The Poor House

Does your community need to put its house in order?

Looking at current poverty statistics, anecdotal stories published every now and then in the media and face book groups where people lament about having to choose between paying the ever-increasing hydro rates or buying groceries, or knowing somebody who is not able to get their prescription medicine because there simply is no money in their bank account to do so, it is apparent that we, in Canada, need to look beyond our living rooms.

There are lots of people trapped in the basement. Children, a million of whom are living in poverty in this country. There is a terrible mess in our collective basements and the cries for help and justice are not being heard. These come from people who cannot afford to rent a home let alone buy one, disabled people who cannot get the medical transportation they need to take that upgraded highway to the medical care they need. It includes parents and students who had their community schools closed and who have been stuffed into overcrowded leftovers. It includes adults and children who cannot afford to eat nutritious food, who go to school and to their minimum wage workplaces hungry, tired, and with untreated dental problems. It includes people with renal failure, active liver disease, crippling arthritis, stroke, mental illnesses and head injuries, who cannot qualify for the disability assistance that, in B.C. gives them $906.00 a month to eat and pay rent. It includes children who live in unsafe housing and who cannot go to proper childcare facilities because the people upstairs in the house scrapped their commitment to funding universal daycare.
In the back corner of the basement are twice as many homeless as there were three years ago, 75 per cent of whom are not on welfare because they cannot get it, and they contribute to the 60 percent increase in food bank demand. With their backs against the wall are poor and disabled people who cannot access help for their human rights, their debt issues, their legal problems such as tenancy issues, elder abuse, or accessing a benefit they are entitled to.

Some of the people in the basement are out working, at ten dollars an hour, or at part time, temporary, contractual jobs. Some to try to save up so they can afford to take a few university classes, and many under adverse conditions, because changes to the Employment Standards Legislation gave some “flexibility” to employers and weakened safeguards to workers. Just like the Residential Tenancy Act changes ghettoized many tenants. It is quite crowded in the basement from those thousands of public sector employees who have lost their jobs. There are special needs students wandering around because they have no one-to-one support or supervision, and before and after-school program cuts have many children alone when they shouldn’t be. Some of the seniors in the basement are trying, and failing to take care of themselves or their elderly spouses because there are no beds for them in care facilities. The cuts to the Ministry of Children and Families has many frightened and needy children scrambling out of the cracks they have fallen into in the basement of this house.
The economy, as always prioritized by our legislators, applies to everyone in the “house” not just those upstairs. The wealth of this community has been out of reach to many, and the leaders who are elected to keep our house in order, don’t seem to realize, or care, that there is a basement.

It is their duty, as the head of our house, to do so.