Will we always have the poor to kick around?
Even when poverty and inequality don’t add up to an immediate death sentence, as it did for Hank William’s “Tramp on the Street,” (and make no mistake, poverty can be fatal here too — just look at the sharply curtailed life expectancy of the province’s homeless revealed in a recent study by Megaphone magazine), they can and often do leave people hungry, or facing hard choices about who in the family will get to eat.
“We don’t skip meals, just my mom does,” 14-year-old Rosalie told Andrew MacLeod last year. Rosalie’s mom, on a disability pension because of a workplace injury, tries to feed herself, Rosalie and a 21-year-old son on the $300 a month left after she covers housing and medication costs. Little wonder that the disabled mom sometimes has to skip meals to provide for her kids.
Rosalie and her mom were at the B.C. Legislature the day MacLeod met with them a year ago, there to lobby for a change in regulations for the province’s Persons with Disabilities program, draconian rules that clawed back every penny that Rosalie’s mom received in child support payments from Rosalie’s father.
The Clark government finally changed the contested rule in February this year.
But that hard-won and welcome reform is only a small step toward addressing the scandalous increase in inequality in B.C. over the past decade and a half. The top 10 per cent of B.C. residents hold 56.2 per cent of all private wealth in the province, while the bottom half of B.C. residents controls a paltry three per cent of assets. The bottom 10 per cent are also underwater, with outstanding debts. Last year B.C. was the most unequal province in Canada in terms of income, and Canada was one of the most unequal countries in the OECD. The average income of the top 20 per cent of B.C. earners is six times larger than the average earned by the bottom 20 per cent.
Some of the Liberal policy decisions that have widened the gap include 37 per cent cuts in provincial income tax levies, tighter eligibility rules for income assistance, lower rates for single “employable” welfare clients, cuts to child care subsidies, reductions in support for women’s centres and doubled post secondary tuition fees.
MacLeod, the Victoria reporter for online journal The Tyee, has expanded a series of articles on economic inequality in B.C. to produce A Better Place on Earth, a detailed examination of the issue that takes the reader on a painful but eloquently described trip across the landscape of inequality in the province. MacLeod seamlessly weaves together detailed statistical research and humanizing moments like his interview with Rosalie and her mom. (Full disclosure. Like MacLeod, I have written for the Tyee, and we have met.)
MacLeod does a workmanlike job of describing the provincial policies that have helped make B.C. such a standout leader in child poverty and other manifestations of inequality. Scrupulously even-handed, he humanizes his analysis with first person interviews with people on both sides of the inequality gap. Although both Jim Pattison and Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, B.C.’s two richest men, declined to be interviewed for this book, many among the wealthy and the powerful are quoted, along with the walking wounded from this province’s version of class warfare, and the author’s tone is fair and quiet throughout.
The facts, he obviously has decided, speak for themselves, and they bespeak an urgent need for reforms to reduce our spiking levels of inequality.
This book is required reading for anyone who cares about B.C. and social justice. As the list of 36 possible equality remedies that closes the book suggests, the inequality that has been created by unfair public policy could arguably be ameliorated by reforms to make the tax, education, health and welfare systems more humane.
How do we get some of these long deferred reforms implemented?
Perhaps we could take a hint from Rosalie and her mom, who together with other poor people, policy activists and opposition politicians, won reform on the odious child support claw back issue. Change will happen if we organize and fight for it.