Health care. Homelessness. Addictions. Inadequate education. Hunger. What do these all have in common? Poverty as an underlying cause. Poverty is the single greatest social ill in our city, in our province, in our country. This is something I have had much intimate first-hand experience with, as well as something I have intellectually understood. But I began to appreciate the problem on a different level this morning.
A handful of HRM Green candidates – Leader Ryan Watson, Halifax Needham candidate Kris MacLellan, Preston candidate Sarah Densmore, and yours truly, from the heart of Dartmouth South-Portland Valley – spent a few hours talking to some of the people who populate the organizations that take the fight against poverty directly to the street. It was a walking and talking tour of the Gottingen Street anti-poverty non-profit sector. These organizations are essential to social welfare delivery in our society, stepping in and providing services where government delivery is insufficient or inefficient or has even failed entirely. I honestly find it tragic that these NGOs are even needed, but they are. I always believed our society could banish poverty if it decided to. I still believe it, actually.
We stopped at Community Action on Homelessness, the North End Community Health Centre, Halifax Housing Helps, and the Maynard Street Supportive Housing Units. A planned one-hour tour tripled in length. And how could it not? There is much to learn about poverty, and these organizations have much to teach. The morning turned into an eye-opening, and sometimes jaw-dropping, exploration of the intertwined world of housing, health, addictions, disabilities, and poverty.
Did you know, for example, that shelter beds were used in Halifax over 52,000 times in 2008? That’s more than a thousand times a week, and an increased need is anticipated. Or that nearly half of all the people recieving income assistance have some form of disability? Or did you know that in order to satisfy the definition of “affordable housing” of 30% of your income, a single person living alone in a bachelor apartment in Halifax needs to be earning $12.48 per hour for forty hours per week and that the minimum wage is nearly three bucks an hour less than that? The income assistance allowance for housing is $300, in a city where the average bachelor apartment costs $599. Which would be laughable if it wasn’t such a social tragedy or public policy travesty. One thing some of the people I met today seem to encounter in government is the difficulty in getting anybody to understand that the best cure for homelessness is homes. Sure, it seems obvious to you and me – but something happens to the normal human brain once it reaches deputy-ministerial level in government, and it is rendered completely unable to see obvious things.
There is some consensus among the people we spoke to at each of these organizations as to the failure of our health and community services departments to take a holistic perspective on the causes and consequences of poverty in Nova Scotia. There is consensus, also, that funding is too scarce and too difficult to obtain. Too much of their time and too many of their human resources must be dedicated to pursuing funding, which draws away from their doing what they do best. It occurred to me, and not for the first time, that maybe the government ought to do the funding part (a job it is reasonably good at) and get out of the service delivery part (a job it consistently sucks at), while letting the non-profits do just the opposite. Then everybody would use all their time doing things they are really good at. This could just be me, or it could be one of those obvious things to which deputy ministers are blinded.
On June 2, with one week to go before polling day, the Community Advocates Network called a press conference to take all of the political parties to task for their failure to address the issues surrounding disabilities and poverty during this election. They were right to do so. In the partisan quibbling over a handful of new emergency room beds here and a few rural roads paved there – it seemed nobody was talking about the big issues. Nobody was talking about poverty.
And that’s what the political parties – all of them – should be talking about. It is a point of only small partisan pride that the Green Party stands alone against VLTs and the role they play in poverty. But we should all have been talking about it in the first place, long before the election. And we should keep talking about it until long after the election, until it is a thing of the past – until the only thing Nova Scotian children know about poverty is what they have learned in history class. The thing is, before we can talk, we must listen. That’s what this morning was about for me. I went to learn.
The media is as culpable as our political leaders for keeping poverty out of the headlines. It is, by far, the single greatest cause of disease in our culture, and it warrants hardly a mention. But we couldn’t get enough about the Swine Flu (ahem…H1N1), with the media reporting every sneeze of every new diagnosis. Poverty is plain, not “sexy enough”, as I heard at one location this morning. Maybe one of those trendsetting media types can help us out here, and figure out how to sex-up affordable housing.
In the meantime, I urge everybody to start talking to their politicians about taking a broad and holistic approach to poverty. Ask them about people with disabilities, and what our society is doing for them. Ask them about the failure to recognize the connection between having a safe place to live and having good health. Ask them about the terrible and unnecessary strain homelessness puts on our emergency rooms. Ask them to listen to the people who actually understand poverty – to the people who live with it and work with it. Demand they reject the notion that anybody chooses homelessness, that anybody chooses poverty. Tell them a society is judged by how it treats its least advantaged and ask them what they will do to ensure our society gets high marks.
