Dispatches from the Poverty Line

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

“Those moments. Those life-altering, life-shattering moments. That
instantaneous, permanent reduction from all you were to the little you
are perceived to be. Frail elderly. Downsized. Divorced. Shunted aside.
No longer one of us. A burden.”

Pat Capponi, the author of this description of what it is like to be
forced into the margins of Canadian society, is one of nearly two
million Canadians who in 1997 could not find employment sufficient to
keep themselves above the poverty line. This book is conceived as an
open letter to Mike Harris, Premier of Ontario. Although it chronicles
the suffering of people living in destitution, it is also about what
Mike Harris and Pat Capponi have in common.

Capponi once received a letter from Harris. He sent the letter because
she seemed to be a living embodiment of his neoconservative worldview. A
former mental patient, Capponi had taken herself off welfare to become a
critically acclaimed author and well-paid mental-health-care advocate.
Harris praised her as “someone who has pulled herself up by her
bootstraps.”

In 1995, the funding for Capponi’s advocacy job was canceled by the
newly elected Harris government. Capponi again found herself a
stereotype of the neoconservative worldview, only now she was “too
lazy to work ... a social pariah [who] won’t get off the wagon to help
push.”

In yet another act that Harris would find praiseworthy, Capponi refused
to go on welfare. After her UI benefits ran out, she restricted herself
to one meal a day while writing her book-length open letter to Harris.
At first Capponi’s tone is angry and personal, but as the work
advances, her outlook evolves into a much more complex examination of
the relationship between Canada’s haves and have-nots. The result is
an honest, witty, articulate, and well-informed work, a portrait of
modern Canadian society and of two individuals, Capponi and Harris, with
two very different worldviews. This is a very fine book.