There’s no sure-fire way to get your voice heard at Queen’s Park. But buying a table at one of the Premier’s fundraising dinners is probably a good place to start.

Which explains why the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty never seems to have much luck influencing Premier Ernie Eves.

With a meagre budget raised from public donations, OCAP has to rely on less pricey ways to get its message across. And these ways don’t seem nearly as effective.

This has always been a problem for the poor, who can’t afford dinner, let alone spin doctors, image consultants and think tanks.

But the problem has become particularly acute in the last decade as a virulent pro-rich, anti-poor bias — parading as an economic theory — has infected both our federal and provincial governments.

Nowhere has this been truer than in Ontario where the newly elected Conservatives promptly slashed welfare payments by more than 20 per cent in 1995.

How does one fight back when one has just lost one-fifth of one’s income, is already poor and suddenly no longer has a phone or a room to answer it in?

When poor-bashing was a fresh, new thing, it was at least considered a hot story by the media. Cabinet ministers were grilled about it, reporters lived for days on a typical welfare diet in order to write first-person accounts of what it’s like to feel hungry.

But the novelty is now gone.

Cabinet ministers shrug off questions about the poor, knowing the media have lost interest (no new angle). Reporters no longer write firsthand accounts about what it’s like to feel hungry (pretty much the same as before.) Media interest has moved on.

But the poor haven’t moved on, nor has OCAP, which has become a front-line resistance movement, run by poor people, for poor people (with two poorly paid organizers).

As the Progressive Conservatives have kept up their attack on the poor — pushing them into boot camps, defunding their services, tightening welfare rules — OCAP has been there for them, helping them fight evictions and deportations and generally championing a cause that, in this glamour-obsessed society, has all the glamour of a Kraft dinner.

It’s this leadership role in organizing resistance among the poor that, one suspects, has made OCAP very unpopular at Queen’s Park.

Government prosecutors are now contemplating whether three OCAP leaders should face a new trial on charges stemming from a Queen’s Park protest three years ago. The judge declared a mistrial in the case last week when the jury was unable to overcome deep divisions in its ranks.

It’s interesting that many poor people were regular middle-class types not long ago, until a serious setback — the death of a spouse, a bout of unemployment, an unwanted pregnancy — got their lives badly off track.

In these sorts of crises, most people turn to family for financial and emotional support. People without such support are obliged to rely on the public system, but increasingly there’s not much of a public system left.

It’s easy to imagine how Kimberly Rogers — pregnant, alone and depressed — ended up committing suicide in her Sudbury apartment while under house arrest for welfare fraud.

OCAP is proposing a different solution for the poor than the one Rogers chose. Rather than succumbing to despair, it urges poor people to fight back against the government’s attempt to take ever more away from them.

And, yes, OCAP has pushed things beyond the normal limits of lobbying — occupying empty buildings and setting up a food counter for the homeless in a public park. But, considering that government cuts have led to homeless people freezing to death, the tactics don’t seem too extreme. (Imagine the rage we’d hear from the Canadian Taxpayers’ Federation if its members were dying grisly deaths because of their tax burdens, rather than just having to forgo bigger SUVs or hot tubs for their cottages.)

Personally I’m impressed by OCAP’s fighting spirit despite the opposition it encounters from Queen’s Park, the financial elite, the police, the courts and much of the media, not to mention all the other problems of coping with poverty.

Eves wants to portray himself as being nicer and more humane than that nasty guy who was premier before him. But Eves hasn’t reversed a single mean-spirited, anti-poor measure put in place when Mike Harris was premier and Eves was — let’s not forget! — finance minister.

In previous times, Ontario premiers actually met with OCAP leaders. But Harris and Eves have sent the police to deal with them instead, saving face time for those who attend fundraising dinners.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...