I'll start by telling you that in 1995, when the 21.6% came off the welfare cheques, the Fraser Institute, which made that estimate, also allotted only 1,000 calories a day to live on. I know that was true, because I lived it. In two months, there was no food in the house. By the spring of 1996, I was in the hospital, sick with gallbladder. By the time I was graduating, I was so malnourished I couldn't read a paragraph and be able to get into Guelph University for my masters' degree in international development.
The first job I got, with unemployment so bad and so many people losing their jobs in all that restructuring, was a job cleaning toilets at Toyota. I was injured. This is one of the worst things that happened at that time. When you downloaded everything onto the municipality, with everybody was losing their jobs, it was a real mess. The discrimination and hatred that came toward us was just unacceptable for this country. It's not who we are. We aren't that kind of people.
I could never understand the hatred, but it came, and it came full-fledged. I ended up outside the country for four years, teaching English in Mexico. I got back to Canada. I've moved 16 times in the last four years. I've worked at market research. Guess what I was doing? I was enlisting young kids in the American army. Do you want that immoral job? Because that's the kind of crap that's being given to us. The jobs where there is a minimum wage are a waste of time. It just doesn't work.
As for welfare, when we signed NAFTA, I thought dismantling welfare was wrong, but I agree with it now. What we need is to get rid of it. It's punitive, it's demoralizing, and it just doesn't work. There's no way to get out of that thing. You get on welfare today and you go to your food bank. I met a woman—I'm talking about immigrants—who has just been in Canada a month. She gets a welfare cheque, which is only 1,000 calories a day. She goes to a food bank. As for the food I get at the food bank, 90% of it I would not otherwise buy. There's no nutrition in it.
As far as the Canada Food Guide, shelters, and the rest of the places are concerned, I've lived in those shelters. It's not true.
On the mechanisms, I went to the UN. All we were taught as poor, homeless, and under-housed women, that was and is our experience. I'm not just talking about women. We went to CEDAW because it's the bill of rights, but I'm talking about all the poor.
I would like to see some special measures. We signed documents with the UN. We wrote the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That's who we are. We told them about what had happened.
Here's what I would like to see. Number one, the LICO line is probably the fairest for us. The Fraser Institute claims that there are only 1.5 million people living in poverty in Canada. Statistics Canada says it's about 4.9 million, but the OECD—the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—at a 60% median, they're saying it's 6.5 million. I'll take the LICO line, but it has to be guaranteed and non-taxable.
We need full health-care rights. I spent a year and a half going to a naturopath, teaching my stomach to eat, because my body will not tell me that anymore. The sad part about it is that all of the year and half that I spent there I'm losing, because I'm going to food banks. So it's back again. It's starting. I'm beginning to lose that year and a half. My body is beginning to do that again because I can't get enough food.
Food is a major issue among the poor. The only way to end this is to say enough with the band-aid solutions. We can do this. We had this dream in the 1970s. We wrote these documents. This is who we are. Go back and read it. It's the greatest document that's ever been made: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We made it. It was our dream.
There should be no squabbling about money in this. We have to get back down to being Canadians again. We have to remember who we are.
This should never ever happen again, where the poor are used as a scapegoat with the market economy flipping one way or the other and used in a political agenda. We need to be enshrined in the Charter of Rights, so that this never happens again.
The two 80-year-old women I met were in these drop-in centres, the 20 that I visited.