A small group of advocates rallied at Victoria-Beacon Hill MLA Grace Lore’s office to exhort the provincial government to “raise the rates” of disability benefits for recipients reduced to living in legislated poverty at the peak of a housing crisis that shuts them out of market rentals, or even subsidised housing.

This modest rally was called forth by Kim Hynes of LLEOHN, a collective of people with lived experience of homelessness. I counted nine participants at peak attendance, although more would have joined if the event hadn’t been called on a workday or had been announced days ahead instead. But the organiser cared little about turnout, only about getting the message out.

We could have used a larger crowd. But while the cause draws overwhelming consensus, disabled people are difficult to mobilise.

Reporter Sidney Coles of the Capital Daily covered the event. She attempted to talk to the MLA office’s staff, who were not available for comment; reportedly they are available by appointment only on Thursdays and Fridays, especially when protesters picket at their front door demanding something be done about poverty in their circumscription. In any case, Grace Lore has a reputation to be largely inaccessible to her constituents.

Welcome to the least welcoming government office in town.

While market rents have gone down slightly across the country as of late, they remain obscenely high in Victoria, at more than two thousand dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment. Even meagre subsidies condemn people living on disability benefits to abject poverty, especially since the shelter allowance for a single person is stuck at five hundred dollars a month, a paltry sum in contrast to market rates. That leaves many homeless people moving into rental units set up to fail as they spend nearly a hundred percent of their monthly allowance on rent, making them entirely dependent on food banks and charitable donations just to survive.

The group marched across downtown to the sardonically-named Ministry of Social Development and Poverty Reduction on the notorious 900-block of Pandora Avenue, among dozens of unhoused residents fenced off sidewalks and green spaces while unable to climb up the ladder to supportive or subsidised housing for lack of affordability, arguably the main drive of the housing crisis along with scarcity of available units. The Ministry has announced in March its target to reduce poverty in half in the next ten years, as usual with a timetable that will leave the next administration to blame for its predictable failure as the promised rate hikes fail to materialise.