Group items tagged

We know that income provides the prerequisites for health including housing, food, clothing, education and safety. Low income limits an individual's opportunity to achieve their full health potential (physical, psychological and social) because it limits choices. This includes the ability to access safe housing, choose healthy food options, find inexpensive child care, access social support networks, learn beneficial coping mechanisms and build strong relationships. Here's what everyone needs to know:

1. In Canada, there is no official measure of poverty. The way in which we measure and define poverty has implications for policies developed to reduce poverty and its effect on health. Statistics Canada does not define poverty nor does it estimate the number of families in poverty in Canada. Instead, it publishes statistics on the number of Canadians living in low-income, using a variety of measurements. Following the federal government's cancellation of the mandatory long-form census, long-term comparisons of income trends over time have been made difficult because the voluntary survey is now likely to under-represent those living in low income. 2. There is a direct link between socioeconomic status and health status. Robust evidence shows that people in the lowest socioeconomic group carry the greatest burden of illness. This social gradient in health runs from top to bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum. If you were to look at, for example, cardiovascular disease mortality according to income group in Canada, mortality is highest among those in the poorest income group and, as income increases, mortality rate decreases. The same can be found for conditions such as cancer, diabetes and mental illness.

3. Poverty in childhood is associated with a number of health conditions in adulthood. More than one in seven Canadian children live in poverty. This places Canada 15th out of 17 similar developed countries, and being at the bottom of this list is not where we want to be. Children who live in poverty are more likely to have low birth weights, asthma, Type 2 diabetes, poorer oral health and suffer from malnutrition. But also children who grow up in poverty are, as adults, more likely to experience addictions, mental health difficulties, physical disabilities and premature death. Children who experience poverty are also less likely to graduate from high school and more likely to live in poverty as adults. 4. People living in poverty face more barriers to access and care. It has been found that Canadians with a lower income are more likely to report that they have not received needed health care in the past 12 months. Also, Canadians in the lowest income groups are 50 per cent less likely than those in the highest income group to see a specialist, and 40 per cent more likely to wait more than five days for a doctor's appointment. They are also twice as likely as higher-income Canadians to visit the emergency department for treatment. Researchers have reported that Canadians in the lowest income groups are three times less likely to fill prescriptions and 60 per cent less able to get needed tests because of costs.

5. There is a profound two-way relationship between poverty and health. People with limited access to income are often more socially isolated, experience more stress, have poorer mental and physical health and fewer opportunities for early childhood development and post-secondary education. In the reverse, it has been found that chronic conditions, especially those that limit a person's ability to maintain viable stable employment, can contribute to a downwards spiral into poverty. Studies show the former people living in poverty experiencing poor health occurs more frequently than poor health causing poverty.

As we approach the October election, Canadians ought to remember that poverty, health and the economy are inextricably linked issues. We ignore those links at our peril. Carolyn Shimmin is a Knowledge Translation Coordinator with EvidenceNetwork.ca and the George and Fay Yee Centre for Healthcare Innovation in Winnipeg.

Patti Jo Encinas, a CUPE Ontario health care worker and vice-president of OCHU. “Today, the government has no shame as it cravenly passes the buck by freezing social assistance rates, slashing public sector services and gutting workers’ pensions.

Their recommendations included the ambitious goal of reducing poverty in Saskatchewan by 50 per cent by the end of 2020. To reach such a goal requires putting in place a policy with the power to do so, and the group came to the consensus that a basic income pilot project would be an effective and achievable means of doing so.

Sound expensive? A growing body of evidence shows that allowing poverty to continue is far more expensive than investing to help improve people's economic well-being. Currently $3.8 billion - 5 per cent of GDP - is lost from the Saskatchewan economy each year due to increased health and social costs and decreased economic opportunities. In Ontario, this cost of poverty has been calculated to be upward of $30 billion per year - far more than estimated costs of basic income implementation.

Where more extensive basic income pilots have been tried, both internationally and in Canada, the results have been impressive. The Mincome experiment in Dauphin, Manitoba in the 1970s resulted in higher school completion rates, and a reduction in hospitalization of 8.5 per cent largely due to fewer accidents, injuries and mental health admissions. According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information, Canadians spent $63.6 billion on hospital services in 2014, meaning a decrease of 8.5 per cent would result in savings of $5.4 billion. This is just one of the many areas where the return on social investment saves public funds, improving the lives of Canadians in the bargain. Some policy changes happen slowly, with incremental movements in public opinion. But every once in a while, an idea that had seemed outside the realm of possibility quite suddenly gathers momentum. The concept of basic income is on a course from the margins to the mainstream. If political leaders have the health of Canadians as their first priority, they'll turn advice into action and implement basic income.

Danielle Martin is a family physician and vice-president of Medical Affairs and Health System Solutions at Women's College Hospital. Ryan Meili is a family physician, founder of Upstream: Institute for A Healthy Society and an expert adviser with the Evidence Network.

What do these campaigns accomplish? Undoubtedly, food drive campaigns get some much-needed food and money to local food banks. They provide great publicity for their corporate sponsors. They help companies appear to be good corporate citizens who care about local communities. They give those of us who participate a sense that we are "doing something" about a terrible problem in our midst. What they don't do is solve hunger.

Research shows that most hungry Canadians never even go to a food bank. And even those who do can never get enough food to keep them from being hungry. Food drives cannot solve hunger because they do not address the underlying problem of poverty. Across the country, political leaders, medical doctors, public health officials and ordinary community members are recognizing that the most effective and important thing we could do to end hunger is to provide everyone who needs it with a basic income guarantee or BIG. A BIG would ensure that everyone has enough money to buy the food they need

The list of BIG supporters is growing every week. It includes P.E.I.'s new premier, Wade MacLauchlin, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi, Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson, former Kingston and the Islands senator Hugh Segal, former Toronto mayor and current Senator Art Eggleton, Medicare defender Danielle Martin, the Simcoe Muskoka Public Health Unit, the Ontario-based Association of Local Public Health Agencies (alPHa). And the list goes on. In Kingston, a group of local citizens, including this writer, has joined with the Basic Income Canada Network to build support for BIG. An effective basic income guarantee would enable all Canadians to meet basic needs and to live with dignity. It would solve the problem of hunger by ending its underlying cause, poverty. It would address the income insecurity that is affecting more and more Canadians as full-time, permanent jobs are becoming increasingly difficult to find. It would unleash our creativity and entrepreneurial spirits. And it would reward the countless hours of unpaid and volunteer work that so many of us do.

Over time, a basic income guarantee would more than pay for itself with savings in health care, education and the justice system. And once there were no more hungry Canadians, a basic income guarantee would mean that food banks could finally close. Elaine Power is an associate professor in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University and co-founder of the Kingston Action Group for a basic income guarantee. © 2015 Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved. Illustration: • JULIA MCKAY/THE WHIG-STANDARD • Volunteers David Norman, left, and Ralph and Kathee Hutcheon pack up one of the 30th Hotel Dieu Hospital's Food Blitz brown bags with nonperishable food items in the warehouse at the Partners in Mission Food Bank in Kingston in May.

While the findings and recommendations are not binding, Smith said they highlight the challenges faced by African Canadians for the international community and hopefully put more pressure on Ottawa to rectify the inequities. "The situation is only going to get worse," Smith said. "We have families in the community torn apart at an alarming rate. "The future looks pretty bleak for our young people."

The UN delegation was in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax to meet with government officials, community members and rights groups to identify good practices and gaps in protecting the rights of black people. "We had been trying to secure a visit to Canada for a long time. It's a great joy that we were officially invited here," the working group's chair Ricardo Sunga told the Star in a phone interview Tuesday. "We look at Canada as a model in many ways when it comes to human rights protection.

We appreciate Canada's effort in addressing discrimination in various forms, but no country is exempt from racism and racial discrimination." Despite the wealth of information on socio-economic indicators in Canada, the investigators criticized the "serious" lack of race-based data and research that could inform prevention, intervention and treatment strategies. "The working group is concerned that the category 'visible minorities' obscures the realities and specific concerns of African Canadians," its report said. "There is clear evidence that racial profiling is endemic in the strategies and practices used by law enforcement. Arbitrary use of 'carding' or street checks disproportionately affects people of African descent."

The overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system was of particular concern for the group, who found African Canadians make up only 3 per cent of the population but account for 10 per cent of the prison population. In the last decade, the number of black detainees in federal correctional facilities has grown by 71.1 per cent, it warned. Among other findings by the UN experts: Across Canada, African Canadian children are being taken into child welfare on "dubious" grounds. Forty-one per cent of children in Children's Aid Society of Toronto's care were black when only 8 per cent of children are of African descent. The unemployment rate for black women is 11 per cent, 4 per cent higher than the general population, and they earn 37 per cent less than white males and 15 per cent less than white women.

A quarter of African Canadian women live below the poverty line compared to 6 per cent for their white counterparts. One-third of Canadian children of Caribbean heritage and almost half of continental African children live in poverty, compared to 18 per cent of white Canadian children. Chris Ramsaroop, an advocate with Justicia for Migrant Workers, hopes the report will raise awareness of the plight of African Canadians. "We need every opportunity to hold the feet of the federal and provincial governments to the fire," he said. The UN experts recommend a national department of African-Canadian affairs to develop policies to address issues facing black people and implement a nationwide mandatory disaggregated data collection policy based on race, colour, ethnic background and national origin.

Odion Fayalo, of Justice is Not Color Blind Campaign, protests racial profiling before a Toronto Police board meeting. • René Johnston/TORONTO STAR file photo

This should be no great revelation – research has shown for some time that there is an association between high-cost use and socio-economic status. Yet this knowledge has not been enough to shape the policy agenda with respect to high-cost users, perhaps in part because solving poverty seems a monolithic problem well beyond the means of a health care system to address.

So it shouldn't come as a surprise that, despite a decade of public programs intended to promote health equity, the health status of the poorest Torontonians hasn't improved. In fact, this was entirely predictable. At the heart of the issue are two important insights provided by our best available science. First, public health programs that are designed to encourage people to alter their lifestyles and behaviours simply do not address the myriad other associations between economic position and health status. Attempts to address any one problem do little to fundamentally interrupt the overall correlation. Second, because public health programs do not address the "causes of the causes," they are incapable of stemming the tide of new individuals that develop poor health-related behaviours. No sooner has one cohort been exposed to a health-promotion program than another is ready and waiting.

oronto has made little progress in the fight against poverty over the last decade and thus it's to be expected that health inequality remains stark. We find little fault in the actions of Toronto Public Health. Rather, as the science makes clear, the true guardians of our health are the policy-makers that determine whether all Torontonians - and all Canadians, more generally - are able to keep up with the costs of everyday life. What can we do? We can create widespread recognition that when our governments fail to redress inequalities, they undermine the health of our society. We can engage in civic and political action to help pass public policies that reduce the economic distance between the rich and the poor. We can also support organizations that advocate on behalf of these policies, including Toronto Public Health and the labour unions that protect the conditions of low-wage workers.

Health inequalities are one of the most formidable public health problems of our time. The science strongly supports Toronto Public Health's insights that public health programs are wholly insufficient to alleviate their burden. The solution lies in tackling the unequal distribution of resources that has become a defining feature of our city and our society at large. Arjumand Siddiqi is assistant professor and Faraz Vahid Shahidi is a doctoral student at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto. Correspondence should be sent to Ms. Siddiqi at: aa.siddiqi@utoronto.ca

Freedom for our bodies, our land and our territories.”

Approximately, 100,000 people in New Brunswick, almost one in seven, live below the poverty line. Almost one third of single-parent households in New Brunswick are poor, according to 2011 statistics. Following the most recent economic crisis, governments have been implementing austerity budgets and New Brunswick is no exception. New Brunswickers are still struggling for pay equity, access to reproductive health care and child care.

Elsipogtog women made international headlines when they put their bodies on the line to defend their territories against shale gas. Maya women in Guatemala are demanding justice in Canadian courts for rape and murder committed by a Canadian mine’s security guards. Rape is a weapon used in wars around the world.

More of us are demanding action be taken for our missing and murdered indigenous women and girls and making the links to capitalism, colonization and destruction of the land.

This global feminist movement brings together diverse groups, including women’s groups, unions, anti-poverty groups, Indigenous activists, international solidarity groups and many others. Since the first March in 2000, activists have organized local, national and global marches, hundreds of workshops and actions and lobbying of governments and international organizations.

Speakers:

The 4th International World March of Women was launched on March 8, International Women’s Day, and will conclude October 17, 2015, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty.