Jagrup Brar, MLA for Surrey Fleetwood, will follow in the footsteps of late MLA and B.C. Lions player Emery Barnes by going on welfare in the new year to raise awareness of poverty in B.C.
Brar said he will live on $610 for the month of January in an effort to gain a "first experience" of how an estimated 180,000 British Columbians live.
The time will be divided between Surrey and Vancouver, said Brar. Full details are still being worked out, but Jean Swanson of Raise the Rates, the organization that issued the challenge to the province's MLAs in May, said Brar will likely stay in shelters and/or a low-rent rooms.
Given that he's an MLA, Swanson said Brar will go to work one day out of the week and, if he so chooses, visit his family once a week as well. Raise the Rates is paying the $610 and Brar will continue to collect his pay as an MLA.
"I want to live exactly the same life, as close as (I can, to) their lives," said Brar at Monday press conference in Surrey.
"To experience that life and listen to their stories and share those stories with the people of British Columbia. I have a dream to bring positive change and to bring some hope to the most vulnerable people in B.C."
In 1986, Emery Barnes lived for a month in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside on $350.
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