C9

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

1 Comment(s)

They say two heads are better than one, but 2,500 are even better.

More than 2,500 people weighed in with input for the Poverty Reduction Task Force in the past few months, and the results are utterly astounding.

What citizens told the task force was helpful, but not so astounding. It's the fact that the government took their good advice that is astounding.

Last week, Social Development Minister Kelly Lamrock, Premier Shawn Graham and Opposition Leader David Alward presented a united front in announcing sweeping changes that will affect the province's poorest citizens.

Those changes have long been requested, but successive politicians have ignored them - until now.

The economic unit policy will be abandoned. That much-hated rule forbade two income assistant recipients from sharing shelter. So even if they received the lowest monthly amount possible - $290 - they could not even share a rented room, the cheapest of which is $300 a month.

How was that in any way humane?

Thankfully, that $290 cheque will jump to almost $540 with this announcement.

The government has always said that income assistance is meant as a temporary measure. But its own rules encouraged people to remain on assistance because of the health card that came with the monthly cheque. That health card - something like the group health benefits many are familiar with - disappears when one leaves income assistance for a job.

But when that job has no security and no health benefits, that's a frightening leap of faith to take.

For many parents, their fears for sick children outweighed their hopes of getting off income assistance.

To fix that problem, the province will now allow a person to keep his or her health card for up to three years into a job, making that transition much more palatable and far less frightening. What a positive change to encourage a new beginning.

There are other benefits and changes, but the two that cannot be measured, but are surely among the biggest, are the addition of dignity and hope.

Dignity replaces shame for being poor, which has been the sad reality. Some reading this have been poor at some point in their lives, and most people realize poverty isn't a deliberate choice and isn't simply because people are bad or even irresponsible. In some cases, circumstances make earning a living extremely difficult.

And hope - where despair was rampant, now there can be a bit of hope for the future. That hope is found in less stress, the ability to make plans and a healthier living environment.

We couldn't have predicted these positive changes. A whole cartload of such improvements is not the norm for government. But we are, nonetheless, delighted to give our praise and thanks to Kelly Lamrock and his government for their action on poverty.