Surrey MLA brings his welfare challenge to Vancouver
Jagrup Brar has only $ 21.45 in his pocket to last 15 days, but he’s nearly $ 16 richer than his new pal who lives in the Downtown Eastside
It was appropriately cold this week as Surrey Fleetwood NDP MLA Jagrup Brar brought his welfare challenge to the icy streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside where the brief benefits of seasonal charity has long since dissipated and one of Canada’s poorest communities is once again in survival mode.
Brar, who began his month’s sojourn into poverty Jan. 1 with a food budget of $ 108 to last him 31 days, was down to $ 21.45 Tuesday, with 15 days to go.
He’s never going to make it but at least he’s ahead of his new pal Fraser Stuart, who’s been appointed his guide and mentor while he’s staying at a rooming house at 306 Jackson Ave., just across from Oppenheimer Park.
Stuart has just $ 5.52 to last until Jan. 25, when his next welfare cheque arrives with its $ 175 a month ( after lodging) to live on.
“[ Brar is] going to run out of money before the end of the month. But, hey, that’s why he’s got a buddy,” said Stuart.
“It took me two months to find out about food down here. I’ll take him down to the Forty- Four, where he can get a good meal for $ 2 and then when his money’s gone it’ll be the [ Salvation Army] Harbour Light that’s got free food because he’s going to need it by then.”
Brar has accepted the challenge to live on $ 610 a month — the amount given to an able- bodied single person by social services — issued by the antipoverty group Raise the Rates, which wants an increase in social assistance payments.
He spent the first two weeks living in an illegal rooming house in Surrey before arriving to live in a single occupancy room — one of the Downtown Eastside’s infamous SROS — which is all his supposed welfare allotment could afford.
His Surrey quarters were regal compared with what 306 Jackson has to offer, which is where Stuart lives.
This rooming house is for single men only over the age of 45.
When Brar first saw it, before beginning his challenge, he told Raise the Rates he wouldn’t spend an hour there.
“Then we took him to the Balmoral and some other places and at the end he said they made this place look like the Four Seasons,” said Stuart. “It’s one of the best down here.”
Brar has a tiny room with a oneburner stove attached to a sink, a couple of broken pieces of furniture, a small set of cupboards with all the doors ripped off or missing, a typist’s chair, and a bed that consists of two small foam mattresses stacked against a wall because once placed on the naked floor there’s no room to move around.
The bathroom he will share with 15 other residents needs to be seen to be believed. A single bare light bulb is in the ceiling; a laundry tub serves as a handbasin; the bath would only fit a child but anyway the shower head doesn’t work and has been capped; the lower half of the separate shower stall door is brown with mildew, as are the walls, which are in a state of decay with paint erupting and flaking, strips of plaster hanging down undone by damp, and a thick layer of filth and grit piled on top of an electric baseboard heater seemingly collecting there since first installed.
Accompanying Brar was his wife Rajwant, daughter Noor, 12, and his four- year- old son, Fateh.
On the pavement outside his new residence, Rajwant was clearly concerned.
“I’m very emotional. I feel like some part of my body is gone. I’m not eating properly. I get migraines and I think about him all the time,” she said.
But she keeps all this from her husband. “I don’t want to say anything to him that we are worried. He looks a lot thinner and sometimes tired. I am concerned but I don’t say this to him. I tell him everything is okay,” she said.
“We are very proud of him. We are counting our days saying ‘ another one is gone’ but there are a couple of nights when you feel emotional and you can’t sleep at all.”
Noor, who supported her father’s decision to accept the poverty challenge, said what he was doing was good “but I still want him in the house.”
Fateh offered to accompany him, his mother said.
“‘ I can stay a week with Daddy,’ he told us.”
Stuart said it’s something he wouldn’t have done.
“Give up your home and a beautiful family like this just to come down here when you don’t have to? It’s different if you’re pushed here by circumstances. I admire him, but I wouldn’t do it.”