Megan Mitton speaks during Green Party Facebook panel
New Brunswick Green Party MLA Megan Mitton says that although the COVID-19 pandemic has created new problems, it has also exposed some that already exist.
“Now more than ever there is a need to de-couple labour from income and ensure that everyone’s basic needs are met through a Guaranteed Liveable Income,” Mitton, who represents the provincial riding of Memramcook-Tantramar, said Tuesday night during an hour-long Green Party panel discussion on Facebook.
She pointed to the $2,000 per month that people, who have been forced to stop working because of COVID-19, are eligible to receive under the federal Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB).
Mitton echoed a point that provincial Green Party leader David Coon made earlier about the $537 per month that single welfare recipients receive in New Brunswick.
“CERB has been essentially establishing new benchmarks for what minimum incomes could be,” she said. “So, $2,000 a month is needed, I guess, to support someone — that’s what the government is essentially saying as a minimum stopgap — and yet people have been expected to live on much, much less.”
Mitton added that aside from the $537 monthly income that single welfare recipients get, other New Brunswick workers have also been earning much less than the $2,000 federal benchmark.
On April 1, the provincial minimum wage increased to $11.70 per hour, a rate that gives someone working a 40-hour week a weekly income of $468 or $1,872 every four weeks.
‘Corporate tax dodgers’
MLA Megan Mitton
“While these gaps and cracks in our society are being exposed,” Mitton said, “we have corporations and the extremely wealthy who are actually in some cases profiting from the pandemic, and we have corporations who are registered in tax havens and they’re going to be able to access bailout money here in Canada.”
She added that the federal government should follow other countries in not allowing such corporations to receive emergency funds.
“These companies have actively been avoiding paying taxes in our country and contributing to the public good and our public services,” Mitton said. “We need to, at this moment, ensure that progressive ideas and that investments in public services and liveable income and wages are the policies that are solidified and we need to hold corporations accountable.”
Mitton said that after the pandemic, the province needs to resist neo-liberal policies that emphasize deregulation and privatization as outlined in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
“We need to ensure the opposite of that happens,” Mitton added. “We need to make sure we are taking care of people and that we stop letting tax dodgers off the hook.”
Mitton did not mention the Irving family by name, but according to Financial Post columnist Diane Francis, K.C. Irving pioneered corporate tax avoidance in 1972 when he moved to Bermuda.
“Since then a large chunk of an entire Canadian province has been owned by a series of trusts worth billions of dollars that don’t pay Canadian taxes,” Francis wrote in 2016.
This is the first in a two-part series about the Green Party panel discussion on Facebook.
So assuming now she thinks that someone drawing welfare is entitled to the same wage as a person who is working? Why would anyone want to work doing any job that paid same as welfare? Maybe without welfare we wouldn’t need to import foreign workers to do jobs that we can’t seem to find anyone to do. I think that the government is trying to spend the economy from completely folding during this pandemic. but using this as a forum to give people more money to never work is a slippery slope.