Canada’s poor

Canadians are jet-setting once again because of a healthy economy and a strong Canadian dollar. The second quarter of this year saw Canadians spending over $5.9 billion on foreign travel, nearly $1.8 billion more than the total amount spent by foreigners in the country during the same period. A lot of Canadians traveled to Mexico, Dominican Republic, Australia, the UK and Hong Kong.

The number of American visitors to Canada decreased along with the number of visitors from the Asia-Pacific region but the number of Canadians traveling within their own country had a healthy increase which helped offset the decline in international travel.

Filipino Vancouverites who regularly remit money in the Philippines are greatly impressed with the new and fast services offered by the recently-opened Metro Remittance Centre Inc. on Fraser St. Being an affiliate of Metrobank Philippines is another advantage. We can now get quicker and reliable notices of remittance through Metrobank’s Remittance text alert service. This is definitely a competitive edge in the business and the others will have to upgrade their services to survive.

There are just too many polls in Canada and they sometimes conjure conflicting, confusing images and perceptions. Take British Columbia, for example, which was proclaimed by a recent poll as the "happy province". The poll showed that 66% of the residents are very happy, employed, with good environment and housing and content across the entire province. When asked what aspects of life make them happy, 50% named family, friends, career and good health.

Married life, sadly came last for feeling happy. The happiest respondents trended to be 55 years of age or over. And what are the other factors to make us happier?

• To have inner peace and to have material wealth.

• To have people say you are funny or say you are smart.

• To be rich and to be thin.

• To be handsome/beautiful or be successful in one’s career.

On the downside, a new poll reported that British Columbia has the largest share of working poor in Canada. The working poverty category used the Market Basket Measure (MBM), a definition of poverty based on the annual cost of basic goods like food, clothing, and shelter in different Canadian cities. Based on the figures, Greater Vancouver is the second-most expensive city to live in after Greater Toronto. The biggest difference between Vancouver and other major cities is the high cost of housing.

Most working poor are paid well above minimum wage — the average is $12 an hour. For new immigrants from third world countries, the pay is not bad at all. But many are supporting an entire family or they are single parents or their spouse don’t work.

Other findings about the working poor:

• The working poor work just as hard as anybody else. The average worker in poverty work 2,090 hours of work per year, a bit higher than the 2,050 of an average worker above poverty line.

• A six-year period study showed that a worker in poverty spent an average of three years in the job before moving on to a better paying job.

Vancouver’s Latin American Film Festival is celebrating its fourth successful year. It allowed us to enter the world of a growing and colorful ethnic group in the province. There’s about 19,000 Spanish speaking Latin-American Canadians in Greater Vancouver. Many came as refugees during the Central American civil wars and as skilled workers. It is a fascinating and well-organized festival and this year five of the major films explore the international theme of migration, very similar to what’s happening in the Philippines.

The best I have seen was Al Otro Lado (To the Other Side), a Mexican film with a collection of heart-warming stories about families left behind in Mexico, Cuba and Morocco when the fathers emigrate for work in another country in search of a better standard of living. The countries represented are Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Cuba, Costa Rica, Chile. It is a wonderful life to live in a multi-cultural country.