City of Ottawa Proposes Poverty Reduction Strategy

On Friday, September the 18th, I had the opportunity to attend one of two public consultations where a Proposed Ottawa Poverty Reduction Strategy was presented. The purpose of the consultation was to gather community input.

The vision behind the strategy is “All residents of Ottawa living in dignity, in a community that fosters participation and inclusion for all.” It was founded on the beliefs that all residents of Ottawa must be able to meet their basic needs, that the community must come together to create change, and that there must be efforts to both raise awareness as well as concrete actions to reduce poverty. Many of these principles are shared by CPJ.

To achieve this vision the committee has proposed several recommendations that fall under three strategic priorities. The strategies are to create a service system working to benefit the people in need, to build a community of inclusion and belonging, and to break down myths about poverty and promoting poverty reduction.

A few of the recommendations that I thought were particularly exciting were numbers 5 and 13.

• Recommendation 5: “Request the province to annually increase social assistance rates utilizing a market basket measure that reflects the cost of living”
• Recommendation 13: “Develop options for a living wage policy at the City and a consultation plan and Report to community and Protective Services Committee in the spring of 2010.”

The same principle is behind both recommendations, in that they allow people on low income to still live in dignity. The committee explained that the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) – a member of the Dignity for All campaign steering committee – has proposed a Living Wage Policy that would ensure that “any individual working full time would earn enough to meet their basic needs and be able to build some saving for the future.”

Currently individuals living on social assistance and those working full time at minimum wage in Ontario do not earn enough to live off. With their minimal income they must make choices between necessities such as paying their rent or buying groceries for the month. Often families are forced to access other public services such as food banks to make ends meet, taking away their ability to live a life of dignity.

If ACORN’s Living Wage Policy is carried out, those earning minimum wage would not only be able to live a more dignified life but would also be able to save towards a future, breaking the cycle that poverty creates within families. In addition, it would be a more efficient use of the public’s tax dollars. Unfortunately the city does not have control of social assistance rates, and so to carry out these recommendations it can only encourage the Province to increase its rates.

Another notable recommendation was “[to] develop a policy framework to reinvest savings from the upload of social assistance benefits into infrastructure and poverty reduction.” It was explained that for years the City and the Province shared the cost of Social Assistance, but each year the Province pays more of the costs, resulting in quite a large amount of savings to municipalities. I learnt that currently the city has policies that direct money to 3 or 4 different areas, but social services is not one of them. The public needs to be informed about these savings to put pressure on the City to direct the money saved towards those for whom it was originally intended.

So who would be responsible for implementing these strategies? Participants determined that the responsibility falls to the City of Ottawa, social services staff and the community. The public’s support is essential in the reduction of poverty. The community has the capacity to encourage the province and the federal government to increase minimum wage and social assistance to liveable standards and to put pressure on the City to put savings back into the community.

The Proposed Ottawa Poverty Reduction Strategy is, after all, “a joint community city initiative.”