Always worried
'I am a person too,' says woman living in poverty
On a hot August weekend, TeriLee d’Aaran is already thinking about winter boots.
Her old pair leaked and fell apart. She needs new boots, but she will have to find $60 to buy them. Where will it come from?
She thinks about money all the time, because she’s poor.
D’Aaran lives in Cambridge on a disability pension of $1,255 a month. Of that, $800 goes for rent.
“It’s a massive struggle” to get by, she says. “You just cannot make it.”
Being poor means not drinking fresh milk for a week. It means taking the bus an hour into Waterloo to do your laundry, because there’s a laundromat there that lets you use the dryers for free.
It means sliding further into debt when the unexpected happens. D’Aaran had to use her credit card when she had to move earlier this year. It’s now maxed out. She owes about $7,000 and pays back just $45 each month.
The feeling of being insecure is hardest of all, she said. “You do not live a free and easy life in poverty.”
D’Aaran was disappointed to hear that the new Ontario Conservative government scrapped a program that explores whether people on extremely low incomes would see improved health and nutrition if they got more money.
The program provided payments to 4,000 low-income people in Hamilton, Brantford, Lindsay and Thunder Bay. Single participants received up to $17,000 a year, while couples received up to $24,000.
D’Aaran’s disability pension adds up to about $15,000 a year. That extra $2,000 would have meant everything to her, she said.
“I’d be able to buy better food,” she said. “I’d be able to pay my debts.
“I might have a life, a hobby or something like that. I’d love to go horseback riding. I’d love to do ceramics.”
D’Aaran has tried to take jobs and improve her life, but she suffers from anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder.
She has a service dog, Princess, who helps her get through each day, but who also has food and vet bills that have to be paid.
D’Aaran has been on social assistance for 23 years now. She has a high school diploma but no higher education.
She can’t access the well-paid jobs of Canada’s high-technology economy. They might as well be on Mars.
D’Aaran can’t even work at a coffee shop. Although she’s under the care of a doctor, her anxiety always gets the better of her, and she can’t continue.
She has thought about moving further north where rents might be cheaper. But she doesn’t have the money to rent a moving truck. “How am I going to get there?” she said.
The move by the government to cancel the pilot program was both dishonest and callous.
Dishonest, because Conservative Leader Doug Ford had promised during the campaign that he would leave the program intact if he won.
Callous, because it ended any semblance of hope for D’Aaran and people like her.
“The best social program is a job,” said Social Services Minister Lisa MacLeod earlier this week.
Surely she knows that if people could get jobs, they wouldn’t be on social assistance. And that the extra money was enabling some of the people who were in the program to return to school and re-equip themselves for the job market.
There haven’t been any results yet from the halted research project, but we have plenty of evidence that poverty, all by itself, damages your health.
But it’s too easy to blame the Conservatives alone.
Welfare rates were slashed by former premier Mike Harris after he came into power in 1995. After the Liberal government took over in 2003, those cuts were never fully restored.
Even if the Conservatives had brought in the full three per cent increase to those rates that had been budgeted by the Liberals earlier this year (the Ford government has, instead, pledged a 1.5 per cent increase), they would still be lower in real dollars today than they were two decades ago when Harris cut them.
Many of us are closer than we think to the disadvantaged people who suffer this poverty. We’re one layoff or accident away.
North America is in the paradox of being a wealthy society in which sustainable jobs are disappearing. Long ago, we started losing low-skilled manufacturing jobs to automation and global trade. Today, retail is collapsing before our eyes. Self-driving vehicles and artificial intelligence are poised to disrupt the economy further, even as they promise to improve the quality of our lives.
Where does that leave most of us? How will the wealth be shared equitably? What are the alternatives to earned income?
The plan of former premier Kathleen Wynne to start experimenting with a minimum basic income came far too late in the Liberal mandate. But it was an idea that needed to be explored, for all of us. Closing the door on it now would be incredibly shortsighted.