Welfare programs keep Island recipients hostage to poverty.

On P.E.I. there are over 10,000 children living in poor families. Poverty steals children's opportunitiy to achieve their full potential.

Social assistance, or welfare programs, provide money to individuals deemed unable to provide a living or can't meet basic needs and have exhausted all avenues of financial support.

Applicants must be between 18-65 years old. Single-parents must apply for entitled maintenance support. People with disabilities require medical certification of their condition.

In 1998 on P.E.I. a couple with two children living on welfare received $17,999. The average income for a working couple, with two children was $49,851 according to a recent National Council of Welfare report. The average welfare income for a single parent with one child in the same year was $11,676.

The cycle of poverty is difficult to break. Welfare receipents are discouraged by its system. Long-term, meaningful employment or a post-secondary education is only a dream for many. Welfare recipients are often wrongfully laelled by society's judging eye. They are viewed by some as lazy, uneducated, and a burden on taxpayers.

Welfare programs financially penalize people who enrol in college or university making it impossible to attend. A post-secondary education is quickly becoming an opportunity only for the elite. People who don't want to be burdened with astronomical student loans end up in blue-collar professions or dead-end jobs. The white-collar elite dominate the labour market and global resources. The future poor will be (or is) enslaved to the predominantly white upper class society.

Government should be held accountable for cutting and slashing social programs to the bare bone. Instead of providing for the less fortunate, it's stolen from those who can least afford it.

On July 1, 1998, a major change in welfare policy came with the new Canada Child Tax Benefit. Government clawed it back from Island families on welfare who lived on incomes well below the poverty line.

Political representors live in a luxury,Canada's poor can only dream of. Politician's perks and freebies, that cost taxpayers millions, could be better spent on helping those who need it.

In 1989 the House of Commons passed an unanimous resolution to end child poverty by 2000. It aimed "to seek to achieve the goal of eliminating child poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000."

Was the 1989 resolution a smokescreen to conceal a hidden agenda of a national conspiracy for inclusive National control? After all, the federal government body is the wealthy and the powerful.

National child poverty population has increased to 436,000 since 1989. It effects 1.5 million Canadian children. The stark statistics depict the naked truth of government's broken promise and an uncertain future for the low-income population.

The gap between the rich and poor has grown at an alarming rate since 1973. One in five children in Canada remains poor.

Is Canada using developing countries for a blue print?

Make no mistake about it, Canada is fast becoming a Third World country. A place where the rich control the country, its resources and the people.

SS