"Working Together Out of Poverty”

The grim reality posted in the recent liberal blog on the occasion of International Day for the Eradication of Poverty 2011, let me think about the concern of the liberals on the issue of poverty and try to find out how effective their policy is to solve this social problem.

The statistics in that blog  show that “one in seven Canadian children lives in low-income conditions – and that number goes up, way up, in First Nations and Inuit communities and among those new to our country”. It is really a challenging and in a way a embarrassing  factor for the so called rich countries like Canada. This fact is serious and it echoed the voice of Ban ki- moon, the Secretary General of UN in his speech on that very occasion:

Too many people are living in fear:
Fear of losing their jobs;
Fear of not being able to feed their families;
Fear of being trapped forever in poverty, deprived of the human right to live with health and dignity and hope for the future.
We can meet the challenges we face — the economic crisis, climate change, raising costs of food and energy, the effects of natural disasters.
We can overcome them by putting people at the centre of our work.

                                                                    Ban Ki- moon, UN Secretary General

The liberal ideology, that claims for the inclusive and prosperous Canada today, is the foundation of welfare state in the post-World War era that among other issues “seeks to reduce the excesses of inequality by using the power of the state to provide opportunities, such as public education, or health care, that would not be available to some people without government intervention” (Mullaly, p 92). They started different welfare programs to “compensate the victim of capitalism”. But was it sufficient enough for the eradication of poverty from the society?  And the answer is definitely NO as accepted by the liberals themselves in the above linked blog.

The federal Liberal Party of Canada has recently developed different policies like Liberal Family Care Plan, designed to help those caring for sick family members at home, and  the Liberal National Food Policy, which emphasizes the importance of providing healthy food to low-income children. But as a social worker I doubt, how far these policies will be effective in the time when we are advocating for the participatory democracy to address the issue from the level of people who are the direct concern of the subject rather than the representative democracy that the liberals are applauding for.Coulter (2009) finds the provincial liberal government of Ontario using poverty as a lip service to the humanity and just as a mode of governance to contrast their approach with the conservatives (p 40).

My concern is, liberals have paved the way for the betterment of Canadian society through their policies and plans for more than a half century but are they revising themselves accordingly and "putting people at the center of work" as Moon mentioned above or it is time to get replaced by other ideologies as seen in federal election 2011. Sandwell (2003) is concerned to the same sorts of aspects beyond the narratives of individualism and social minimum that the liberals are unwilling to forward with (p 452). 

Subas

References:

Coulter, K. (2009). Women, poverty policy, and production of neoliberal policies in Ontario, Canada. Journal of women politics and policy, vol 30, 23-45.
Liberal blog (2011). Working together out of poverty. Retrieved October 18, 2011 from www.liberal.ca
Moon B.K. (2011). A speech on the international day for the eradication of poverty. Retrieved October 18, 2011 from www.un.org./www.youtube.com
Mullaly, R. (2007). The new structural social work (3rd Ed.). Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press
Sandwell, R. W. (2003). The limits of liberalism:The liberal reconnaissance and history of the family in Canada. Canadian Historical Review, 84,423-453.