| The provincial government is increasing AISH (Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped) and the minimum wage in this year’s budget, but people living on social assistance won’t see an increase to their rates, which are the lowest in the country in most categories. And that has some anti-poverty activists questioning whether the province is creating "deserving" and "undeserving" categories for people living in poverty.
"We’re creating tier systems," says Donna McPhee, a member of the Alberta Coalition Against Poverty (ACAP) who receives social assistance. "This society is saying, ‘You’re the deserving poor and you’re not. We’ll try to be nice to you (people on AISH) but we’ll bash you (people on social assistance).’"
The province has announced the minimum wage will increase to $7 per hour from $5.90, and AISH will increase to just over $1,000 a month from $850. McPhee welcomes both increases, but says the government should also be helping people who are struggling to survive on extremely low social assistance rates.
"When you get into trouble with the welfare rates, you just dig yourself into a bigger hole and it’s harder and harder to get out of," says McPhee, explaining that people who don’t have enough to pay their bills just get farther and farther behind. "Once you’re down there you know you’re gonna stay there."
People living on social assistance are always one step away from homelessness, says McPhee, because they often can’t afford to pay rent and/or utility bills. She points to the situation of fellow ACAP member Barbara Banman, who was featured in a March Fast Forward article about poverty. Banman, who is in a wheelchair and has MS, has just received an eviction notice from her landlord because she is behind in her rent payments. This follows another crisis last month, when Banman almost had her utilities cut off – her social worker paid the bill, but then reduced her social assistance cheque of just over $600 by half until the money is repaid, leaving her without enough money for food and rent.
McPhee also says the stigmatization of people on social assistance by the Alberta government and the general public creates a division among people living in poverty. People on AISH or the working poor making minimum wage "don’t want to be the bad poor," and that leads to less solidarity in the anti-poverty movement.
John Donovan, a social worker at Potential Place, says he’s glad to see an increase to AISH and the minimum wage after years of lobbying for it as a member of the Calgary Low Income Coalition. Most of the members of Potential Place, which helps people with mental illnesses, are on AISH, but Donovan says the handful of members receiving social assistance are "in desperate straits."
He says there’s an economic argument to be made for helping people move out of "abject poverty" – doing so will help Calgary’s economy and also reduce costs to the education, health care and criminal justice systems. If people can get beyond "survival mode," they have a better chance of finding employment and thriving in their lives, he explains.
"Having people living in poverty costs society far more than people think. The crime rate goes up when you’ve got poverty. Children don’t excel at school because of poor nutrition and they drop out early," says Donovan.
It’s an argument the United Way agrees with as well. The organization commissioned a study on the costs of poverty and found that in "purely economic terms," poverty costs about $500 million per year in Calgary. That includes income support programs and costs to the health care, education and justice systems. Both the United Way and the Calgary Homeless Foundation have lobbied for increases not just to AISH and minimum wage, but also to social assistance.
Donovan says he’d now like to see social assistance increase so "you’d stop spiraling people down and down" to the point where they can’t recover.
"Without adequate funding for all low-income programs, it just costs society in the long run, because people living in abject poverty will just crumble under their depression," he says.
Sharon Blackwell, a spokesperson for the province’s Human Resources and Employment, told Fast Forward in a recent interview that assistance rates won’t be increased because the province’s approach is "a hand up, not a hand out."
She says there are programs in place to help people upgrade their education and to retrain in another field so they can "get back to work and stay independent." |
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