Poverty Reduction Plan ‘not all that rosy,’ says advocate

Cormier says the Poverty Reduction Plan does not help the province's food banks. Photo Contributed.

Shawn Graham’s Poverty Reduction Plan only benefits a very small number of welfare recipients, says a leading provincial poverty advocacy group.

“If you listen to the media it seems that the Poverty Reduction Plan was a real good thing, but if you look at it and analyze between the lines then you start wondering if it’s really not all that rosy,” said Auréa Cormier of the New Brunswick Common Front for Social Justice at a public discussion at St. Thomas University last Thursday.

According to Cormier, 97 per cent of welfare recipients will not be affected by the province’s Poverty Reduction Plan, which was introduced in November. The three per cent that will benefit are those in the interim assistance program, which provides money to employed welfare recipients.

“Ninety-seven per cent of the neediest people in this province were left out,” she said. “What happened is they took three per cent of the recipients and they moved them up to the next [assistance] rate, so the remainder [97 per cent] had not been helped at all. That is a serious problem with the Plan.”

The goal of the Plan is to reduce income poverty by 25 per cent and deep income poverty by 50 per cent by 2015. Cormier said that in reality, the Plan’s objective is to reduce the number of New Brunswickers on social assistance, thus saving the government money and solving the province’s high unemployment rate.

“The poverty reduction plan was put in place by well-meaning people, but the focus was not right. It was ‘Lets get them off welfare and let’s get them into the workforce and stop them from sucking from us,’ and that’s not a good approach.”

Research from the National Council of Welfare shows that among single parent assistance recipients, 62 per cent of their monthly income comes from welfare. The organization also claims New Brunswick has one of the lowest welfare rates for single employable adults, and would have to double that rate in order to bring it to the Atlantic Canadian average.

This single employable category is the three per cent of recipients who will see a change in their monthly dividends because of the Poverty Reduction Plan. The Plan, which will cost the government $30 million over the span of five years, extended health care cards for up to three years for former welfare recipients who are now employed, and aims to introduce a prescription drug plan for uninsured citizens by 2012.

Cormier said that while the Plan is a step in the right direction, its shortcomings and ignorance to vital problems of the current welfare program should be addressed.

“What’s missing? There’s nothing on pay equity, no concerns regarding immigrants and seniors, and many of the recipients are not being affected until five years from now.”

A major flaw in the Plan is that the government offloaded many social assistance programs to community-based organizations, providing them with the funding but leaving the private sector to handle the execution of such resources. While some argue this places the programs at a more holistic, grass-roots level, Cormier said this presents a serious language issue in a province known for its French-English barriers.

“All public New Brunswick services must abide by the Language Act, so a Francophone living in Saint John should be able to receive services in French and Anglophones living in Caraquet should be able to get services in English,” she says. “But if all this is transferred to community groups, then there’s going to be some problems.”

Premier Shawn Graham. Photo courtesy of gnb.ca

Cormier said Graham’s government failed to address the poverty issue through a gendered lens. She said 55 per cent of New Brunswick’s 39,100 welfare recipients are female, and 35 per cent of recipients are children, suggesting poverty is a women’s issue.

One of the more detrimental aspects of the provincial welfare program is the agreement among the government and employers that if employees receiving social assistance are given tips from customers, employers are allowed to reduce that employee’s hourly wage, often bringing it below the minimum wage requirement.

“This impacts women in particular because a lot of them are in jobs where they get tips, such as in restaurants.”

The province’s food banks are suffering from a lack of provincial funding, yet they were not mentioned in the Poverty Reduction Plan, says Cormier.

Cormier said the Plan requires a lot of work before it can be considered a success, suggesting the time allocated to drafting the program was minimal, and the people involved in the program were not ideal.

“Everyone involved in the final forum was selected by the premier,” she says. “It took only 10 hours to complete, so you can see how rushed it was and how little chances there were for really making strong change.”

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Posted by Gilean Watts on Apr 7, 2010. Filed under News, This Week's Edition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.