Marchers urge minimum wage hike, increased welfare payouts
By Paul Morse
The Hamilton Spectator
(Sep 28, 2005)
Loretta Erie has known poverty all her life, from
growing up poor in the North End to struggling to make ends meet now.
Yesterday, Erie joined dozens of Hamilton residents on
social assistance and anti-poverty activists on a march through
downtown calling on the provincial government to give priority to
dealing with poverty.
"My mother was single and raised four children," Erie
said. "I don't know how she did it, but she managed on welfare and
child benefit cheques."
The Hamilton anti-poverty protest, including a
presentation to city council's social and public health services
committee, is a preview of a larger provincial rally at Queen's Park
tomorrow, organized by the Ontario Coalition for Social Justice.
Today's social assistance rates must be brought in line
with real costs of living, Erie said.
Like her mother, Erie is a diabetic and suffers from
serious arthritis. The 48-year old grandmother has fought hard to
keep her head above water while watching friends lose hope, struggle
with addictions, the law and the street.
"I feel like I'm going backward," she said. "I was born
in poverty and now I'm below it."
Ten years ago next week, Mike Harris's Conservative
government cut Ontario's social assistance by more than 20 per cent
and later downloaded welfare costs onto municipalities.
For Erie, that meant an Ontario Works $231 monthly
welfare cheque. The next eight years were a hand-to-mouth existence
relying on temporary low-paying jobs, soup kitchens and food banks
as she fought for disability benefits.
Today, Erie receives $800 a month in disability
benefits. About $600 of that goes toward subsidized rent for her
Market Street apartment, hydro, phone and other bills.
"That leaves a little better than $200 for food and
necessities and I have to make tough choices," she said.
Hamilton's Campaign for Adequate Welfare and Disability
Benefits (CAWDB) wants the provincial government to raise Ontario's
minimum wage to $10 from $7.45.
"We need to readjust the division of the income pie
because the gap between the rich and poor is becoming too wide,"
said CAWDB co-ordinator Peter Hutton.
Hutton, who is part of a high-profile city roundtable of
business leaders, politicians and activists on poverty, says the
roundtable is hearing that Hamilton faces special problems
contributing to poverty.
"We seem to have an inordinate number of young mothers
living in poverty because we have a higher teen pregnancy rate than
other parts of the province."
A lot of Hamilton's housing stock is also substandard,
he said, and an increasing number of seniors are struggling with
spiralling energy costs.
"We have people in Hamilton with electrical heating
bills in the winter where they pay three or four times what another
person would pay for a monthly mortgage."
Hutton believes raising social assistance and disability
benefits cannot happen without increasing the minimum wage.
"If you don't have a decent minimum wage, it's very
difficult for people on social assistance to make the jump off it."
But boosting the minimum wage is only part of the
equation. Governments must give the national child benefit
supplement back to people on welfare, Hutton said.
"The working poor get it, but people on assistance
don't. It's supposed to help families with children but it ends up
subsidizing governments."
Hamilton and District Labour Council president Wayne
Marston told protesters part of the solution is to increase the
minimum hourly wage to two-thirds of a community's average
industrial wage to become a "true living wage."
More than 93,000 people in Hamilton are living in
poverty, Marston said.
"Across Canada, youth unemployment remains stuck above
13 per cent," he said. "When young workers aged 15 to 24 do find
jobs, they earn 25 per cent less than their parents did when they
were that age."
And, he said, 40 per cent of all new jobs created over
the past year were temporary contracts.
Councillors on the social and public health services
committee agreed yesterday to bring a poverty roundtable report to
committee of the whole and invite public presentations on poverty in
November.
CAWDB is making two buses available to send people to
tomorrow's Walk, Wheel and Ride for Dignity rally at Queen's Park.
The buses will leave at 9:30 a.m. from the Wesley Centre, 195
Ferguson Ave. N.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 905-526-3434
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