Living in poverty

posted August 4th, 2018 at 3:58 AM

In my opinion the term poverty has many levels of meaning and unless the term is defined it can be quite a vague notion ranging from the extreme of homelessness to the choice between buying food or paying the utilities as a single parent. There is so much judgement surrounding the idea of living in poverty that defining exactly what you mean by poverty is an important thing to do if you are going to say something about it. Without going into much detail I think that most people who live on any kind of social assistance or a pension is living below the poverty line for Canada. That is a very important distinction to make because of the way that living conditions vary in the other parts of the world. The notion of poverty is relative to the way people around you are living in your own country. The NDP government has recently done some good for the recipients of social assistance and disability but unless more major changes are made we are left with the same problems so far. I never see government trying to actually change how people see the issue and it would be great to find that government could do more in this regard. The problem is that people usually feel that they will lose out if someone else will gain but if both attitudes and the system were changing and were changed all would potentially benefit. Being poor or living in poverty can be very expensive for our society. Take a look at how much money our social problems are costing us for example in the prison system. People really need to look at the bigger picture to see the truth of what our attitudes towards poverty are actually doing

3 Comments

Anonymous

Aug 4, 2018 at 10:54am

this is a confession how?

The NDP...

Aug 4, 2018 at 1:16pm

... did basically what the Liberals have done over the past few years, a token raise to the support allowance for disability assistance. Nothing for shelter for disability or basic income assistance. And I bet that the $100 increase to disability assistance is all the NDP will do for their whole term---next year, they're going to say "well, not enough money to do anything else." They're certainly not going to increase shelter to market rates, or tie shelter to the City in which someone lives.

Let's remember that a single disabled individual (or individual on income assistance) gets $375 for shelter every month. You cannot rent anything for $375. Social assistance is supposed to be so that people can live independently. "Get room-mates!" is not viable.

One of the largest issues that goes unaddressed, that the Straight refuses to post for some reason, is that people on disability assistance, especially males, are basically denied any reasonable capacity to have a family. I guess disabled males shouldn't breed or something. If a single person on disability gets married or starts cohabiting with someone who works, he loses his assistance. So even if a disabled male doesn't want to have a family, just wants companionship, no woman is going to take on a disabled man who loses all the support he gets from the Government if he moves in or they get married.

Even the idea of social housing is basically an apartheid system for disabled people---it's not Riverview, but it's not living in market rentals in the community like normal working class folks.

And now that you have all this international travel, you have all of these lovely middle class people who've been to India, Vietnam, Cambodia, whatever, seen 'real poverty,' so they are just totally insensitive to what goes on here, because, hey, "it's better than the slums of Brazil!"

And let's not get started about how we have two-tiered medical now. We have private basic medical services that disabled people cannot access.

The "big picture" issue is that we live in a top-down managed socialist state. The only excuse for that is that everyone gets a decent life, but, of course, we know that's not how socialist states operate...doctors get a good life, tho, same for many managers in the social service...

There is also emotional poverty

Aug 4, 2018 at 1:31pm

Good post. Financial poverty is a hard life.
Sometimes people living on assistance or small pensions are also living in emotional poverty. Even some with moderate income. I have not been hugged or had friendship or laughter or outings with other people for over 20 yrs and I am approaching age 70. I think poverty of spirit is one of the worst kinds.