I recently received a letter from the Government of Alberta regarding my own letter about the Civil Enforcement Act. Much to my dismay, the government appears not to have considered anything I wrote seriously, as they basically just re-phrased my own words. Essentially, they said that the Civil Enforcement Act does *not* create extreme poverty in Canada because it includes exemptions from what creditors are able to take from someone owing money. Of course, nothing could be farther from the truth.
In essence, the act says that if there is a judgment against you, creditors must leave you with a minimum of 800 dollars to live and 200 for dependents (there are other exemptions for property like clothing, etc.). But in my mind, that's outrageous. If you had a salary of 60,000 dollars, for instance, this legislation essentially says that they can take up to 84 percent of your income. That's allowing you to live on 16 percent of your hard earned salary! And the more you make, the greater the fall as percentages are incremental. To put it another way, if you were working for your 800 dollars, that would be a wage of 5 dollars an hour. The minimum wage is around 9 dollars an hour. The poverty line is around 18,000 dollars per year. You would be making 9,000 annually.
My complaint to my government is that it's unclear why legislation allows such exorbitant amounts to be taken from a person. A much more fair legislation would try to balance people's contractual obligations with ensuring that people live with dignity outside of poverty so that perhaps no more than 15 percent of a person's income (in total of all their debts) could go to paying debts. This would ease the burden placed upon services like food banks and homeless shelters as people most certainly would need some kind of assistance if they saw themselves plummet from a 60,000 dollar income to 5 dollars an hour. Dependents would also benefit as 200 dollars for a person is nothing in today's economy. It would also take into account the fact that many times people enter into debt for reasons outside of their control--an education, the rising costs of living, unexpected costs of caring for another or repairing property. As it stands, legislation doesn't begin to take these sorts of things into account. It is clearly biased towards greedy corporations.
Most infuriating is that while people continue to support organizations that supposedly fight poverty--the United Way, the Red Cross, food banks, homeless shelters, welfare services--nothing has yet been done to reform a law that can make you extremely poor with the declaration of a judge. If you're going to leave people with a minimum, make it something substantial, not something that's an insult to anyone with the slightest intelligence.
