Category Archives: Poverty

Consider, Issues, Poverty

I am so poor …

Leave a comment

… I can’t even afford a free automobile.

I found myself dealing with this twisted irony of poverty: that for those living in poverty the cost of a free car is prohibitively expensive.

Now one would think that ‘free car’ and ‘prohibitively expensive’ are mutually exclusive phrases. Not so for those who are living in poverty, or the poorest in our wealthy society.

When fate offered me a new to me car that is younger and in better shape than my 1987 Duster it was this reality I found myself facing.

For me and others a car is a wellness tool that is integral to recovery by allowing us to be involved in programs, community, part-time employment etc as we seek wellness and to become self-sufficient. It is having a car that permits me to be as involved in the community (Abbotsford) as I am and to work; to get to and from a variety of widely spaced locations in a timely manner that is just not possible with the current bus system in Abbotsford.

When the Duster was incapacitated for almost a week while I dealt with an alternator replacement it had a devastating effect on my life. I became housebound and isolated which was not only unproductive but was/is a situation detrimental to my mental health.

Sunday evening the phone rang and I was offered a 1991 Cavalier which had to be moved out of the apartment parking lot by Tuesday, Tuesday being both the last day of the month and moving day.

My first thought was not of the costs associated with a free car but of Fate. The last time I was offered a great deal on a car, the faithful Duster, I said ‘No thanks’. Within ten days the VW was not running and the cost of repairs was well beyond my means. It was only luck that the Duster was still available for me to purchase.

With the offer of a “free” car my first thought was that the offer meant the Duster was on its last legs if I said no to the Cavalier and kept driving the Duster. Even now, days later, I am hesitant to tempt fate by abandoning the Cavalier even with the headaches and problems that have come along with getting it running and on the road.

It was sober second thought that considered the cost associated with getting the “free” Cavalier on the road.

I found myself on the horns of a dilemma; offered a car in better shape and with a (probable) longer life than the Duster, but I could not cover the expense of getting a free car.

My budget is such that at the end of the month, next months rent and my bills are paid and I have $20 to spend as I choose. I estimated I would need a minimum injection of $2001 into my budget to get the Cavalier on the road.

Though I had no plan for where the $200 would or could possibly come from I said Yes.

Not automatically saying no, feeling the fear and doing it anyway, is a measure of progress into recovery and wellness. It was not that many years ago that confronted with such an offer and such a situation a panic attack would have been triggered.

So I found myself at 2:30 AM, very early Monday morning, contemplating not only the logistics of getting the car out of the apartment garage by Tuesday evening but where I was going to find the money to cover the costs of the ‘free car’.

During my 25 years as a Chartered Accountant in public practice and business $200 was pocket change. Now, a $40 oil change is a major budget item that must be planned for and for which money must be set aside to pay.

Until I experienced it (an experience I would gladly end) I had no idea or appreciation for just how grinding poverty is on someone. Poverty grinds away at you physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually; grinding you down and down, robbing you of will and spirit.

The plan that I came up with was to ask for help in the form of a loan or loans and I sent out an email request explaining the situation; the backup plan was panhandling.

It turned out that while I may be living in poverty with respect to money, I have a richness of people in my life that will help me out. By the time I got up the next morning and checked my email for any replies to my request for help I had offers that covered the $200.

It turned out that obtaining the $200, which I had seen as the major obstacle, was the easy part.

Once I had the $200 in hand the Testing and Lessoning began. Testing? Lessoning? Every so often it seems as if the Universe feels the need to test my progress on my journey of recovery and wellness and/or teach lessons I need to progress on that journey.

And so the Saga of the Cavalier began in earnest.

Unfortunately the Universe seems to deal with me in a manner in keeping with my own skewed sense of humour and the absurd. Giving one the impression the Universe is playing with my head in an absurdist assault on my Sanity.

I met with the owner and picked up the signed documents needed to transfer the car to me… at least in theory. Arriving at the insurance broker revealed the registration papers were missing. A phone call determined they were lost, requiring a trip to the seller’s insurance agent to secure a new registration.

Quickly zipping the seller back to the move and with registration in hand I returned to the insurance agency only to find out that a correction made on the transfer document made the document invalid. Being a legal document ICBC insists that the transfer document be perfect.

Filling out a new transfer document, with a great attention to detail, I once again returned to the seller to get the new (and perfect) transfer document signed.

Returning to the insurance office I got a 3 day insurance permit since a 3 day permit was cheaper than 2 permits good for a single day. The Cavalier had to be moved Tuesday but it was now late on Tuesday and with Wednesday being Canada Day the Cavalier could not be run through AirCare until Thursday.

Armed with the insurance permit I sent out a request for someone to meet me at the owner’s old apartment building to jumpstart the Cavalier; being grateful that, considering the delays, I had not scheduled this activity.

Mr. Doug answered my appeal but in order to jumpstart the car, we had to push the Cavalier out of the garage as his truck was too tall to fit in the garage. It took patience to get the car started and running since it had been sitting for a year, but we succeeded.

Getting the car started revealed the car was a 5 speed. Fortunately I not only can drive a stick, but prefer it over an automatic. Happily Doug provided an escort back to my place; in the process providing jumpstarts as needed (ie after a stop to add fresh gas to the tank – which helped the car to run better).

He also, most kindly, returned latter that evening with a battery charger to breathe some life into the dead battery.

I spent Wednesday afternoon making hats, bookmarks and/or colouring while volunteering at the Canada Day celebrations after which I went home and took the Cavalier out for run in preparation for AirCare the next day.

Thursday morning Cavalier barely started, demonstrating the battery’s inability to hold a charge overnight. After taking the Cavalier out for a highway runI proceeded directly to AirCare where the Cavalier passed muster.

Having several places I needed to be from noon on I did not get the plates and insurance until late Friday afternoon; which turned out to be lucky.

With the plates on I limped to auto wreckers in search of a used battery. Alas there were no appropriate batteries at the auto wreckers forcing the purchase of a reconditioned battery. With the battery installed I thought that that was that, that I was done. It developed the Universe was not through with the Saga of the Cavalier and I.

Saturday I found I could not remember whether or not Thursday had been payday. Given the way things were going with respect to the Saga of the Cavalier, I decided that it would be wise to check that there was enough money in the bank to cover the insurance.

Checking revealed a $25 Cr(edit) balance. As an accountant a credit represents a debt owed, so I thought I needed to find money enough to cover not only the insurance tab, but the $25 Cr overdraft.

Making for a pleasant surprise when, after cashing cans, raiding my piggy bank etc I returned to deposit $70 I had managed to scrap up. I could have danced a jig out the door when the teller’s statement of the account balance reminded me that a Cr was the bank recording the money it owed me and that after depositing the $70 there were sufficient funds to cover the insurance charge.

As I said, it turned out to be lucky I was running late on Friday since the insurance charge against my bank account was not processed until Monday and I avoided being guilty of having insufficient funds.

Leaving the bank Saturday I was relived, pleased and relaxed; which made the emotional crash and mental stress of the car stopping and refusing to run – leaving me stranded on Lakeview Terrace most upsetting.

With no money for a tow truck or anything else what was I to do?

Call a skilled mechanic I know who was interested in my old VW. While a non-running metal sculpture for me, it was a puzzle and a project for him. A deal was struck and in exchange for the VW I ended up with a used, but working alternator, and the ability to get the car home.

Aside: Best friends know how crazy you are and choose to be seen with you in public. They also lend you driveway space to store a VW; understanding your having an emotion bond with a VW you lived in while homeless in abbotsford and the need for time to be able to let go before disposing of the VW.

Now back to our Saga: starting the car up resulted in the battery quickly getting hot as did the alternator. I was told to turn the car off and was loaned a battery to get the car home. He explained that if not properly conditioned, reconditioned batteries can be hard to charge, causing the battery to heat up. This situation also puts a lot of strain on the alternator – in this instance frying the old alternator and leaving me stranded.

Getting back to my home Saturday evening we switched out batteries and I was lent a trickle battery charger. I got several phone calls during the evening sending me out to check on whether the battery was getting hot. It was not.

The fact the Duster is running and insured made this situation much easier to be sanguine about; allowing me to leave the Cavalier charging. Which I am told, will deal with the sulphides in the battery resulting in the battery functioning much better and (hopefully) sparing the replacement alternator the fate of its predecessor.

Of course, in keeping with the spirit of the Saga of the Cavalier, the Duster has been temperamental, threatening to cease to run any second. Indeed, I have no doubt that if I continue to drive the Duster it will gasp out its life quickly. If I pass it on to someone else the Duster will likely run for years.

The final twist of irony is that the Cavalier has been sitting there with charger hooked up since late Saturday evening inasmuch as I have been to apprehensive (or is that superstitious?) to tempt fate and start up the Cavalier.

So tomorrow (Thursday) I will force myself to see if this phase of the Saga of the Cavalier is done. Unplugging the battery charger, firing up the Cavalier and finding out if the road ahead will be smooth or whether the Universe is not through testing and tempering me yet.

As an addendum I want to take some of the 86,400 seconds I have available today to say thanks to those without whose generosity and assistance I would have been left wondering what “could have been” the Saga of the Cavalier.

>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<

1Actual Cash Outlay

$$$
28 Transfer fee
53 3 day insurance permit
30 Gas
23 AirCare
134

55 Battery
88 Insurance
277

100 Alternator*

377

* a price of $100 had been agreed to as the sales price for the VW traded for the replacement alternator; this resulted in the removal of the $100 from my budget in the same manner as paying the $100 for an alternator would have.

Poverty

Greed Season officially opens with a death.

Leave a comment

It is the Friday following American Thanksgiving, official opening day of the Greed Season.

Before dawn Friday a ravaging horde, maddened by their greed at the promise of bargains, literally trampled a Wal-Mart employee to death. A man was being trampled to death and the crowd kept stampeding into the store and shopping, going so far as to push the police, who were there to try to save the life of the trampled employee, out of the way of shoppers run riot in their panic at the thought of missing a bargain.

The world economy is in meltdown and the root cause of this meltdown is greed.

Not just the greed of those in the financial system, although their insatiable greed and quest for multi-million dollar bonuses triggered the current economic implosion which has us teetering on the brink of disaster.

The greed was spread far and wide. The greed of shareholders who demanded faster, higher rising stock prices; the greed of executives for the multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses that came with delivering higher and higher stock prices; the greed of workers focused on wages and benefits; the greed of financiers for large fees and interest charges in financing these companies – whether they were viable or not; greed of politicians for the political contributions generated by all this greed; greed by the public that bought into the impossible political promises of lower taxes and wealth for all; greed that reprehensible acquisitiveness, that insatiable desire for wealth.

A house of paper built on the foundation of greed, an empty house collapsing in on itself as if it were of no more substance than a house built out of playing cards.

The price we will pay in correcting the economic mess that building on a foundation of greed is going to be painful, perhaps extremely painful. Unfortunately this pain will fall most heavily on the most vulnerable in our society, those least deserving or able to bear the price.

I strongly advocate that we consider the wisdom of using the virtue of charity as the foundation and as the building blocks with which we rebuild.

Not just the more restricted modern use of the word charity in its meaning of benevolent giving, but charity in the fullness of its older meaning as an unlimited loving-kindness toward all others.

As a result of our greed over the past two decades our food banks are inundated with those who depend on them for the food to sustain life. As a result of the fallout from our greed our food banks are currently being swamped by new clients in need. As a result of focusing on ourselves, donations at our food banks are falling at the very time they need to be rising.

What is needed is a generous outpouring of loving-kindness for others that results in a tidal wave of donations to our food banks (and Christmas Bureaus) assuring that anyone in need will find sustenance.

Let us turn our back on greed and embrace charity in its full meaning of unlimited loving-kindness toward all others and not focus on worrying about our own future economic situation. Rather than worrying about the future, focus on those in need now.

Instead of buying another dust-catcher for that hard to buy for someone on your Christmas gift list, make a donation to you local food bank in their name. Or perhaps rather than an exchange of gifts, you can exchange donations.

Offices often have those $10 gift exchange games. Why not everyone throw the $10 into an envelope for donation to the local food bank? I have complete faith that another game can be found to give people a chance to laugh at our own and others foibles.

We need to be creative and generous in meeting the demands placed on our local food banks by increasing hunger and need in our communities.

It is time and past time that rather than trampling others underfoot, we extent our hand to help up those in need of such help.

Homeless, Poverty

Balance? Fairness? – where did you go?

Leave a comment

I had dinner at Global Harvest and I would be remiss if I did not take a moment to thank the gentleman and his helpers who were responsible for a great treat of a meal – Thank you.

In spite of the great meal and generosity of our benefactor, the evening was disconcerting with a disquiet that began when I stepped through the doors and looked around the tables set out for diners. There were far too many new children in attendance, families with children in need of a meal they could not afford to provide for themselves.

Ask the good people at the Food Bank how many new families and children have been added to the ranks of families and children that already depend on them for food, for sustenance, for life. Lunches at the Salvation Army are attended by an increasing number of families with children.

Escalating housing costs in the lower mainland are dragging more people and families down into the class of the working poor. The poorest of this economic class are forced to choose between shelter and food; forced to depend on the food bank and soup kitchens for their daily sustenance.

The comfortable lives that people take for granted and often smugly congratulate themselves for achieving arise from the transfer of wealth from the working poor through the means of poverty wage levels and working conditions that in many ways are no better than the conditions we condemn sweatshops or China for. Never in Canada’s history has Canadian society been so economically unbalanced and unfair.

Denial of this reality is so much more comfortable than to accept our part in benefiting from and at the expense of the working poor economic class. Denial also lets people avoid any thoughts of giving up any of their luxuries so that the working poor can afford the basic necessities of life.

Thus I expect to continue to be disquieted stepping through doors and viewing increasing numbers of families and children in need of food to sustain life, while wealthy and comfortable Canadians continue to dwell in the comfort of their lives and the land of denial.

Poverty

Economic boom not putting food banks on the shelf

Leave a comment

Economic boom not putting food banks on the shelf

Norma Greenaway, CanWest News Service
Published: Thursday, November 08, 2007

OTTAWA – Canada is on a roll. The jobless rate is near record lows, oil prices are soaring, the loonie is flying high, and the federal government is awash in surplus cash. The good economic news has not, however, erased the country’s hunger problem.

A new national study, titled HungerCount 2007, says 720,231 people, a number just shy of the population of New Brunswick, were forced to turn to one of the country’s 673 food banks in March to feed themselves or their families.

The tally was down slightly from last year. But it was up almost nine per cent from a decade ago, and no province or territory can boast that food banks have outlived their usefulness, says the Canadian Association of Food Banks, which has conducted the annual survey since 1989. The survey, released_Thursday, covers only one month

Although there have been fluctuations from year to year, the number of users has remained “unacceptably high” at more than 700,000 for each of the past 11 years, the survey found. Moreover, people with jobs comprise the second-largest group of food bank users, after those on social assistance.

“This is a sad reality when we live in such a prosperous country,” Katharine Schmidt, the association’s executive director, told a news conference on Parliament Hill.

Schmidt said the $60 billion in tax cuts announced last week by the federal government, including a one-point cut in the GST and a dip in the tax rate on the lowest-income earners, must be followed up with, among other things, more generous federal tax benefits for working people and parents, and an expansion of the Employment Insurance program to cover more people and to give them better benefits.

Even in booming Alberta, food banks reported a steady stream of clients again this year, many of whom reported having jobs. Camrose and District Food Bank reported, for example, that 90 per cent of its clients received most of their income from employment.

Food banks helped 38,837 Albertans in March, or 1.1 per cent of the provincial population, the report said. Of the clientele, 43 per cent were children, 27 per cent reported earning wages and 35 per cent said they were on social assistance.

In the nation’s capital, the Ottawa food bank said the number of schools seeking meals for hungry children has grown dramatically to 17. The food bank has also started providing 12,000 meals to children during the summer months.

Nationally, the survey said children accounted for almost four of 10 people using food banks. Single-parent families account for 28 per cent of the clientele, two-parent families 22 per cent, single people 37 per cent, and couples without children 12 per cent.

People on social assistance were the primary users of food banks at 51 per cent. Employed people accounted for 13.5 per cent, people on disability supports accounted for 12.5 per cent, pensioners accounted for six per cent, and people on Employment Insurance benefits accounted for five per cent.

For the first time, the association surveyed the housing situations of people using food banks and found that 86 per cent were renters and eight per cent were homeowners.

Peter Tilley, executive director of the Ottawa Food Bank, said the annual studies illustrate a sad reality that food banks, once thought of as emergency assistance for people needing some short-term help, have become a crucial part of the country’s social safety net for hundreds of thousands of people.

“It’s a shame we made a business out of poverty,” he said with a grim smile, referring to the network of food banks across the country, most of which, he stressed, rely almost exclusively on volunteer labour.

Consider, Homeless, Poverty

Convenient concern for the homeless and poor.

Leave a comment

“Where was your concern for our low-income families then”?

This comment from a recent newspaper column took me back to a very similar thought I had while reading the editorial pages of all the local papers and finding letter after letter denouncing slots because “they are hard on/bad for the poor”. I was left sadly shaking my head at such blatantly self-serving morally objectionable behaviour.

I do mean to christen as immoral those who are concerned for those in need only when it is convenient or serves their self-interest and ignore those in need when it could inconveniently required effort or even (shudder) some small sacrifice or there is no self-interest to be served by being concerned for the well-being of the poor.

Immorality: something that is a cause or source of suffering, injury, or destruction: the social evils of poverty and injustice (American Heritage Dictionary).

Week in and week out papers were filled with letters about how bad for the poor slots would be, a vast outpouring of concern for the poor to the papers and to council. Before or after the slots debate?

Precisely.