Band-aids or Bridges, costing options for poverty

Why can’t the feds and the provinces take their own advice when it comes to poverty?  In a recent report by the National Council of Welfare, we are told that Canada has a $12.6 billion shortfall for funding people and services related to poverty, but that each year we indirectly spend over $25 billion continuing the situation.

In Vancouver and Victoria, persons suffering from poverty are readily visible on our streets.  Shelters and services are at visibly overflowing capacity, with queues and congregations on sidewalks forcing the city of Victoria to install a second sidewalk in one location (at the corner of Pandora and Quadra).  One service agency, Our Place, feeds up to 1500 people per day, but has to turn aside children, reports one Victoria based newspaper.

It is clear we need to make investments in social services in B.C. and the rest of Canada.  Some provinces report spending of up to $42,000 to house a person in a shelter for one year – compare that to a cost for providing continuous low-income housing at only $8,000 – or consider that a family who can’t afford prescription medication will end up in a hospital emergency room with the expense that entails.

So where does Canada start?  Canada starts when we have a new B.C. government that makes decisions based of socially and economically sound policy and a position of caring, and it seems to me that some of the choices we are making try not to achieve that place.
 

The National Council of Welfare press release can be viewed at http://www.ncw.gc.ca/l.3bd.2t.1ils@-eng.jsp?lid=444