Raising welfare rates would get money into circulation
Vancouver Island News Group - Comox Valley Record
February 16, 2009
Opinion by: Betty Gidlof, Courtenay

Dear editor,

I wish to make a couple of suggestions about dealing with the recession.

The objective at such a time is to get money back into circulation. People who are poor - and as you know, there are many in B.C. - spend all of their income just to meet their basic human needs.

Therefore, raising the amounts of money given to those on welfare and to the working poor would get more money into circulation and help minimize the damage done to the economy.

As you surely realize, most of those on welfare are women with children. They are unable to work because there isn't affordable child care (which your government could fund), or they may not have marketable skills.

The province needs to increase welfare rates by 50 per cent and remove arbitrary barriers to accessing welfare that keep people in dire need from getting the assistance they need.

After years of economic growth and record low unemployment, 546,000 or 13 per cent of the population live in poverty, and homelessness continues to rise. Most poor people in B.C. are in the labour force, yet even working full-time, their wages are not enough to lift them and their children out of poverty.

We all pay for poverty and homelessness with higher health costs, higher justice system costs, more demands on social and community services, more stress on family members and diminishing school success.

A recent Environics poll indicates that 87 per cent of British Columbians want to see strong political leadership to reduce the number of poor people in Canada and in our province. This same per cent believe that you should set concrete targets and timelines to reduce poverty. And 74 per cent of British Columbians say they would be more likely to support a provincial political party that pledged to do that.

The people who are most vulnerable to poverty are recent immigrants, children, single-mother families and aboriginal people, people with disabilities and single senior women.

Mr. Premier, I hope that you will give these suggestions careful thought and implement them as soon as possible.