BC Alliance Tackles Housing and Basic Income at Budget 2022 Consultations
/On September 21, the BC Alliance for Arts + Culture addressed the Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services, as part of the committee’s consultations on Budget 2022. In his remarks, our Interim Executive Director, Howard Jang, stressed the need for affordable housing and universal basic income programs. We’ve reproduced Howard’s speech for you below.
Good morning and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you on behalf of the BC Alliance for Arts + Culture, which represents over 480 arts organizations and individual artists around the province.
My name is Howard Jang and am of Asian descent and fourth generation British Columbian.
I would like to take a moment to express my gratitude for the privilege of working on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations – and acknowledge their role, and the role their ancestors played, in stewarding this land over thousands of years.
First off, I want to thank you for your additional investment of $21M in the BC Arts Council announced a year ago and last March a $14M fund for resilience supplements over this very challenging year. The fact that this government recognizes the important role that arts, culture and creativity play in everyday lives of British Columbians sends a hopeful message to our sector – a sector that has been labouring for decades to be sustainable. We are so very grateful that the contribution we make to society is being acknowledged by this government.
It would be an understatement to say the past 18 months have been the most disruptive in modern history, and continue to be.
It is also widely understood that the arts and cultural sector will be one of the last that will begin to consider entering a recovery period.
In terms of recovery, we’ve been using the phrase for several months now that there’s ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, but I would certainly say that the light we see at the end of that tunnel is so different than the light that we entered in on. We aren’t sure what the environment is going to look like.
Excuse the analogy, particularly here in BC, but it feels like we have been hit by an earthquake and we are trying to rebuild from the ash and rubble. We know that we must rebuild to become earthquake proof.
We did some recent polling of our sector, and the concerns are very consistent:
Uncertainty in identifying sustainable operating models
Developing the trust to return to live events and gatherings
We need to rebuild with and goal of re-growth, re-emergence, and sustainability.
Our single most pressing issue is how our current models of funding can respond to the growing needs of artists, audiences, and communities as we move toward the new light of greater social, racial, and environmental activism in our work and presentations. The arts hold up a mirror of our world while also pointing the way forward.
Ford Foundation President Darren Walker says, “You know, the arts create empathy, and without empathy, you cannot have justice.”
This much we know: if you were to ask an artist how much money they earn, they will tell you in terms of monthly income, not annual, because making ends meet is their most pressing issue.
I would like to focus your attention on two aspects of the infrastructure that is universal to our whole ecosystem, and particularly troubling for the arts and cultural sector, and those are housing and basic income.
Here are the housing challenges:
The lack of appropriate government funding to invest in social rented homes;
the lack of skills or capacity in housing departments to build new homes;
the dramatic reduction in the supply of social and genuinely affordable housing through policies such as the Right to Buy;
the lack of effective regulation in the private rented sector;
the high costs of renting and home ownership;
the poor quality of some homes in both the social and private rented sectors and how this affects the well-being of tenants;
and the effects of housing benefit cuts on vulnerable people who struggle to meet their housing costs.
This is the state of our world.
As for basic income:
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit, which provided $2,000 per month in guaranteed income. Along with the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy, which subsidized employee wages for eligible businesses, the CERB provided temporary security and relief from the stress of losing work, something a large portion of the country’s population (some 5.5 million people) experienced when COVID hit.
The fact that the government was able to provide this emergency support so quickly, and with few bureaucratic hurdles for applicants, proves that what is often deemed impossible is actually not: expanding the social security net to include more people and to offer genuine support instead of crumbs.
While CERB was the closest Canada has come to a federal basic income program, it still left many out, and was dependent on meeting a previous employment threshold. People who had earned under $5,000 in 2019 were ineligible, along with those who had been unemployed before the pandemic or were coming off EI or parental leave.
This is where basic income differs. Basic income programs are not tied to employment, and, unlike welfare and disability assistance, they do not require constant monitoring to determine eligibility and deservingness.
Addressing the housing and income crisis will advance the recovery period for our sector which, as I have said, is last in line.
I know this is a big ask and beyond the scope of a direct request for the arts and cultural sector. But this is an unusual time, and we need to think creatively and broadly for the good of the whole.
Thank you for your time.
