Are we sure we're still on the way up?

I suppose every generation wants to believe it’s improving on the past. That’s how it always seemed in my history lessons at school, too - that we were intent on working our way up, from “primitive” to medieval to Renaissance and right on through to the enlightened human beings of modern times.
We’ve made some remarkable progress. We’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and easily surviving diseases that once used to kill us off in vast numbers. We don’t just talk about human rights, we enshrine them in our laws. We wear our seatbelts, bicycle helmets, sunscreen and in-car sobriety with pride, and are better for it.
I used to ponder ugly moments in history and feel grateful for not having been alive in those years. The destructive and stupid behaviours of human beings through the ages baffled me, but I was happy that my generation dwelt in kinder, gentler times and was in turn leaving a better world for their own children.
But is that what’s actually happening? Is life in Canada improving? I’ve got my doubts, given the wear and tear of two decades of federal and provincial governments whose actions have seriously eroded the social fabric of the Canada I was born into.
I don’t mean to suggest another Crusades is imminent, or that we’ll soon be using wild animals to kill off the old and weak in front of a cheering crowd of thousands.
But the disasters of history start out small - one thing and then another, each piling on top of each other to bend a country in a way that no one had expected. The emergence of a growing underclass in Canada is of no small concern.
The decline most evident to me after most of a lifetime in B.C. is a loss of economic and political power for the “common people,” if you will. It’s a subtle change that has come about incrementally, aggravated by a prevailing political ideology in which minimal government is the stated goal even while power and money accumulate at the top in ways that are very nearly feudal.
An interesting statistic, courtesy of child advocacy group First Call and Stats Canada: Between 1989 and 2006, the richest 10 per cent of B.C. families with children saw their average annual income rise 30 per cent, to $201,490. In that same period, the poorest 10 per cent of families saw their income fall eight per cent, to $15,657.
The richest of the rich in Canada more than doubled their average yearly income in the years between 1982 and 2004, to $2.5 million. The years weren’t as kind to families in the bottom 10 per cent, who by 2004 had average income of a mere $6,000 a year.
That’s not to say rich people aren’t entitled to their wealth. No doubt many work very hard for the money. But the growing gap between the rich and poor in Canada didn’t come about because the rich work hard and the poor are lazy. We’ve had a series of governments whose policies have made things better for those who already had it pretty good, and considerably worse for those just getting by.
In B.C., one of the first things to go was the fishing industry, given away by Ottawa to a handful of wealthy men. Next was forestry, to the point that even the land where the trees once grew now gets handed off to developers without a whisper of consultation.
Our social systems have become twisted versions of themselves, to the point where our governments reward themselves for taking away people’s benefits.
In the first year of B.C.’s intensified crackdown on welfare under the Liberals, a deputy minister received a $15,400 bonus for slashing the welfare caseload by 22 per cent. Eight years on, there’s little evidence that anything about the immensely costly welfare-to-work years have benefited British Columbians (see http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/04/27/Poverty/). A massive increase in homelessness in the same period has in fact increased the cost and extent of poverty dramatically.
Meanwhile, employment insurance is now so difficult to get that barely 30 to 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians qualify for it, even while Ottawa sits on a $54-billion EI surplus. If you feel frustratingly powerless to change such things, as I do, that’s a pretty serious signal that we’ve lost control of our governments.
In less than two weeks, a new government will be elected in B.C. For the sake of a better tomorrow, please pick with care and thoughtfulness. And vote “yes” for STV, which at least puts a little power back into the hands of the people.

Progress Board /08 report highlights B.C.'s chronic challenges

Left to my own devices, I’d have a heck of a time trying to take the measure of B.C.’s economic performance. I get that it’s a really important thing to pay attention to, but my brain just doesn’t go there easily.
So I’m grateful for the yearly analysis done by the B.C. Progress Board, a non-profit entity set up eight years ago by the Liberals specifically to track key performance measures in the province.
The annual report certainly doesn’t give you everything you need to know to gauge whether things are improving in B.C. But the economic and social measures it gathers at least provide a partial picture of how B.C. is performing, both over time and compared to other provinces and countries.
The 18 business leaders and academics who form the Progress Board piece together things like hourly wage rates, exports, tax levels, productivity, and long-term employment, then work in social/health indicators like air quality, land preservation, people living below the low-income cutoff, and life expectancy. (Find the 2008 report at http://www.bcprogressboard.com/2008docs.html)
The reports are valuable for what they tell us about B.C., including the challenges that continue to elude us. The 2008 edition finds the Liberals enjoying considerable success on some fronts and spinning their wheels on others, most often on issues that have gotten the best of B.C. for many years now.
The Liberals were elected on a platform of fiscal responsibility and lower taxes, and have seen success on both those fronts. We’ve had four consecutive years of budget surpluses, ending a nearly 13-year stretch of deficits.
If you’re well-paid, you’ll also appreciate that B.C. now has the second-lowest income tax rate (14.7 per cent) in the country for people in the top income bracket. We’re also top of the charts when it comes to producing university graduates.
But the progress report also reveals that some of the tough issues dogging B.C. when the Liberals took office continue to bedevil the province today.
A couple examples: B.C. had one of the lowest productivity rates in Canada when the Liberals formed government in 2001, and some of the highest rates per capita of people living below the national low-income cutoff. We still do. We also have one of the highest crime rates in Canada.
Productivity is essentially a measurement of how many hours of work it takes to produce all of B.C.’s goods and services. It’s important because higher productivity rates mean better wages, a more competitive workforce, and increased revenue for government to fund health care, education, infrastructure, and so on.
But it’s clearly something we struggle with in B.C., and not only because we’re laid-back West Coasters.
“While we are concerned about whether employees in British Columbia are reaching their full potential,” writes the Progress Board in its 2008 report, “of equal importance is the need for governments and private industry to create ‘winning conditions.’ Are we making sufficient investments in infrastructure and innovation? Our benchmark results suggest the answer has consistently been no.”
In terms of people living below the low-income cutoff (a somewhat flawed standard used to estimate poverty), the 2008 report wonders whether there’s something unique about B.C. that explains why it has a high number of “less well-off” people even when the economy is booming. The board promises more study into B.C.’s consistently poor ranking on this front for more than a decade.
Social conditions in B.C. get a “middling” ranking of six from the Progress Board, which came to that conclusion after factoring in things like life expectancy, long-term employment, low-income households and number of income-assistance recipients.
A six isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s still an improvement over the nines and 10s that predominated from 1999-2005. However, I wonder whether the higher welfare caseloads in those years skewed those figures, and disagree with the board’s assumption that any decline in welfare rolls is automatically “good.”
As for crime rates, they’ve fallen dramatically right across the country in the last decade or so, including in B.C. But we’ve still got one of the worst rates in Canada. Yes, the incidence of reported crimes has dropped 14 per cent in B.C. since 1998, but rates have dropped even faster in other provinces.
What does it all mean? That B.C. has seen some successes but still has significant work to do if it really wants to be “the best place on Earth.” Whoever forms government after the May election needs to put aside ideology-based theories of governance and just get the job done.

Change of heart on BC welfare may be too little, too late

When Gordon Campbell’s Liberals were first elected in 2001, almost a quarter million British Columbians were living on welfare. Those numbers have fallen by almost 100,000 since then.
Good news or bad? That’s a profound question. The tremendous drop in B.C. welfare rates over the past 14 years is either a marvel of social strategy or a major reason why we’ve ended up with so many people living on our streets. So it’s not the kind of thing you want to get wrong.
The government’s own vision for its welfare programs establishes what we’re shooting for in the province: “Government is committed to helping those most in need and helping people who are able to work achieve sustainable employment.” Are we achieving that vision?
First, a brief welfare primer for B.C. newcomers. Welfare rates hit an historic high in 1995, with 367,387 British Columbians on assistance - 10 per cent of the population. An embarrassed New Democrat government promised a crackdown, and by the late 1990s had adopted a new “tough love” qualification process and welfare-to-work program that continues to this day.
By the time the Liberals took office, the NDP had reduced the number of welfare clients (which includes the children of people on welfare) to 245,000, six per cent of the population. The Liberals have since cut it further, to three per cent: 146,152. Subtract the people with permanent disabilities from that tally, and it turns out that less than one per cent of the population now receives temporary assistance.
Welfare is a mean existence. The money’s just enough to stay poor forever - $610 a month for a single person on temporary assistance, and only for those with a place to live ($235 otherwise). But it’s better than nothing, and a vital component of smart social planning.
Most of the reduction in client numbers was made during the Liberals’ first term in office, when their enthusiasm for slashing social programs knew no bounds. The party’s second term has been significantly different, at least in the last couple of years. Perhaps they just woke up and smelled the coffee, but at any rate the welfare caseload bottomed out in 2007 and has been rising ever so slowly ever since.
For the first time since 1995, the number of people qualifying for welfare is increasing rather than decreasing. This past year, the client load grew by more than 10,000 people.
The government has even begun to hire outreach workers to hit the streets specifically to find people who aren’t on welfare and sign them up - unthinkable in the Liberals’ early years. Welfare rates inched up a little. It could be the Liberals have come to see what many of us had already concluded: that the government had gone too far with its cuts to welfare.
Trying to measure government performance is a challenging task if only because the goal posts keep changing, and rarely more so than in the Ministry of Housing and Social Development, where the welfare program resides. The name of the ministry alone has changed three times since the Liberals took office, and trying to draw comparisons between then and now is a bit like comparing the fabled apple to the orange.
But two long-term trends clearly visible through the haze are an increase in the number of people receiving disability assistance, and a dramatic drop in those receiving temporary assistance.
The number of people receiving disability has almost tripled since 1995, to 81,000 from a low of 26,708. Disability provides a little bigger stipend than regular welfare and includes a cheap annual bus pass, so I’ll take the increase as a positive sign that more people who really need the help are now getting it.
At the same time, however, the number of British Columbians receiving temporary assistance has fallen by more than 80 per cent, from 340,679 to a mere 64,754.
Some people have found jobs through B.C.’s welfare training programs, of course, and others deserved to get dumped from the dole. But many more simply crashed through the gaping holes that developed in the system. In terms of cost-effectiveness, Andrew MacLeod reported in the Tyee in 2005 that we’d spent $31 million on welfare-to-work programs in the Liberals’ first term to save $18 million in welfare payments.
Good on the Liberals for trying harder these past couple years. But the suffering they inflicted to get to this point has been considerable. People lost housing, hope and dignity during the worst of the cutbacks, and problems on our streets skyrocketed.
I’ll be looking for smarter, better-informed welfare policy from the next B.C. government.