It isn’t quite let-them-eat-cake, but it surely heads in that direction.
“We have to remember that a person on social assistance — a single person on social assistance in British Columbia — gets double the annual income of a person in the Third World. And we should remember that — not because we say it’s right but we should remember actually how good this country is.”
There seems to be more gold than Golden Rule in our current ruling clique in Victoria, but this struck me as callous and over-the-top in its lack of empathy and misdirection from the realities of what his government has done to the citizens of the province.
“The test of our progress is not whether we add to the abundance of those who have much. It is whether we provide enough to those who have little.
—Franklin D. Roosevelt
By Roosevelt’s measure, we in BC have bounded backward for the last decade and a half, and we weren’t doing all that well when Gordon Campbell ushered in his New Era in 2001.
What Deputy Premier Coleman misses is that our recipients of social assistance don’t have the luxury of flying off to Costa Rica or Nicaragua where their purchasing power might equate to a more reasonable lifestyle, and that they are facing an employment and cost of living situation that is at least difficult, if not hostile, a situation not improved by the use of temporary foreign workers to keep labour costs at a minimum, even though companies employing them are still selling into a market in the high-rent district. It’s rather like offshoring at home.
In addition, the goose and gander get somewhat separated when Minister Coleman’s salary has risen considerably over the time he’s been in government, and we can’t really say the same for social assistance rates, or for the level of service that the province provides to help its citizens find reasonable work that will meet the needs of those having to exist in cities that have become increasingly unaffordable.
The statement is typical of the total lack of care for anyone other than those on the donors’ list and the lists of approved contractors on mega projects.