classes
were having their way with the poor.
We are living through
difficult economic times, with high unemployment and low benefits for
the jobless. It is still tragically easy to put the blame on the weak
for society’s problems. We have enough – more than enough if you
consider the holiday cornucopia on offer at the mall and at festive
gatherings – to provide a decent life for all.
I can’t help but
think of the swollen ranks of the underprivileged who must be saying,
“That Canada looks like a fine place. I sure wish I lived there.”Yet a
spirit of solidarity is abroad in a country that remains one of the
world’s richest places. The recent resurgence of poor bashing comes
after years of patient organizing by social justice advocates. We have
managed to nudge the plight of the poor back onto the political agenda.
We
must continue to do so. Watch for poor bashing and counter it at every
turn. Write a letter to the editor. Use call-in radio shows along with
media like Facebook and blogs. Talk to your neighbours.
And
contact ISARC to help with the upcoming Social Audit. When we venture into Ontario’s
communities this spring, we will listen to the voices of those affected
by byzantine social assistance policies. Then we will redouble our
efforts at getting those policies changed in a meaningful way.
--------------------
Click here for 25in5 Network’s response to the Auditor General’s December 7 analysis of Ontario’s social assistance system.
Also read Carol Goar’s article, Thin gruel on welfare `gravy train' in the Toronto Star, December 14, 2009.
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