A B.C. MLA will learn what it's like to be unemployed after accepting a challenge to live on the province's welfare rate of $610 a month for a single person.
Poverty advocacy group Raise the Rates issued the dare in an open letter to B.C.'s 85 MLAs in May, but the challenge was largely ignored.
After months of discussion, organizer Bill Hopwood says New Democrat Jagrup Brar has accepted, and will live on the welfare rate for the month of January.
The Surrey-Fleetwood MLA, who has volunteered to provide services to youth, seniors, new Canadians and the homeless, said he will collect bottles and panhandle if he has to.
There are currently more than 180,000 people on welfare in the province, according to Ministry of Social Development statistics, indicating what Hopwood calls a fundamental problem.
"Twenty-nine years ago, for example, food banks were established in B.C. as a temporary measure. Twenty-nine years later we still have them and they feed thousands of people."
The challenge follows in the footsteps of former B.C. New Democrat MLA Emery Barnes, who lived on welfare for seven weeks in the Downtown Eastside in 1986.
He came away from the experience calling for a welfare rate of $700 a month, which amounts to more than $1,270 today when adjusted for inflation.
Hopwood also points to the First Call BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition's recently released annual report on child poverty, which ranked B.C. the worst in Canada for the eighth straight year.
The proportion of B.C. children living in poverty rose from 14.5 per cent in 2008 to 16.4 per cent in 2009, according to the report.
The Raise the Rates group has five demands for government: increase minimum wage to $12 per hour, build 2,000 units of affordable non-market housing per year, increase taxes on those earning more than $250,000, remove barriers to receiving assistance and increase welfare rates.
