Wild Ginger Writing

By: Sam Smith For Metro Published on Mon Oct 24 2016

If there was one lesson for volunteers who participated in the Welfare Food Challenge — a week-long annual experiment which officially ended Sunday — it’s that living off of $18 for a week’s supply of food is not, well, fair.

“$18 a week is dangerous,” DJ Larkin, lawyer and campaigner for Pivot Legal Society, told Metro in an interview.

This year was the first Larkin took part in the annual initiative, which asks participants to eat as if they only have the $610-a-month allowance a single person in B.C. who has no recognized disability receives from the government.

Of that amount, participants deducted $479 for rent to simulate the average monthly rent for a single-residence occupancy (SRO) hotel room in the Downtown Eastside. A further $25 is deducted for phone use, since recipients are expected to be seeking work. Another $20 for a damage deposit, and a final $10 for personal hygiene.

No budget was allowed for transportation, however.

“I knew what it would be like to concentrate — to get things done — when you’re that hungry,” Larkin said. “But to viscerally feel it makes a huge difference.

“The idea that I could work at the same level, to function, to express myself clearly when I’m that hungry is not possible. After two weeks of this I wouldn’t be able to work. I would stop functioning.”

At one point, Larkin recalled, she was taking a ferry to Victoria and stared down at her dinner for that day: half an undressed potato, and one egg.

She couldn’t handle it.

“So I went into the BC Ferries cafeteria and I ‘liberated’ some of their salt and pepper and ketchup,” she admitted. “I did it dressed like a middle-class, white lawyer; I got a couple of sideways glances from the BC Ferries staff, but they didn’t ask me to leave, and I have to wonder if I got away with it because I look middle class.

“It was amazing how fast I started to feel like, ‘I need another way to survive. This isn’t enough,’” she added, arguing that the government needs to step in and double what the province’s current income assistance is.

New Democrat MP Jenny Kwan echoed Larkin’s experiences at an event on Sunday at Vancouver City Hall to close this year’s Welfare Food Challenge. But for the Vancouver East politician, the experiment went awry after just four days.

It was, she confessed, a “rough week” after she became sick on Wednesday and was forced to spend roughly $17 on medication, digging into her meager food budget.

That’s a luxury, she said, people who actually live on $18-a-week simply couldn’t afford.
“At the end of this press conference my challenge ends,” Kwan said. “But for other people — some 185,000 British Columbians — it doesn’t end.”

Kwan ended her speech calling on Justin Trudeau to come up with a national plan to end poverty.