Letters to LIFE

LETTER TO THE EDITOR: published in the Victoria Times Colonist in the summer of 2006
(reprinted with permission of author)

Back in the old days--1970 to be exact--I was appointed by the federal government to be on the first National Council of Welfare. This was the Trudeau era, don't forget, and things were happening. We thought we had the "whole, wide world" at our beck and call.

One of the first recommendations we made, as an advisory board in 1970, was that we needed in Canada a guaranteed annual income-if we ever hoped to deal adequately with the problem of poverty. Well, here it is 36 years later and the problem has not gone away. It has gotten much worse.

All provinces in Canada have eroded the amounts paid for social assistance on the erroneous assumption that the majority of recipients are employable, when the vast majority are disabled, single parents or, for other reasons, unemployable.

The National Council of Welfare this summer reports that B.C. and other provinces are now giving welfare recipients less money than 20 years ago.

Victoria and Vancouver are worried about losing conventions and tourists due to visitors being upset by seeing panhandlers. Those cities are looking at how to move the beggars away.

We now know that the world is in one heck of a mess. We can't fix it all. But maybe the government can start to build some low-income or social housing. Then maybe we could start to re-build the social safety net we systematically cut down from the 1980's onward.

Raising welfare rates above subsistence levels might start to make Canada a civilized country again, like we thought it was in 1970.

Sincerely, Gwyn Frayne, Courtenay, BC