Forward / Poverty Homepage

Face of poverty must be call to action

What does poverty look like? Look around. In London, the chances are there are few places in the city where someone is not suffering a life of quiet desperation, trying to scrape by on not-quite-enough money, hoping no sudden illnesses or repair expenses come up, struggling to keep food on the table. However, unless you happen to be one of those people, you might have trouble believing there are about 50,000 of your fellow citizens, including children, living at or below the poverty level. Well, it's wake-up time. This series in The Free Press is all about putting a face to those endless, mind-numbing statistics. Until we start to understand what those numbers actually mean, it is hard to get riled up enough to take action. And action is needed. These stories are not being told to make any of us feel guilty. Neither are they about blaming individuals for the choices they have made. In London, the statistics have been around for a while: 15.2 per cent of families are considered low-income. That means that despite our continued reputation as a fat-cat insurance city, London actually has more than the provincial average of 13.1 per cent of low-income families. That means there are a substantial number of children in our city going to school hungry, families relying on the food bank to get through the month, households turning to United Way agencies for help. For too many of those 50,000 impoverished Londoners, it means the opportunity to ever climb out of poverty is slipping farther and farther away. Poverty truly can be a trap. It takes huge amounts of time and energy to keep up with bills while surviving on one or two minimum-wage or part-time jobs. There are massive amounts of red-tape involved in social assistance and more than 40,000 Londoners are on some form of social assistance. The hard work that goes into simply surviving as a poor person in our city leaves little time to upgrade education, training or job skills, necessary steps today to better jobs and lives. That is a hugely important detail for those enjoying comfortable middle-class lives in this city. It means the gap between the rich and the poor can only get larger. That is something that will hurt everyone in the long run. Experts say it means everyone will prosper less, and there are the inevitable consequences of widely separated social classes -- growing disillusionment, anger and often crime. Unless ways are found to help people out of poverty, the city will divide into camps of us and them. Children who grow up with less than their middle-class neighbours are, by turns, sad and envious, unable to access the opportunities that see the rich get richer. This cycle of poverty must be turned around. The city has a crucial role to play in creating the climate to attract businesses with well-paying jobs. In the end, that's the only long-term solution to poverty. This week, take the time to closely look around and see beyond the surface of the city, to the pockets of poverty and the needs of neighbours. Read the stories on our pages. Resist the temptation to be judgmental. Listen, learn -- and take action.

Hardship in midst of plenty

Children bear the brunt of economic struggle while London maintains a reputation of affluence

By Jane Sims
Free Press Social Services Reporter

DEREK RUTTAN The London Free Press Six-year-old Andy gets a hug from mom Tracy McCaw-Livingston, who worries her children miss activities as well as some essentials. But in a household of five people living on about $21,000 a year, there's still plenty of love to go around.

London, a conservative city better known for what it has than what it doesn't have, sits in the heart of Ontario's food basket, but Tracy McCaw-Livingston worries her children may be going to bed hungry. The Livingston home is among the 15.2 per cent of households in London defined by Statistics Canada as low income. The provincial average is 13.1 per cent. Although both adults in the home are working, the family is among about 9,000 who use the food bank here annually. McCaw-Livingston's kids aren't fussy eaters -- they wolf down their meals. Still, "These guys know they're not getting as much," says the mother of three.

More than 40,000 Londoners rely on social assistance. The United Way estimates 40 per cent of welfare recipients are children. More evidence of poverty's grip can be found in the Middlesex-London health unit's recent report on 1996 census data. It placed London's unemployment rate at 9.6 per cent, higher than the provincial average of 9.1 per cent. The number of low-income Londoners was also above average -- 18.8 per cent versus 17.7 per cent. But some experts believe many of us are oblivious to the challenges faced by our low-income neighbours. One in three Londoners use United Way services, but only one in six households give to the agency. Londoners give $12.74 on average, below the provincial average of $14.35. "(Poverty)'s very much ignored. I think we have had a long history in London of not thinking about it because we tended to think of London as a very well-off community," said Bill Avison, a University of Western Ontario professor who heads up the campus Centre for Health and Well-being. Avison said the city has long been one of contrasts, with a substantial number of people taking home upper- and upper-middle class professional incomes. "On the other side we have a vast number of people who used to earn a living working in manufacturing and working in assembly-line kinds of jobs. Those jobs have tended to dry up in this city," he said. "I think it's taken Londoners a long time to recognize that we have a very large working-class population that has experienced a lot of difficulties through recession and job loss and re-training. "The result of that is we have had trouble coming to terms with this and trouble deciding what we ought to be doing about it," he said. Avison does, however, point to a number of well-meaning initiatives, including the Mayor's Anti-Poverty Action Group. But a year after the task force issued its report, an action plan has yet to be fully funded and set in motion. Starting today, The Free Press looks at the individuals who are the statistics; how does economic desperation mute their dreams and those of their families. Is the community of London doing right by its children and disadvantaged members?

Finding the comfort zone

To be classified as poor in Canada you have to meet a statistician's criteria, but the perch above the arbitrary poverty line isn't necessarily comfortable.

Story by Peter Geigen-Miller; Photos by Derek Ruttan
The London Free Press

Cliff, who roams Dundas Street, says he survives on $318 a month from social assistance. His monthly rent is $150 for a small room. At 61, his last job was delivering flyers. A Nova Scotia native, he left school in Grade 7. He said he's never been married. He had a car once but he never had a licence.	Canada's most widely used poverty measure is under attack. Federal and provincial governments are threatening to replace the low-income cutoffs, Statistics Canada's unofficial but widely accepted national poverty line. Working behind the scenes, federal and provincial officials have come up with a proposed new poverty measure some critics say would effectively remove 1.8 million people -- 500,000 of them children -- from Canada's poverty rolls. Andrew Mitchell of the Toronto Social Planning Council opposes the new measure. "It starts with the wrong objective," he says. "Very clearly the objective is to lower the measured incidence of poverty so it doesn't look like governments are doing as shoddily as they are in addressing the problem of poverty."
Mitchell says the federal-provincial proposal takes a similar approach to the Fraser Institute, a conservative think-tank, to redefining poverty. "It is fatally flawed. I don't see this going anywhere at all." Ironically, Statistics Canada's poverty line -- the low-income cutoffs or LICO -- has never been acknowledged by the agency as an official poverty measure. Even so, the cutoffs have been embraced by the National Anti-Poverty Organization, the Toronto Social Planning Council, the Canadian Council on Social Development and many other organizations as a poverty measure. Using that measure, the National Anti-Poverty Organization estimates 5.3 million Canadians live below the poverty line, up from 3.8 million in 1989. Those 5.3 million currently living in poverty include 1.5 million children. But Christopher Sarlo, an economics professor at Nipissing University in North Bay, says the StatsCan measure vastly overstates poverty. By Sarlo's measure, there are a million poor in Canada, roughly a third of them children. How can there be such a huge disparity in poverty statistics? It's the difference between a relative measure of poverty -- used by StatsCan -- and Sarlo's absolute measure. The federal-provincial proposal also is an absolute measure. With a relative measure, you are poor if your economic means fall short of those enjoyed by other Canadians. StatsCan's cutoffs are based on people falling below certain income levels -- $14,694 for a single person and $27,651 for a family of four in a city the size of London. An absolute measure is based on your ability to purchase a basket of essential goods and services. Sarlo, whose work is published by the Fraser Institute, thinks his measure better reflects common ideas of what it means to be poor. It was not developed to play down the issue of poverty, he says. "Obviously, we all have compassion, we are concerned about people in that predicament. But it is important to distinguish between people who were generally poor and those who were getting by adequately." Sarlo says the StatsCan measure includes people who aren't really poor -- university students, for example. "Although they have low income, we don't often connect them with poverty," he says. "In fact, they are going to be among the income elite of the nation once they finish university." Similarly, many seniors are wrongly categorized as poor, he says."When we have poverty lines of $22,000 -- the low-income cutoff for an elderly couple living in a large city -- I think that's a little bit high. That is not a wonderful living standard but it doesn't seem to fit the condition of poverty as most people understand it and most dictionaries define it."
Sarlo's poverty lines focus strictly on basic physical necessities -- the essentials of life. They are built around a basket of items that includes food bought at grocery stores, rental accommodation appropriate for family size, clothing, health care, furnishings, telephone, transportation and personal hygiene needs. His poverty lines range from $7,500 for a single person to $20,000 for a family of five or more. Sarlo's poverty measures are dismissed as insufficient by critics such as Mitchell of the Toronto Social Planning Council. Mitchell says all poverty measures embody value judgments and none is perfect but the StatsCan low-income cutoffs are as good as anything that's come along so far. It's important for Canada's poverty definition to take account of social, psychological and physical well-being -- as the low-income cutoffs do -- rather than bare subsistence.	A wicket at the Ontario Works offices.
Given Canada's affluence, our poor deserve better than a subsistence existence, he says. A weakness of the cutoffs is their complexity, Mitchell says. "If you are not a statistician, you'll never have the faintest idea how the thing is done because it is quite complicated." Kevin Lee, a research associate with the Canadian Council on Social Development, says common sense shows the low-income cutoffs are valid. "If you actually look at the numbers and look at whether a family can be raised on $30,000 a year in a large city, it makes sense to a lot of people that those are pretty low incomes to raise a family." The reality is more people are falling into poverty, just as the low-income cutoffs show, says Lee. Mike Farrell of the National Anti-Poverty Organization says the rising numbers reflect the trends his organization sees in society.
A Dundas Street panhandler earns about $20 a day.         The St. Joseph Hospitality Centre provides nutritious food in a convivial setting for needy Londoners.	Widespread layoffs coupled with an increase in part-time work, cutbacks in employment insurance entitlements and aggressive provincial campaigns to lower social assistance rates or make it harder for people to qualify all have played a role in pushing up the poverty rate, says Farrell. Sarlo, by contrast, says Canada's poverty level is down dramatically from the 1950s. His numbers show that up to 30 per cent of Canadians lived in "basic needs" poverty in 1951. By the '70s it was down to seven to eight per cent and since the late 1980s has declined to around four or five per cent. Andrew Bolter of LifeSpin, a London organization that helps the poor, finds such statistics ludicrous. It's clear from LifeSpin's work that poverty is on the rise in London, says Bolter. "It's very artificial to say there's a poverty line and if you're a dollar below it you are poor and a dollar above it you are fine," he says. The only way to tell for sure someone is living in poverty is to look at individual or family circumstances -- income, expenses, debts, special needs, everything else, says Bolter. "People can have nice houses and still be living in poverty. That's the reality we see." New insights into the extent of poverty in London and other Canadians cities will be provided by the urban poverty project being undertaken by the Canadian Council on Social Development. Farrell, who is co-ordinating the project, expects it to be completed by March.

Facts about poverty in London

• Nearly 11 per cent -- 16,665 people -- of London's workforce of 154,335 is considered working poor.
• 24,028 Londoners relied on Ontario Works benefits at the end of October.
• 15.2 per cent of London households are considered low-income, compared with a provincial average of 13.1 per cent
• United Way estimates 40 per cent of welfare recipients are children.
• One in 6.5 London singles makes less than $10,000 a year compared to the Ontario average of one in 7.5. The average annual household income in London of a two-or-more person household ($58,245) is more than 2.2 times greater than the average household income of a person living alone (about $26,354)
• About 80 per cent of single-parent families are female-led and about 63 per cent of those live below the poverty line. Single-parent incomes in London are about 10 per cent below the provincial average.
• About 25 per cent of Londoners cannot fill out a job application.
• London's poverty rate is higher than that of Windsor, Sudbury, Oshawa, St. Catharines and Thunder Bay. 

Poor carry burden of proof even in revamped system

Mel, 57, lives on a disability pension. He used to be a truck driver until back trouble meant he could no longer work.

In a bank of a glass cubicles on the second floor of the Market Tower, London's poor forfeit their privacy in exchange for basic financial assistance. Wading through a myriad of probing, personal questions desperate Londoners undergo more scrutiny than is required for a passport or credit card. Social assistance applicants must provide documented evidence for every declaration, from birth certificates to bank accounts. They must promise to participate in programs aimed at getting them back in the workforce as quickly as possible. Failure to make the commitment means funds are denied. "You go in there with fear because you know they hold your life in their hands whether you're going to have rent money or food money, or not," said Jane Pitt, a community outreach worker with LifeSpin, who has used the system herself and now works with welfare applicants.

Applying for welfare is as intrusive and intimidating as before the recent revamping of the provincial welfare system, Pitt said.
Now, in addition to documents proving identity and financial need, new applicants must determine where they fit in the Ontario Works employment enhancement programs such as workfare.
"It's so overwhelming the stuff they are giving the client and what they have to bring in," said Mike Laliberte of Neighbourhood Legal Services.
"A lot of people leave there confused," he said.
Various forms to sign, various decisions to make are all put in front of a client during their initial interview.
Bob McNorgan, administrator of the city's Ontario Works program, said the program gives applicants the opportunity to take "the shortest route back to employment" and builds in needed checks.
"The (Ontario Works) Act is clearly challenging us to make this a reciprocal kind of service," he said. "And that's very different than the sense that was conveyed in the previous legislation which is what the government has characterized as passive."
Unlike the old General Welfare Assistance Act, the new system is "rich in accountability," and makes the client more responsible for maintaining assistance, said McNorgan.
But the transition to Ontario Works hasn't been seamless, he admitted. Budget constraints left staff levels stretched during the summer. Caseworkers had an average of 200 cases each and clients were waiting up to 16 working days for an appointment.
More staff have been added and McNorgan wants to push the case ratio down to 120 for each worker.
He would also like to see more home visits, which have been cut back for efficiency reasons. Some disabled clients and those with young children, who are entitled to a home visit, are being asked to come to appointments.
Ongoing case management has also suffered. There are endless complaints about clogged telephone lines and lost documents. With every client having to submit a stack of documents, plus monthly income statements to maintain their benefits, the paperwork can appear endless.
Missing paperwork frequently means a cheque put on hold.
"The whole area of paper transfer and paper management is fraught with peril," McNorgan said. "It is truly frustrating for the client, equally frustrating for my staff."
He would also like to see family support workers, victims of budget cuts, reinstated to track down any potential defaults on child support.
Even with the problems, McNorgan said there is still too much criticism in the community about the program, particularly the workfare component that has received a chilly response in London.
"Nobody gets penalized because they can't find a job, just like nobody gets penalized if there's not a community participation volunteer opportunity.
"Clients are only in jeopardy for failing to develop an employment plan or goal or failing to comply with employment plan and goals," he said.
The price of not adhering to the rules is steep. A provincial welfare fraud hot line is open for business and the government reports 7,910 calls to the line.
In 1997-98, there were more than 1,100 welfare fraud convictions. There were 61,653 reports of suspected fraud handled by local offices.
Though McNorgan hopes the bugs will be ironed out with better staffing, critics say too many people are getting cut off because of the burdens placed on clients.
"Every time your cheque gets put on hold, your rent is late, your hydro may be cut off, your telephone is gone if you had enough money to cover a telephone in the first place," said Jacqueline Thompson executive director of LifeSpin.
"You have to put in your monthly statements. Period. If you do not . . . you're cut off."
And, Pitt said, no one wants the hassles or even to have to go into the welfare office to ask for help.
"People would much rather get a paid job and get off the system so they are not under scrutiny about anything they do."

Time on general welfare assistance in London

Welfare caseload for City of London, Ontario Works
Sept. '98 11,703 cases (24,028 beneficiaries)
Sept. '97 12,454 cases (24,959 beneficiaries)

The Ministry of Community and Social Services form to determine spousal status for social assistance includes the following questions:

• Who pays for the groceries and other household supplies?If you have a will, is your co-resident mentioned in it?
• Has your co-resident been appointed in your will as executor, beneficiary or guardian of your children?
• Do people think of you as a couple?
• Do you and your co-resident entertain together as a couple?
• Do other people invite the two of you over together?
• Do you go out with your co-resident to dinner, movies, social events or sporting events? Who pays?
• Do you and your co-resident attend holiday celebrations together? Do he/she buy holiday presents?
• Who eats meals with you at home?
• Who does the weekly meal planning and how is it decided when to order takeout/in or cook at home?
• Does you co-resident ever do your laundry (or the children's)?
• Do you ever open each other's mail?
• Do people think of you and your co-resident as a family?
• Do your children receive gifts from your co-resident's employer or attend events sponsored by your co-resident's employer?