By:
Les Whittington
Ottawa Bureau reporter,
Published on Mon Dec 09 2013
OTTAWA—Nathaniel Parent has known hunger on and off for most of his life.
Now cleaning offices
for $11 an hour while he awaits a chance to acquire better job skills,
the 21-year-old former foster care ward from Midland, Ont., finds
himself choosing between student loan payments and food.
“For the most part, I
don’t eat very often,” Parent says. Sometimes when his debt has to be
paid, he says, “I do choose to pay it and it’ll be like, OK, I’ll just
wait to eat or maybe have something at a friend’s house.”
Parent, who says he
often went without food as a child before being placed in foster care,
adds that it’s a struggle for many of his acquaintances to keep from
winding up on the street.
He currently pays
employment insurance premiums but, Parent says, like most people he
knows, he wouldn’t expect to see any of that money if he lost his job.
“I have no faith in that system,” he says in an interview.
From the
unemployed to low-income families and poor seniors, more people than
ever are struggling with grim choices as they try to cope in the leaner,
meaner Canada presided over by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
Since winning power
eight years ago next month, the federal Conservatives have chipped away
at programs that helped define the compassionate, caring Canada built
over the course of several generations.
“It is changing
Canada,” former Saskatchewan premier Roy Romanow says of the current
federal approach to social and economic policy.
“Unchecked, if we
continue down this path, the big danger is a more regionalized and more
unequal nation,” Romanow, who headed a royal commission on the future of
health care in 2002, told the Star.
Social programs long valued by Canadians are in the Conservatives’ crosshairs.
Federal health-care
spending is to be reined in. Canadians in future will have to work two
years longer before receiving old age security — a measure Harper said
was meant to address Canadians’ disproportionate focus on “our services
and entitlements.”
And at a time when 1.3
million are without jobs, the federal government has toughened the
criteria that employment insurance recipients must meet to hang on to
their benefits. In all, only 37 per cent of jobless Canadians are
eligible for EI benefits.
Dozens of groups
dedicated to improving human rights or the well-being of the most
vulnerable citizens have also seen their funding reduced or eliminated
as Ottawa redraws its priorities and budget allocations.
At least 10 aboriginal organizations and more than a dozen environmental groups, including the
Experimental Lakes Area
research site and the Hazardous Materials Information Review
Commission, were hit. Groups working on child care, rights advocates,
health-care researchers, numerous immigrant support organizations and
women’s groups — including the National Association of Women and the Law
as well as the National Network on Environments and Women’s Health —
received less support from Ottawa. The list goes on and on.
Many believe the
Harper agenda is turning Canada into a more unjust society where
free-market, business-driven values trump a commitment to fairness,
equal opportunity and community-building.
NDP Leader Thomas
Mulcair said the government is reducing “services that Canadians rely
on” — from health care and pensions to basic municipal infrastructure —
to pay for across-the-board corporate income tax breaks, a practice he
says started with previous Liberal governments.
“Families are getting
hit three times at once,” Mulcair said. “They’re getting fewer services.
They’re paying a bigger share of the tax bill. And while incomes have
increased for the top 20 per cent of families, the bottom 80 per cent of
families have seen their incomes decline.
“In short, we’re
becoming the first generation in our country’s history to leave our
children and grandchildren with a lower quality of life than we
inherited from our parents,” Mulcair said.
The government does
not provide a comprehensive list showing all the federal programs that
have been cut or eliminated, or naming the non-government groups that
have seen part or all of their funding axed by Ottawa. A Star analysis
has for the first time pulled together a detailed account of the full
range of recent cuts.
In 2006, in their
first year as a minority government, the Conservatives unexpectedly
began chiselling away at programs and spending on the same day Finance
Minister Jim Flaherty announced a $13-billion budget surplus from the
previous fiscal year.
Acting on long-held
Tory objections to what was considered unneeded spending by the previous
Liberal government, Flaherty eliminated $1 billion in spending. Gone
were the Court Challenges Program, which had funded legal actions by
gays and rights activists, and the Law Commission of Canada, a respected
federal law reform agency. At the same time, the Conservatives took aim
at Status of Women Canada, closing regional offices and barring the
federal organization from funding women’s groups involved in advocacy
and research.
Also among Harper’s
first moves was cancellation of the $5-billion, five-year national child
care program set up by the Liberals. It was replaced by a program that
provides $100 a month to parents for each young child. Debate over
whether the Conservative plan — which has now cost $17 billion — has
really helped parents, particularly when the majority of mothers with
young children are working, has raged ever since.
During the 2008-09
global recession, the Harper government spent heavily to prop up the
economy. But by 2010 the Conservatives had resumed their efforts to
reduce Ottawa’s spending. The 2012 budget — coming less than a year
after the Tories won a majority government — carried the full imprint of
Harper’s thinking.
It laid out plans for
billions in annual spending cuts by government departments, including a
reduction of the federal workforce by 19,000 over three years. An
analysis by then parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page said $783
million, or 15 per cent, of that year’s cuts came out of social
programs.
The pivotal
budget
axed the renowned Katimavik youth program; cut the Canadian
International Development Agency’s budget by $319 million; trimmed
spending in the Aboriginal Affairs Department by $165 million and
reduced Environment Canada’s budget by $88 million. It also scrapped the
independent National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy
that had been created in 1988 by the Mulroney government, and it
informed everyone younger than 54 that they would have to work to the
age of 67 — not 65 — to receive old age security.
The budget legislation
overhauled environmental protections established over many years,
weakened equal pay rules meant to protect women, aboriginals and others
working for federal government contractors, and launched a crackdown on
charities, including environmental groups, suspected of doing too much
political advocacy.
Overall, it is estimated that by 2017 Ottawa will have reduced spending by a cumulative total of $13.6 billion since 2010.
But it was
changes to the EI system
that sparked some of the angriest responses to the Conservative agenda.
The new rules require laid-off workers to take jobs they might
previously have considered unsuitable, possibly with up to 30 per cent
less pay. If not, they could lose their EI benefits.
Labour organizations
see the new approach as unfair, particularly because it comes when
shifts in the job market are forcing more workers into part-time or
contract employment that doesn’t make workers eligible for benefits.
“It’s a downward
spiral that this government is putting us in and they need to seriously
look at what they’re doing to Canadians,” said Tracey Newman, a special
needs educational assistant who joined a recent protest against the EI
changes in Toronto. “The Harper government has made changes to our
employment insurance system that puts workers like me at risk. The
changes have been made without a mandate at election to do so and they
have been made without consultation with the public.”
But the government
says the vast majority of workers who pay into EI and leave work through
no fault of their own receive benefits. Employment and Social
Development Minister Jason Kenney said the EI changes are meant to
ensure unemployment payments are not a “disincentive” to job seeking. He
said the initial indications are that more people are working
year-round in high-unemployment regions as a result of the reforms.
As for fewer people
having the kind of permanent, full-time jobs that lead to EI benefits,
Kenney said the trend toward self-employment and contract work has been
building for decades and “is just a reality.”
Overall, say
anti-poverty activists, Harper’s policies have contributed to a glaring
social deficit. Food bank usage in Toronto is still higher than before
the recession began in 2008. The number of children living in poverty is
down 200,000 since the Tories came to power, but it still totals
967,000 — or one in every seven children, according to Campaign 2000, a
national coalition of social organizations. The Canada Child Tax
Benefit, the main federal tool for combating family poverty, needs
substantially more funding, the group says.
An estimated 30,000
people are homeless every night in Canada, and federally subsidized
housing units have been on the decline for years. While the 2013 budget
earmarked $1.25 billion for affordable housing, that’s seen as not
nearly enough to deal with a housing situation that is getting worse as a
result of skyrocketing shelter costs across the country. Some 72,000
households are stuck on the waiting list for social housing in Toronto
alone, according to the Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association.
More needs to be done
to address income equality, opposition MPs say. A recent study by
Statistics Canada said the top 1 per cent of Canada’s tax filers
accounted for 10.6 per cent of the nation’s total income in 2010, up
from 7 per cent in the early 1980s.
With wages stagnant,
the middle class is falling deeper into debt, says Liberal Leader Justin
Trudeau. “Canadians are struggling at a time when our economy is
supposedly doing well, and people I meet across the country have a lot
of questions as to why their government hasn’t been able to help them
through these difficult times,” he commented.
There are also calls for Ottawa to take the lead to head off what many call an impending crisis of
inadequate pensions.
The current lack of action is “an outrage” and is giving people “very
little hope,” said Susan Eng, vice-president of advocacy for CARP, the
seniors group.
And the government’s
critics say the Conservatives’ policies are not dictated by a lack of
money, since they have forgone an estimated $23 billion a year with cuts
to the GST and business tax breaks.
In an interview,
Kenney rejected the notion that the Conservatives are undercutting
social programs. “This is a government that has been far more humane in
its approach to balance the budget and fiscal discipline” than the
Liberals in the 1990s, he said. Unlike the Liberals, the government has
chosen not to attack the budget deficit by reducing transfers of federal
money to persons or transfers to the provinces. Instead, he said, the
Conservatives are finding efficiencies in internal government
operations.
As for cutbacks to
immigrant settlement agencies, he said funding has been increased but
shifted away from some groups to others because of changes in the
pattern of where people settle. Kenney added that changes had to be made
to old age security eligibility and health-care transfers to the
provinces in future to ensure they are financially sustainable.
And he made no apology
for the Conservatives’ decision to bar funding for non-governmental
groups engaged in advocacy, saying it was a deliberate policy to favour
“programs that help real people.”
