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| MPP Bob Bailey, Sarnia-Lambton. |
Louis Shalako
Social policy matters.
Social policy at federal and provincial levels has a
direct effect on the cost of housing and therefore, homelessness and precarious
housing. We need to look no farther than the homeless encampment at Rainbow
Park here in Sarnia, Ontario, to see this.
The provincial government, faced with the Covid-19 crisis
and the fact that a major segment of the working population had been sent home,
put a moratorium on evictions.
The federal government, in order to keep Canadians
safe, sent workers home and provided those affected with $2,000.00 in monthly CERB
benefits.
The CERB benefit was little enough money to begin
with. Many workers were living on much more than $2,000.00 per month. Some
people are single, some people have families. All of a sudden, things are
really tight. They’re still carrying record levels of personal debt. Something
has to give. People feed the kids first. They skip the expensive medications.
They cut and snip and pare down as best they can,
making whatever sacrifices they must, and sometimes, are just barely holding
on.
Housing costs were already climbing. Some people,
through no fault of their own, got behind on the rent. Some people just plain
abused both CERB and the eviction moratorium.
This resulted in pent-up demand, once the moratorium
was lifted, from frustrated landlords anxious to get out from under paying the
costs of units which were not returning sufficient cash flow. Did the
provincial government not foresee the effect this would have on the rental
market? One would think so, with all of the information available to them.
Did the federal government not understand that
immigration levels, up to a million new Canadians a year, would affect the
housing and rental market? They have all the facts at their disposal. Did they
not think it through? It is a fact that this country has not been building
affordable, geared-to-income housing for the vast number of Canadians who do
not enjoy comfortable, middle-class incomes. This goes back thirty or forty
years.
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| Ontario social policy at work. |
Foreign students are short-term renters. In a time of
housing inflation, every unit that comes vacant is another chance to jack the
rent. Landlords take advantage of such opportunities. The provinces are
responsible for rent control, and would kick up a fuss if the federal
government overstepped their boundaries.
In terms of immigration, perhaps too much focus was
put on professionals—doctors, nurses, medical technicians, software engineers,
rather than construction tradespeople.
Do we need more lawyers in this country. The
perception is that they are high earners, who should, fairly quickly, at least
be able to pay their own way. There are the true refugees, although those
numbers are fairly small.
Many foreign students stay in Canada and make a new
life. They were going to need housing, relatively affordable, until they really
got going and could afford to purchase their own home. First generation
immigrants stick to the larger cities, where opportunities abound. This puts
more pressure on those housing markets.
Did either level of government, faced with rising
housing costs and rising inflation of a general kind, expect that a free market
economy, would, all on its own initiative, and out of the goodness of its
heart, build low-end rental units, smaller houses even, when they could wring more
profit out of the same footprint, and essentially similar units, perhaps with
nicer fittings and appointments?
The difference in investment is not that great.
It seems a bit far-fetched. No government is ever
perfect. No responsible government is ever right all the time, or wrong all the
time, although the true ideologues would have us believe otherwise.
Sarnia-Lambton MPP Bob Bailey admitted in an interview
with a local journal that the provincial government has ‘no plan’ to raise
welfare rates. This is a short-sighted policy, it has had its effects over the
course of their mandate, not guided by any real and practical considerations.
It’s ideologically-driven. The government probably knows better, it mostly
panders to their base, who are subject to all the usual prejudices. It is
ideology, rather than good common sense. It prevents the provincial government
from putting some rational form of rent control on units which become vacant.
This policy really hasn’t been of any great stimulus in terms of increasing the
number of rental units in the lower price ranges. The opposite would appear to
be true.
Welfare for a single adult in this province is still $733.00
per month. This is clearly inadequate. The average one-bedroom apartment here
in Sarnia-Lambton is at least double that and more. It doesn’t take into
account, food, transportation, clothing, and personal needs.
There are systemic issues, such as the low level of
allowable earnings under social services guidelines. It all tends to keep
people in poverty. The attitude is, if you are not suffering on social
assistance, then we must be paying you too much—
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| Let us know when our suffering is good enough. |
Housing restrictions mean that if two people on social
assistance share an apartment, one must lose all or a portion of their ‘housing
portion’. At which point, they can’t afford the rent. We must also ask why any
form of social assistance must be divided into ‘housing’ and ‘personal needs’
portions to begin with. It’s not progressive, to write every line of social
legislation with a view to cutting down on the costs, with provisions that are
baked into the guidelines, leaving little to the discretion of front-line
social workers.
Chronically underfunding all social programs is hardly
progressive.
Former Ontario Finance Minister, the late Jim
Flaherty, had an adult disabled child. It was a cognitive disability as this
writer recalls.
A fairly prosperous family, in order to simply provide
as best he could for his own child, Mr. Flaherty was instrumental in bringing
in the Henson Trust provisions to social welfare and disability guidelines in
this province.
Whether or not this was due to his own interest in the
future of his child, or just a moment of enlightenment, this policy has been of
great benefit to the disabled, the mentally-ill, or otherwise permanently
unemployable citizens of this province.
Perhaps love trumps ideology after all.
There are lessons to be learned here.
#Louis
END
Louis Shalako has books and stories in ebook and audio format available from Google Play. A
Stranger In Paris is the latest in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon Mystery
Series.
***
This sort of thing is hardly helpful, in the print edition of First Monday, Mr. Cooke goes on and on about pimps, pushers, sex workers, drug addicts and criminals. Since he's not naming names, he is immune to legal recourse in terms of suits for libel, slander and defamation of character.
The late Jim Flaherty. (Wiki)
Thank you for reading.
