Is it really okay for little kids to go hungry because of our choices?
The Vancouver Sun
09 Oct 2006
Editorial -- By: Paul Willcocks

VICTORIA - So here we are together on Thanksgiving... Yet our topic is hunger. Not in some distant land, but here at home in B.C. And our information comes not from anti-poverty groups or the Opposition but the government's own provincial health officer.

Dr. Perry Kendall's latest annual report focused on food, health and well-being in B.C. It's fascinating. It's also often grim....

Only about 40 per cent of British Columbians are eating the recommended five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, for example. Many of us are making bad choices.

But the report got scary when it started talking about the people too poor to be making better choices. They just didn't have enough money to feed their families properly. It got scarier still when it counted the number of children deprived of adequate food as a matter of government policy.

There's a risk in the column business in becoming the gloomy guy, brooding about what's gone wrong. But there's no ignoring that behind these statistics are little kids whose lives are being ruined by poverty.

Housing Minister Rich Coleman made the point wonderfully when he announced housing subsidies last week. Today in B.C., he said, children are suffering from malnutrition because their parents don't have enough money left for food. They are falling behind in school, stumbling towards illiteracy, because they are poor and hungry. Government has to act, Coleman said.

But only for some people. The housing supports are denied to welfare recipients....

Who is really going to say it's acceptable that a four-year-old should be hungry, malnourished and left behind because we don't want to pay any more taxes?

That's what we've done. The report found that in 2001 about one in six British Columbians worried about not being able to afford adequate food. That's a lot of children facing malnutrition and a raft of related problems.

And things have got worse since then. "In B.C. child poverty diminished in the late 1990s and then rose from 2002 to 2005," the health officer reports. Almost one in four children lived in poverty in 2005.

Bad luck for those kids, born to the wrong parents.

Except it's not really luck. You decided that it was okay for them to go hungry or suffer from an inadequate diet. The government, on your behalf, set welfare rates that kept kids in poverty and hunger, even with the help of food banks. B.C.'s welfare rates were the second-lowest in Canada in 2004, the report found. In real dollars, they have been cut by more than 15 per cent over the past decade.

The health officer's annual report says it should cost $477 a month to feed a family of three in B.C. -- nothing fancy, but healthy fare.

But after housing, based on Coleman's cost estimates, a family of three on social assistance has about $660 for all their expenses for the month. Healthy food would leave $180 a month for clothes, school fees, life. Maybe it's possible. You could certainly try limiting your family to $500 a month for food and $180 for everything else. I'd be pleased to base a future column on your efforts.

Meanwhile, people are living within the bleak reality we have set. The report notes a single pregnant woman on welfare in B.C. would receive about $580 a month in assistance. Housing would take all that money, leaving nothing for food, clothing or other necessities. Her baby will be born desperately behind.

That's not the way it's supposed to work. All British Columbians are supposed to have a chance to succeed or fail based on their abilities and efforts. Tossing some kids into the scrap heap at birth is not part of the plan.

I'd argue that it's cruel. The health officer's report suggests that it's also stupid. Children in hungry households are more than twice as likely to suffer from asthma and much more likely to suffer from a variety of ailments that tax the health care system for years.

Can't we do better?