I’m a Generation Xer. This means I have more in common with Depression-era people than my older Baby Boomer cohorts. Perhaps that’s why I’m so aware of the roulette-wheel economics many Canadians have endured over the last 23 years.

It’s also why I support the introduction of a progressive social policy that has been bandied about for decades — a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians.

Globalization has sent thousands of Canadian jobs offshore, General Motors has just announced massive layoffs of 25,000 American workers, and the National Council of Welfare says our social safety-net has not really improved since Jennifer Beals maniacally gyrated her way into our hearts in 1983’s Flashdance.

In 1983 I was checking coats, taking a break from my studies, when the working-class heroine/dancer turned the ugly steel town of Pittsburgh into a place of hope and promise. The previous year had brought a deep recession in Canada and the United States. Nervous North Americans flocked to a feel-good movie promising that, if you worked hard enough, you could be admitted to the upper echelons of the ballet world.

But any Flashdance-infused, working-class fairy tales I may have entertained during that decade died on Black Tuesday in 1987. After my best friend lost her job at the Toronto Stock Exchange, I hid out in university for the next five years, finally emerging to greet the same lingering recession in 1992.

There were no jobs in Toronto for new graduates. Headlines were pronouncing liberal arts degrees as “useless” and PhDs were driving cabs. I packed up my stuff and moved back home to Winnipeg. I joined the staff of the Winnipeg Harvest food bank and soon started to see the impact of the job-scarce economy, up close and personal.

Many Winnipeggers’ basic needs were not being met. Their cupboards were empty before the end of the month and they relied on Harvest to bridge the growing gap in their “lifestyles.” I watched in dismay as many middle-class families morphed overnight into the working poor. For the first time, I got to know people who subsisted on social assistance. I learned that poverty is not a character defect. And I found a community of caring people.

The last acceptable prejudice in Canada is poor-bashing. Oh, we’ll give you a handout, but don’t expect it to be sufficient. After all, we don’t want you to get “too comfortable” and abandon the Protestant work ethic for a life of “leisure.” And woe unto you if you supplement your meagre handout by working under the table — your paternalistic government operates a phone line so your neighbours can dutifully rat you out.

It’s now 13 years later and nothing has changed. Welfare rates still hover far below the state-designated poverty line. Shocking research data released last month by the National Council of Welfare reveals that the Manitoba government currently offers the lowly average sum of $5,792 a year to a single employable adult, or $13,103 to a single parent with one child.

In 1989, according to Winnipeg’s Social Planning Council, 22.5 per cent of Manitoba children lived in low-income families. That was the same year the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion to end child poverty.

In 2002, the rate had shifted down slightly to 20.8 per cent. In Manitoba, the single, employable person on social assistance earns 20 per cent of the average income. A single parent with one child earns 37 per cent of the average income. But just be thankful you’re not a single parent on welfare in Alberta — you’d be living at 48 per cent of the poverty line. And if you’re on welfare, the feds allow provinces to claw back the child tax credit they initially offered to help reduce child poverty in the first place.

As for Ottawa, it seems that our current federal bureaucracy has all but turned its back on low-income and unemployed Canadians, hoarding the $45 billion-plus Employment Insurance fund. Why not allow recipients to collect 100 per cent of their previous earnings instead of the current 60 per cent?

Canadians are now supposedly in an economic boom period, but many — especially the 1.7 million who rely on social assistance to get by — would disagree. The money has not trickled down. Inflation has crippled their buying power. Only 20 per cent of Canadians have profited from the boom in the last four years. That means 80 per cent of us are officially downwardly mobile.

Some of this is the result of the economy’s “jobless recovery.” For others, it’s a sudden illness that creates prolonged unemployment and a need for social assistance. Bankruptcy defeats many families who face starting over again in mid-career. The untimely death of a breadwinner can leave young children in poverty. A botched relocation, or a downturn in your employment sector, can mean a perilous decline in living standards. As I’ve learned first-hand, no one is immune to economic downshifts.

Why is it, then, that we tolerate such poor public policy when it comes to our shrinking social safety-net? Now, more than ever, Canadian families need to know that they won’t be poor, homeless or devastated by a job loss or serious illness. If you’re self-employed in Canada, as I am, you don’t even qualify for EI benefits, so entrepreneurship means you’re really on your own. You’re still expected to pay taxes, but you’re working without a net.

Welcome to the New Economy, or as U.S. journalist Bill Moyers called it, a new age of Social Darwinism. Not since the gilded era of greedy American robber-barons has the gap between rich and poor in America been so wide. Canadian scholar John Ralston Saul analyzed this trend, pronouncing globalization a colossal failure.

I’d like to see Paul Martin and his fat-cat cabinet try and live on social assistance for just one week. Or, like the brave and somewhat crazy writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, live with the homeless for a year. His moving account of life in Toronto’s Tent City, Down to This, could have been titled “Shake Hands with the Homeless.”

The Darwinian New Economy means that many of us are now much closer to being ” down and out” than we were in the optimistic ’70s. Although growing in numbers, low-income people are still largely invisible to other Canadians unless you live near a poor neighbourhood, volunteer at a food bank, or happen to accidentally shop at Wal-Mart on Cheque Day.

What kind of workable solutions are there to this dilemma?

  • Fund more subsidized housing so that rent doesn’t eat up the food budget.
  • Demand that our provincial governments stop clawing back the federal tax credit given to poor families. (Manitoba doesn’t practise this punitive policy, but many other provinces still do.)
  • Support local social service agencies with our time and our donations.
  • And offer all Canadians a guaranteed annual income (GAI) and a dignified standard of living so that low-income people won’t be stigmatized for being on welfare — and so we’re all protected should things go from bad to worse.

A 1994 study by Human Resources Development Canada found that a GAI would actually be cheaper and easier to administer than the current system, and would permit a quicker adjustment to changing economic circumstances. It would eliminate the limitations on the receipt of benefits and provide a better incentive to obtain work. (In Ontario, welfare recipients must currently meet 800 requirements in order to qualify for assistance. In Manitoba, an applicant must liquidate all assets before they qualify for help.)

Finally, we can lobby our MPs and MLAs and push for a better standard of living for all Canadians.