Thursday 7 April 2011

How Poor is Poor Enough?

Harper and Alexander
Recently Conservative Chris Alexander made the assertion that Canada has eradicated poverty.  Statements like this are disheartening.  Many Canadians have to make the difficult choice between paying the rent or buying food.  And because people in Canada live on more than $2.00 per day the Conservatives would argue that they are not poor.

If Conservatives are as fiscally intelligent as they claim to be, it would be obvious that purchasing power and not just net income must also be considered.  I would challenge this Candidate to live on the social assistance or minimum wage of his province and see how much of a challenge it can be to acquire the essentials. Yes Mr. Alexander for the most part we do not have people starving in the streets, though we do have many that go hungry.  In a country as rich as Canada, it's a national disgrace.

If the money that Stephen Harper wants to spend on giving tax cuts to profitable corporations was instead spent on addressing the root causes of poverty.  Then, maybe we really could eliminate poverty in Canada.

No policy your party has presented so far will help people living below the poverty line.  News flash low income families rarely have the money to put their kids in organized sports or join fitness clubs.  And I can guarantee you they do not have enough money to max out their TFSA (assuming they have one) at the current limit let alone this mystical increase that will supposedly happen 5 years from now.

It has always been amazing to me how Fat Cats can convince the mice to vote for them but it happens time and time again


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3 comments:

  1. Mark McLaughlin7 April 2011 at 20:52

    You mention the poverty line, and the "poverty line" that gets quoted most often is a RELATIVE measurement that identifies the lowest 'x' percentage. The problem with it is that you can never eliminate poverty this way unless everyone is making the same amount, an impossibility.

    The reality is that homelessness is really a mental health issue (50% or more have schizophrenia or other serious paranoid conditions).

    Most of the rest of the 'poor' still have a x-box and cable TV.

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  2. The Low Income Cut-offs (LICOs) are based on the percentage of a family's income spent on three items:

    food,
    clothing, and
    shelter.
    The percentage of total income (before income tax, and including government income supports) spent on food, clothing and shelter by an average Canadian household in 1992 was 34.7%. Using LICOs, a family is considered to be in low income if the household spends 20 percentage points higher than the average household or more than 54.7% of its total income on these three categories of expenditure.

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  3. I love my wife and children, I love my job, I love my car (the blue one anyways), I love my fellow man, and I love cheeseburgers. Who knows what that word means? What are we supposed to do about poor people. There are 5 billion poor people. Am I supposed to love Canadian poor more than African or East-European poor. The poor Canadian old guy slob drunk over a child in the Congo? And that child doesn't need a color TV and a townhouse to be poor, just some food, school, shoes and a shirt big enough to cover his ass. What ever the percentage is? I'm so sick of Canadians in cities crying poor because they want some middle class schmuck to pay for their kid's soccer uniform and drive them to the games, when you just have to go up north to see what desperation rally is.

    Makes me ill to see some suit think some numbers say what poor is.

    Boy have I been reading this blog too long. Almost converted. I'm a conservative, but not this modern day corporate puppet Conservative.

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