This post was originally written as an opinion piece for the Guelph Mercury in the lead up to the provincial election. It was printed on June 4, 2014.
Written by Terry O’Connor and David Thornley. Terry is the Labour-Co-ordinator for Guelph Wellington Dufferin United Way and co-chair of the Income Security Action Group, a committee of the Guelph & Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination. David is the executive director of the Guelph Community Health Centre and former chair of the Poverty Task Force.

As we head into the final stretch of the provincial election campaign, we need to have a serious conversation about eliminating poverty in Ontario.

The political parties vying for your vote have once again put it on the back burner. Don’t let them get away with it.

Poverty is costing us billions of dollars each year. Research indicates that for every dollar it would take to eliminate poverty, currently it is costing between $1.75 to $2.50 to perpetuate it. In Ontario, the federal and provincial governments lose between $10.4 billion to $13.1 billion annually due to the impacts of poverty, a loss equal to between 10.8 per cent and 16.6 per cent of the provincial budget. Poverty results in lost income tax revenue in Ontario equal to $4 billion to $6.1 billion each year. Child poverty costs Ontario $4.6 to $5.9 billion annually.

If you or I were running a business, how long would we allow such a negative drain on our resources and productive capacity to persist without rectifying the problem? Not long I’m sure. Poverty also hurts families and communities. For example, children living in poverty are more likely to suffer from malnutrition, to have learning disabilities and behavioural problems or problems with the law. That’s inexcusable in such a rich province as Ontario.

The poverty rate in Ontario has been persistently high, hovering between nine per cent to just over 12 per cent, for most of the last 35 years. In good or bad economic times, since the recession of 1992, Ontario has struggled to stay below a double-digit poverty rate. This tells us that efforts to reduce the poverty rate to four per cent, as many European countries have been able to do, or to eliminate it entirely will require comprehensive approaches that address the grossly inadequate incomes and precarious living conditions of many low income Ontarians.

Today, more than one in five Ontario workers, work at insecure, often part-time employment. This precarious work is more likely to involve health and safety risk, cause significant stress due to job insecurity, and result in greater health consequences. Ontario’s labour market has shifted to an hourglass shape with jobs concentrated at the high and low ends, and a disappearing middle. Income inequality has grown by 47 per cent in a generation. In Canada, inflation adjusted earnings of the bottom 20 per cent of workers fell by 21 per cent between 1980 and 2005, while earnings among the top 20 per cent of workers increased by 16 per cent.

Raising the minimum wage could make a big difference.

The Guelph Poverty Elimination Task Force has called for increasing the minimum wage to $13 an hour in four steps by the spring of 2016. This would raise anyone working full-time for the minimum wage to at least the poverty line. The planned cost-of-living adjustment that raised the minimum wage to $11 an hour on June 1, after nearly four years without an increase, is a completely inadequate response. While raising the minimum wage is critical, it is not the full answer for those people living in poverty and working two to three part-time jobs, struggling with finding safe and affordable housing, and acquiring healthy and nutritious food.

It’s time to transform our antiquated social assistance programs into a combination of income supports designed to meet basic needs and to give households the opportunity to contribute fully to community life.

At current levels, an earner working full time for a full year at the minimum wage still cannot escape poverty. The living wage — the hourly rate needed for a household to meet basic needs — has been calculated at $15.95 an hour in Guelph and Wellington County, nearly $5 an hour more than the new $11 an hour minimum wage.

An individual earning the full-time living wage earns over $9,000 more than an individual earning minimum wage. A guaranteed annual income, living wage and minimum wage levels that lift people out of poverty would ensure that all individuals and families are able to afford the basic necessities of shelter, food, clothing, and basic daily living for themselves and their children.

There is nothing inevitable about poverty. It results from a set of dated and ill-conceived public policies that at their core accept that some members of society should continue to live lives of desperation, needless suffering and exclusion from the mainstream of community life. We can and must do better.

Before marking your ballot, find out what your candidates positions are on eliminating poverty and in so doing, save the province billions each year. That’s billions we need to create a caring and prosperous Ontario.

In short, poverty erodes economic prosperity and adds significantly to the cost of health care and other government services. Eliminating poverty makes sense, both socially and economically. The time to act is now. We know how to end poverty. Let’s do it.

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