As I went through a couple of articles, and for sure the text book itself, I got to know that the neo-conservatives are not seriously concerned about the poverty issues like homeless situation as a major social problem to be addressed right away. This view is a direct contradiction against the notion of welfare state that continues the disparity among the people in a society. As a social worker, I can’t agree with them and I see that poverty is a social challenge that affects both the poor and the rest.
For neo-conservatives homelessness is purely a personal problem that “there is no social problem, only personal problem that occur when individuals do not look after themselves” (Mullaly, 2007). In a society where people are motivated by profit and power, they are only concerned to their own life and they have no interest to look for others. As a result, the privileged classes keep on enjoying their supremacy whereas the poor people have to suffer from a number of problems like the shortage of food, lack of proper humanly shelter, and other necessities and rights in the society. Effective government intervention is necessary to address such inequality and to provide social justice to everybody through different welfare programs but the neo-conservatives find it a reverse discrimination and instead continue to praise poverty as a good thing which teaches discipline and provides incentives (Mullaly, 2007). When I am observing this all from the eyes of homeless people of Canada, I find it in a sense a nonsense ideology without having responsibility to its people.
There are thousands of homeless people in Canada who are bound to live the life of beggars, staying in shelter homes, sleeping under the bridge and bus parks, compelled to get addicted and involve in criminal activities, and suffering from physical, mental and emotional problems. This number is growing significantly in the major cities like Vancouver and “unless an urgent action was taken, the number of homeless in the region will easily exceed the 5000 athletes and officials expected to participate in the 2010 Winter Olympics” (Collins, 2010, p.944).
The homeless people in Vancouver taking drugs
These people are getting vulnerable in every day or so. National Council of Welfare indicates homelessness as a big problem adopting a high-cost response to the government (National Council of Welfare, 2011). But the neo-conservatives are pretending to be blind to this very fact because they are sceptical to social change and prefer to maintain status quo in every aspects which sounds unpractical and stupid in many senses. They are too cynics when they view poverty as the cause of individual weakness rather than that of socio-cultural and economic factor. How can the welfare program be hostile to social justice? Is homelessness entirely an individual issue that the government has nothing to do with it? What is the meaning of government to those people who have to live all their life “outside of home”?
The homeless people in Vancouver taking drugs
These people are getting vulnerable in every day or so. National Council of Welfare indicates homelessness as a big problem adopting a high-cost response to the government (National Council of Welfare, 2011). But the neo-conservatives are pretending to be blind to this very fact because they are sceptical to social change and prefer to maintain status quo in every aspects which sounds unpractical and stupid in many senses. They are too cynics when they view poverty as the cause of individual weakness rather than that of socio-cultural and economic factor. How can the welfare program be hostile to social justice? Is homelessness entirely an individual issue that the government has nothing to do with it? What is the meaning of government to those people who have to live all their life “outside of home”?
In this way, I find the neo-conservative ideology as a cheap dogma of affluent elites who do not want to change the existing social scene by the fear of losing their privileges. They lack vision to see the holistic effect of homelessness in the national and international economy that is questioning their own identity. In today’s world, it is almost impossible to think about a government having no welfare program to help uplift the precarious livelihood of homeless people to an equal height and that is why there are many social policies being formulated, research getting done, media and civil society advocating for the marginalized people and the pressure on the government and so on to addresses the issue of homelessness.
References:
Collins, D. (2010). Homelessness in Canada and Newzeland. Urban Geography, vol 31, 932—952.
Mullaly, B. (2007). The new structural social work (3rd ed.). Toronto: Oxford University Press.
National Council of Welfare. (2011). The dollars and the sense of solving poverty. Retrieved October 12, 2011, from www.ncw.gc.ca/l. 3bd.2t.1ilshtml@- eng.jsp?lid=433&fid=2 #link15
Subas Dahal
I love this Subas, but what do you think the government should do about the homeless problem?
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