I'm Jean Swanson, and this is April Smith. She is also one of our Carnegie Community Action Project volunteers.
The first thing I want to do is acknowledge that we're on unceded Coast Salish territory and to thank the Coast Salish people for allowing us to be here.
We call our group CCAP. We're accountable to about 5,000 members of the Carnegie Community Centre Association. We work to get better and more housing in the downtown eastside, which is the poorest postal code neighbourhood. It's about seven blocks east of here. We also work to get higher incomes for low-income people and to stop gentrification.
Every Friday a CCAP volunteer group of about 20 people meets for lunch and to work on these issues. The volunteers are homeless. They live in the crappiest housing in Canada, SROs with no bathrooms and no kitchens and plenty of cockroaches and bedbugs, and we also live in social housing. At the end of every meeting we have a moment of silence for someone who has died, and I'll come back to that.
I was just looking at the 2005 Statistics Canada wealth study. It has absolutely stunning information in it. In the six years between 1999 and 2005 the total net worth of Canadians increased nearly 42%, but the poorest fifth actually got poorer in that period by 70%. That was while the richest fifth increased their net wealth by 43%. I photocopied the page from Statistics Canada that says this. If this trend continues, how much will the poor have lost by 2011? How much will the rich have gained? What about by 2017? What nightmare will our society be like if this inequality continues and gets worse?
The other astounding fact from the wealth study was that the poorest fifth--which means us in our CCAP group, among others--have an average net worth of minus $2,400. We have no wealth--we're in debt. The richest fifth have an average net worth of about $1.3 million.
I want to describe our community, the downtown eastside. Seventy percent of downtown eastside residents have low income and are among the poorest fifth of Canadians. CCAP just finished a two-year consultation process with 1,200 low-income people in the downtown eastside. Our study revealed that the downtown eastside is a strong community with lots of amazing assets. We're very accepting and non-judgmental. We have a lot of empathy for people who are suffering. We have an authentic cultural heritage. We put in hundreds of thousands of hours of volunteer work to build our community. We recycle, and we have some great services, many of which we started ourselves, and we work for social justice. We fought for our park, our safe injection site, our community centre, our missing women. Still, 700 of us are homeless and 3,500 live in one-room hotel rooms, and some people have health and addiction issues.
I'll talk a little bit about the history. We've always been poor, but not as desperate as today. Nearly everyone had some sort of housing 30 years ago, and welfare's purchasing power was about $250 a month more than today. Minimum wage was 122% of the poverty line. Now it's about 80%, and it's about 60% for our inexcusable $6 an hour so-called training wage.
In the 1980s a federal-provincial housing program built close to 700 units of good-quality new social housing in Vancouver per year. Now there is no federal housing program, and the new social housing we get is a drop in the bucket compared to what we need.
As in other communities, some people in our community and in our CCAP volunteer group use drugs that are now illegal. We value these human beings and want policies and programs that will save lives and help people to get healthy. We think harm reduction works.
There is another new Statistics Canada report that says poverty is twice as bad as cancer in terms of causing poor health and early death. This report says poverty--and we would say the government policies that cause poverty--is robbing poor people of about ten years of their lives. I have attached an article on that. Our lives in the downtown eastside are proof of this statistic. This is why we have a moment of silence at every one of our meetings. A lot of people in the downtown eastside die.
Our society doesn't know how to end cancer, but we do know how to end poverty.
We need our social programs back. We need a national housing strategy like every other developed country. We need a decent minimum wage of at least $11 an hour. We need a government that will tax the richest 10% or 20% to help fund these programs, and we need to replace the present illegal drug market with a regulated legal drug market based on public health and human rights.
We'd like your help in making our federal government do these things.
Thank you.