By Jason Markusoff
Some local welfare recipients are so cash-strapped they use their food money for rent. And the City of Ottawa is taking that message to Queen’s Park.
After hearing from Ottawa’s poverty advisory committee at a meeting earlier this month, city councillors decided to send a delegation to the Ontario government’s pre-budget consultations to push for an increase in welfare payments.
The advisory committee reported that a single person on social assistance gets a $325 monthly shelter allowance. Rent for a single-bedroom apartment in Ottawa averages $762 a month.
For many people, this means their rent often comes out of their $195-per-month “basic needs” allowance, which is supposed to cover essentials like food, transportation and heating. For others, it means evictions or homelessness.
“What you’re seeing is people’s quality of life plummeting and their choices of housing being diminished,” says Somerset ward Coun. Elisabeth Arnold.
Arnold is vice-chair of the city’s health, recreation and social services committee, which heard the poverty advisory’s complaints and recommendations. The committee cited the Ontario government as the primary cause of the cost-of-living problem.
The province cut social assistance by 21.6 per cent in 1995, and hasn’t raised it since. Over the same period, average rent in Ottawa has risen by 20 per cent, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.
This disparity has hurt the city financially, says Arnold. The welfare cuts have made the city spend more on homeless shelters and social services.
“There are a lot of costs [going] directly to the city which come from the province walking away from services,” she says.
Ottawa will send people services manager Dick Stewart to the budget consultations at a date to be determined later. City councillors have asked Mayor Bob Chiarelli to join Stewart.
The cross-Ontario consultations will help the provincial government determine its priorities for the next budget, which won’t be released for several months.
Right now, Ontario considers social assistance to be a temporary solution, “a program of last resort,” says Ben Hamilton, press secretary for Community and Social Services Minister John Baird.
“Our goal is to make sure we have a welfare system which doesn’t encourage dependency,” Hamilton says.
Bob Busby, a Centretown resident, has experienced the difficult combination of low social assistance and high rent. Busby, 50, receives disability assistance, which also has not gone up since 1995. When his monthly aid cheques got reduced several years ago, he had to use his food money to pay rent.
“It has not been easy being in the system. You lose your self-worth,” says Busby. “Thanks to people believing in me, I am able to speak out when a system is unjust or wrong.”
Busby is an organizer with the Somerset West Action Network, a group which has launched a “Pay the rent and free the kids” poster campaign around the city and urged city councillors to take action.
“They know they have the people’s support in taking this issue to the province,” Busby says.
“It’s not only coming from some high-level bureaucrat. It’s coming from the grassroots.”