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Media Spin

Globe and Mail Sweeps Poverty Under the Rug

by John Clarke

  Toronto anti-homelessness campaign
 

Toronto anti-homelessness campaign.

On March 31, The Globe and Mail ran a front page feature by Economics Reporter, Heather Scoffield, under the eye catching headline, "Growth Spurs Decline in Poverty." It is a truly classic piece of corporate disinformation that really must be replied to.

In reading over this piece, I was struck by how monstrously unfair it is that such nonsense can be trumpeted from coast to coast. A very privileged journalist, writing for a newspaper owned by a wealthy corporation, selects facts and quotes from such sources and "experts" as she finds useful, while ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary. She is able to do this precisely because she writes for what the millionaires and billionaires who own it, like to call the "free press". If Ms. Scoffield's arguments had to compete in any honest and fair public exchange of views, they would collapse in ruins. If she had to stand up before an audience of people living in poverty and tell them her findings, she would be shouted down unless she was mistaken for a comedy routine.

Corporate apologetics are notoriously lacking in originality. The Scoffield article is really a rehash of a concept linked to 'Reaganomics', the "trickle down theory". If the rich are allowed to dine at the trough without hindrance, the story goes, they will spill enough on the ground to eliminate poverty. Ronald Reagan (or those who told him what to say) advanced this idea before the poverty and misery it would create had been brought forth. Ms. Scoffield, however, is selling a magic cure long after the patient who took it has been taken away in an ambulance. Let's just examine her claims.

Toronto homeless person

Toronto homeless person. Toronto has an estimated more than 30,000 "streetpeople". Poverty in in Toronto and other Canadian cities is growing, rather than decreasing.

The first thing you realize is that basis for Scoffield's assertion that Canadians of all classes are benefiting from the thriving economy is pretty meagre. After falling in 2002 and remaining static in 2003, a 2% increase in average family income occurred in 2004. Also, she is able to inform us that 11.2% of the population lived below the Stats Can low income cut off in 2004 as opposed to 11.6% the year before. During the period under review, it is mentioned in passing that the "rich have been getting richer" but our reporter, with great circumspection, leaves out of the picture their much more impressive percentages. However, modest improvements for the rest of us must, presumably, involve out of unchecked enrichment at the top. As one of Scoffield's sources of opinion suggests, "The poor are much better off when the rich get richer". If the Chief Economist of the TD Bank tells us this, it must be true!

I'm not an economist, just an anti poverty organizer; but a couple of points occur to me that Scoffield and her learned sources seem to have missed. First of all, in a peak year, a small decline in numbers living below the cut offs can take place without it meaning that the living standards of anyone have actually improved. The vast cuts to EI and welfare programs that the Globe has cheered along, have forced people into the worst and most low paying jobs on offer. Given the costs of child care, transportation and suchlike involved in employment, people so pushed into the low wage ghetto may have somewhat higher incomes but still be poorer in terms of what they actually have to live on. The Harris cuts reduced the welfare roles in Ontario from well over a million to less than 800,000 but the poor are poorer for all that. (This point is, actually, even conceded in a less conspicuous page six "social trends" article in the same edition of The Globe and Mail).

Globe and Mail article
Click to Enlarge

Poverty, of course, is not just measured in terms of how many are poor at a given moment but is also a question of how poor they are. Somehow, when talking to Statistics Canada, Scoffield overlooked what that body refers to as the "poverty gap". This is the amount by which poor people fall below the low income cut offs. Had she strayed into this area, her theories would have come to grief. The numbers of people using food banks continues to increase. Here in Toronto, 15% more people are being evicted from their housing (almost all for economic reasons) than took place during the period when Mike Harris was in power. People are poor and they are getting poorer with the passage of time as the economic agenda of bank economists, Heather Scoffield, and those she writes for, takes an ever deepening toll.

It has been said that "the politics of poverty are only the reverse side of the politics of wealth". Let those words be stamped all over this wretched insult to the hundreds of thousands experiencing needless hardship in this wealthy Country. There aren't enough pulp and paper mills or enough printer's ink to hide the truth of the presence of this poverty.



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