Are they Trying or Lying?

By the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty

The McGuinty Liberals have jumped onto the very overcrowded bandwagon of ‘Poverty Reduction’. They have set up a process of highly selective consultation to ‘define the problem’. Then, they tell us, they will ‘set targets’ to reduce poverty and implement a package of reforms to that effect. Implied in all this is an expectation that we should accept it as a good faith initiative. In fact, we are expected to play along and wait patiently for the eventual benefits that will,
supposedly, flow from it.

The first thing that needs to be said is that an uncritical acceptance
of this undertaking would be an act of extraordinary naiveté. This is
the second term for the Liberals and everything they have done to date consolidates the Harris Common Sense Revolution while smoothing over social divisions with token gestures.

Perhaps we should just take a glimpse at how the Liberals have dealt
with the poor over the last few years. They campaigned the first time
they were elected on a platform that included repealing the Safe
Streets Act that Harris used to set the cops on the homeless. To-day,
that law is still in effect, being used on a scale far greater than
when the Tories held power. In Toronto, over the last three years,
there has been a nearly 300% increase in the number of Safe Streets
tickets being issued. The Liberal Attorney General has sent his people
into Court to oppose legal challenges to the Act and his prosecutors
are seeking and obtaining jail time for people convicted of
panhandling.

While an oversupply of upscale housing crowds out the skyline, decent
and truly affordable housing remains a dream for the poor. Toronto
Community Housing says it needs $300 million to repair and preserve its
buildings. Less than 10% of that has been provided by Queen’s Park and
180,000 public housing tenants in Toronto are living in units that are,
literally, falling apart.

Under pressure, modest increases to the minimum wage have occurred but
welfare and disability rates have lost ground against inflation under
the Liberals. More people than ever are being evicted from their
housing for lack of income. Attempts to use the ‘Special Diet’ policy
within the welfare system to actually provide people with enough to eat
have been fought tooth and nail by the Liberals. Now, the new Ontario
Child Benefit, their first step towards ‘poverty reduction’, will not
even be the promised $50 a month for those on assistance and will be
reduced even further through the elimination of clothing allowances.

A 40% reduction in real income for people on welfare still casts its
shadow over the lives of hundreds of thousands in this Province years
after McGuinty first took office on a platform of ‘change’. Meanwhile,
Deb Matthews, the Minister who will be handling his belated conversion
to ‘poverty reduction’, has promised to leave intact the Harris tax
cuts that made the rich richer and the poor poorer. But these were
paid for in large measure by the people and families on assistance who
had their income slashed. If that is not be reversed, then we are
talking about a process of reform that is denied the resources it would
need to be meaningful.

If this poverty reduction initiative, then, is lacking in sincerity, we
may ask ourselves what it is about. In fact, it has several aspects to
it and is part of a process that goes well beyond Ontario.

There is actually a wing of the corporate structure that has become
nervous about overly crude methods when it comes to reducing social
provision. The Toronto Star with its present ‘war on poverty’ is
perhaps the best example of such timid, post Harris ‘social
engineering’. It worries about the impact of outright social
abandonment and the damage done by earlier cutbacks. There’s no
nostalgia for the post war social infrastructure, of course, but
measures to deal with the worst excesses of poverty are something to
look at, provided they don’t go too far.

The above consideration, very limited as it is, is the only element of
the ‘poverty reduction’ process that has any genuine quality about it.
We may also anticipate that a great deal of what Ms. Matthews wants to
develop would be highly regressive in nature. Even with the brutality
of the Harris cuts to social assistance, the system can still be
redesigned in ways that make it more effective in forcing the poor into
low wage employment. By separating the benefits for children from those
of their parents, a classical use of the division between the
‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor is to be seen. Once a mythical
adequacy has been developed for children, welfare can become an even
better tool for driving adults into the most exploitative jobs. Even
at this early stage, Matthews is fixating on children as if she
actually believes their poverty can be considered as something apart
from that of their parents or that the poverty of single adults is of
secondary importance.

The roots of the new religion of ‘poverty reduction’ are actually to be
found in the neo liberal assault on poor countries. Structural
adjustment programs have removed limited protections for poor people
and driven vast sections of the population from rural self sufficiency
into huge and expanding mega cities, where they are warehoused in
squalor on the fringes of economic life. Abandoned people in their
abandoned communities are then told that they can be ‘empowered’ and
become ‘self sufficient’ through community economic development. The
World Bank and IMF, having inflicted misery on billions of people, now
offer them such preposterous ‘solutions’ in place of the resources they
need.

It was striking that ideas drawn from the international ‘poverty
reduction’ industry were present in Matthews’ comments on how she sees
her work. She stressed that reducing peoples’ poverty was only to a
limited degree about resources. (This is very convenient since the
rich have taken those resources and don’t intend to give them back).
No, in fact, a large part of dealing with poverty is about giving
people ‘opportunities’. Notions of ‘personal responsibility’ and
measures of ‘tough love’ are not very far away and give us another
warning that there is an actively regressive element to this process.

Of course, the main models of poverty reduction being pointed to are
those that have emerged in other ‘developed countries’. Ireland and
the UK are held up a great deal. The achievements in those countries
were, actually, much more limited and contradictory than they would
like to acknowledge but they also took place in a very different
context to that facing Ontario to-day. Especially in the case of
Ireland, the twenty six county republic was experiencing an unheard of
expansion and industrialization. With recessionary storm clouds
gathering here and, with the industrial base massively eroded ahead of
time, we would be overly trusting to expect that the McGuinty
Government will charge uphill for social justice. If this process and
its directions remain in their hands, the prospects for any progress in
the fight against poverty are bleak indeed.

As Matthews moves from community to community with her little circus,
we should note that we are seeing here a specialty of the Liberal Party
at work. That body is, after all, the main political mechanism for
demobilizing communities and channeling grievances into blind allies of
‘dialogue’ and consultation. They plan to give the poor very little in
terms of concessions and to include in their reform package measures
that make things worse. The question, then, has to be will this thing
unfold as a safe and controlled exercise with the results mapped out by
the Government ahead of time or will the demands and the anger of poor
people and their communities break through and dominate the process?

If the Liberals lose control of this, it would not be the first time
that an attempt to divert community anger has, instead, provided a
focus for it.
In the early 1970s, the Senate Committee on Poverty became a lightning rod
for community anger. The Social Assistance Review Committee in the
Ontario of the late 80s did not at all divert poor people from mobilizing.
Matthews is trying to prevent this by holding controlled, invitation only
consultations. Already indignant voices are being raised and communities
are starting to challenge her attempt to keep the anger of poor people
from intruding on her sanitized deliberations.

We have been warned against ‘simplistic’ solutions and told that we
can’t tackle the complexities of poverty until we ‘define the problem’.
We should have very limited patience with a notion that works so well
for those wanting to do as little as possible for as long as they can.
If Matthews wants a definition of poverty, the amount of money people
get from her Government’s welfare system is a good definition. So is
the wage people bring home at the legislated minimum her Government
sets. When you have to make a choice between paying the rent and
eating decent food, that is poverty and it is created and maintained by
the Government Matthews is part of. She and her ‘Cabinet colleagues’
need to hear that from the poor and their allies.

Our demands for living income, decent housing and other vital community
needs must force their way to the forefront. The Liberal’s circus of
consultation needs a large measure of truth and big dose of reality.

_______________________________________________
ocap mailing list
ocap@masses.tao.ca
https://masses.tao.ca/lists/listinfo/ocap