Last night I listened to the radio broadcast on CBC of the public presentation on food banks and poverty and poverty reduction in Vancouver. One of the provincial government ministers, Peter Fassbender was a guest panelist and my schadenfreud was having a field day hearing him put all four of his feet in his mouth, over and over again, as pithy questions were given him about the government's chronic delinquency in realistically addressing poverty and income inequality in this province. He bleated out one lame excuse after another and it very quickly became clear and evident that neither Mr. Fassbender, nor his ethically challenged BC Liberals care, have ever cared, nor ever will care so much as a little turd of cat shit for the poor and vulnerable in this province.
When one panelist cited that having to resort to lining up at a food bank when you are working full time and supporting a family might be a humiliating experience he retorted that food banks and community soup kitchens and meal programs are an excellent way of getting the community involved and motivating people to care for one another. Not only did his government have the heartless gall to create misery for so many people on low incomes but he even twisted his logic just a little to make it look like an act of sublime altruism that he and his government could take credit for. This is worse than sleazy! How do people like that get voted in? Oh, that's right, just like Donald Trump, President Dump of the USA, was elected to public office by millions of Americans every bit as sleazy as him. That is the problem with democracy. Horrible venal people voting for horrible venal leaders. Duh!
Then came Fassbender's equally puerile justification for making people on disability income pay fifty-two dollars a month for their bus pass, which used to cost only forty-five dollars A YEAR and that with rising food costs, a number of people on disability have to forgo taking public transit in order to pay for food. Fassbender's spin? They have been given a seventy-seven dollar a month increase or nine hundred eighty-three dollars and forty-two cents a month (of course, that gets scaled back to forty cents given that pennies are now obsolete!) and now everyone has the choice of what they can do with that extra money. No one, of course, mentioned the obvious: try living anywhere in BC (especially in Vancouver) on less than a thousand a month and see how well fed and well housed you're going to be after a year.
Here are two of my favourite sticking points which Peter Bend It Fast parroted shamelessly and rather proudly:
1. The vicious circle about climbing out of the poverty trap. He thinks that just anyone struggling to make ends meet on low-wage employment is going to be able to quit their crappy low-paying job and go into vocational training fulltime and still be able to eat, pay rent and pay the bills when student loans rarely cover everything, not to mention the extra stress if the only option is to keep working while taking training in the evenings. Because the government does nothing to help out with tuition or living costs, this is not going to be a realistic option for some and many are still going to remain stranded where they are.
2. The majority of minimum wage earners are not young people living with their parents. That has already been proven to be an absolute crock, not to mention that there are hundreds of thousands more people in British Columbia subsisting on low wages, perhaps a little higher than minimum and well below the national average wage of twenty-five dollars an hour. Keeping the minimum wage low, also lowers the bar for other low wage earners, keeping even more people in poverty. And the excuse that small businesses can't survive if they pay their workers a living wage? Those kinds of businesses have no business being in business if they are not prepared to pay their workers fairly. If they can't make it, good riddance!
The rest of us have been asleep at the wheel. Now is the time for broadscale resistance to this government and their morally bankrupt policies. I find it salutary that when almost everyone appeared to be getting kicked off of welfare and onto the street in 2002 the employees of the various social services implementing these policies did absolute squat to counter them. Yes, there were some squeaks of protests...but...did anyone speak to the media? NO...did anyone conscientiously refuse to carry out these evil policies?...NO...did their unions go on strike to protest what was being done to their most vulnerable clients? Don't make me laugh.
We have to start caring. Not simply wringing our hands and making sympathetic noises. We need action. Broadscale civil disobedience to bring the BC Liberal government and their detructive policies of callous greed right to their knees!
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