I recently read a report put together by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives that shed light on the unfortunate and depressing reality facing people on welfare in this province. Most of the people that the study looked at were facing tremendous barriers to success, and it seems that our own government policies were often one of the biggest of those barriers.
Homelessness, addiction, and poverty are expensive. It seems the expenses that result from these problems are rooted in the politics of “being cheap”. The government claims that there is not enough money to fix social problems while running up 4 billion dollar plus budgetary surplus.
People on welfare deserve to be treated fairly. I don’t believe for a second that anyone on welfare wants to be there. It isn’t right to deny our fellow citizens the dignity of adequate housing and food when we, as a society, can afford to treat them with compassion. It also costs us plenty. It costs us in personal security, policing and emergency room visits.
The people covered in this study often had to turn to charity and to illegal activities like prostitution to make the money they needed to pay rent, buy groceries, and just plain live day to day. There is no way to describe our government’s approach to people on welfare except tight-fisted. This costs us more than it saves us. It makes our communities less inviting, and it takes away from the beauty of our province.
Our governments are not tight-fisted with banks and oil companies. Banks were given well over 200 million dollars in the last provincial budget, and oil companies received over 300 million. But unlike poor, addicted and homeless people, bankers and oil company execs, along with their companies donate heavily to the parties that currently run our governments.
I believe that it is wrong to send money to big companies that make huge profits when there are hungry children in this province, and young people are living on our streets.
I dislike having to bring this sort of thing up. I only wish corporate buy offs of governments weren’t an issue. It takes work to stay positive in the face of the knowledge that instead of taking care of all the people that need help governing parties are busy arranging next year’s election donations.
There is an alternative though. I think it is high time that we get the corporations out of politics by banning corporate and union donations. (Quebec and Manitoba prohibit corporate donations to provincial political parties and personal donations are not allowed to exceed $3,000.) Then, perhaps, instead of sending more than half a billion dollars to the richest execs in the country, our government could focus on helping British Columbians in need and improve life for everyone.