Dear editor,
Now that we are done with the season of charitable giving, it’s time to sit back and …do something!
Food banks fill a gap, charitable giving is good in and of itself but these things are only Bandaids – as we all know.
But here’s one action that we can take to ensure that the pressure is eased a little on food banks and other charities.
We can ramp up the pressure on the provincial government to end the evil clawback of parental support payments for those on social assistance and disability payments.
This is the provincial Liberal government literally taking money from children! Parental support payments belong to the children. The government is not teaching anybody a lesson about taking responsibility for oneself by withholding these payments. They are not preventing abuse of social assistance by doing this. They are, in fact, ensuring that people are stuck in a dark well of dependency by taking away any ability for people to reach a degree of comfort where they can actually see a future.
There are many things that we can do as citizens to make this a more equitable society.
I don’t do nearly enough to try to change things but I am making this my own feeble effort to rouse people to pressure Don McRae and Christy Clark and all the rest of the Liberals, to immediately end this despicable clawback.
Oh I know, the Liberal caucus is “studying” this issue, but the next budget will have come and gone before the caucus comes to any conclusion.
Do it now I say – any excuse that it takes time is simply bureaucratic BS.
And while you’re at it, raise the amount of money that people can earn over and above their social assistance payments.
These are a couple of simple ways in which we can immediately improve the lives of people who are victims of the lousy economic system under which we live.
Do it now!
Stephen Harvey
Courtenay
