9 May 2012
When elected premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty pledged to eliminate child poverty - not poverty itself. One wonders how a government can lift children out of poverty but not their parents. The answer is they can't. To review the Liberals record, one in seven children lives in poverty in Ontario according to a recently released report. There are 148 000 children whose families rely on food banks. 150 000 families are waiting for affordable housing. One in five children has access to licensed day care.
The future does not look any brighter. With the impending cuts to the public sector, things will get worse. Faced with a deficit it must reduce, the government has already abandoned the '25 in 5' campaign, reducing child poverty by twenty-five percent in five years. Anti-poverty activists who want to abolish poverty, but not the economic conditions that create it, have urged Queen's Park (the Provincial Legislature) to increase the minimum wage and spend more on child- care, housing, and welfare.
The Liberals say they don't have the money for those programs. So, if we accept that the situation is caused by money, the obvious answer would be to abolish money and establish a society of common ownership of the means of producing and distributing wealth. That means abolishing capitalism, the system that relies on money, profit and the market system, a system that is designed to meet the needs of the capitalist class at the expense of those who do the work and create all the wealth. As everyone would have free access to the goods and services produced by society, poverty would be a thing of the past. Capitalism will never be able to do that.
