Ottawa must step in, help our most vulnerable
As has become a pattern during the throes of the pandemic, the Canadian economy rebounded again in the third quarter of the year, making up for the pit that was Q2. But don’t tell that to Janet McLeod.
The 5.4 per cent pace of growth this July, August and September means next to nothing for her.
McLeod is a 79-year-old living in Windsor, Ont., and has been speaking out about the troubles of making ends meet during the pandemic.
She collected some pandemic benefits early on in the pandemic to make up for the collapse of her very small business advising students. And for her sins, she is seeing her Guaranteed Income Supplement being dramatically clawed back. The price of her over-the-counter medication is rising. And she’s cutting back on the small luxuries she used to afford herself.
“I find myself settling for less,” she says.
Coming back to life after the depths of COVID-19 has been a positive experience for many sectors of the Canadian economy. McLeod aside, household spending was on fire in the third quarter, and exports were strong too.
But the big bounce in the third quarter was probably an exception that belies the second quarter and likely the fourth as well. Statistics
Canada revised down its alreadydismal estimate of what happened this spring, now saying the economy contracted at a harsh 3.2 per cent pace. And the 5.4 per cent growth in the summer isn’t expected to persist at that pace into the winter now that we’re reeling with the British Columbia floods, choked supply chains, labour shortages and the spectre of a new, poorly understood virus.
In this on-again-off-again path to recovery, many Canadians aren’t feeling the love.
Consumer confidence in Canada is at its lowest point since May, according to the Conference Board of Canada. In general, people are wary of inflation, are holding off making major purchases, and are saving their money as their worries about future job prospects increase.
What may be niggling concerns for the middle class are existential for low-income communities.
Feed Ontario released new 2021 statistics on Tuesday about food bank usage in the province, and almost 600,000 adults and children accessed a food bank in the province during the first full year of the pandemic — an increase of 10 per cent, and the largest single-year increase since 2009, when the world was in the grips of a recession.
Despite the generous benefits the federal government extended to much of the workforce, most food bank users didn’t qualify for much of Ottawa’s Canada Emergency Response Benefit. And CERB recipients were less than one per cent of those who used food banks last year.
Seniors, on the other hand, increased their food bank visits by a shocking 36 per cent.
“The rising number of older adults relying on food banks for assistance is a trend that we have been monitoring closely since 2017,” says Feed Ontario’s interim executive director, Siu Mee Cheng, adding that housing and the cost of living have been particularly hard on those with fixed incomes and low-income earners.
Indeed, McLeod left Toronto for Windsor quite recently because of her substandard affordable housing in the big city.
And high inflation bites hard for those who are just scraping by, especially when it comes to food. Poverty researcher John Stapleton just went out a few days ago and shopped for everything on the socalled “welfare diet” that was first proposed by the Mike Harris government — to much criticism at the time — as a way for welfare recipients to get by.
Year after year, Stapleton has been using the welfare diet as a benchmark for the cost of food low-income families need. And this year, the bill is the least affordable to date, partly because the price of basic meat, fresh fruit and vegetables has been climbing and partly because social security hasn’t kept up with inflation.
But at the same time, the federal government is dramatically curtailing pandemic-related income supports, cutting off the emergency benefits and replacing them with bare-bones help for those who are completely locked down by public health restrictions.
When the economy is growing at 5.4 per cent and the job market approaches full recovery, that all sounds well and good. But to the Janet McLeods of the world and those who are hit hard by rising prices, job insecurity and a shaky outlook, the ability of governments to plug the holes in the recovering economy is crucial for our collective confidence.
In Ottawa, they could start by ending the clawback of low-income seniors’ benefits from those who received the CERB, à la McLeod.
It’s a demand of the federal NDP, and it’s something the Liberals are inclined to do but are stymied by technical and bureaucratic design issues.
Time to figure it out.