The BC office of the CCPA released today a major study about life on welfare for the poorest of the poor. It tracked a cohort of welfare recipients for two years and tells the tales of how they have interacted with a nasty and mean-spirited welfare system, and also the challenges they face as people in getting and holding work […]
Read moreYesterday, I attended the Poverty Olympics, held in the heart of the Downtown Eastside, aka Canada’s poorest neighbourhood. It was a wonderful few hours of well-orchestrated political satire. There were opening and closing ceremonies, a torch ceremony, a new mascot (Itchy the bedbug), and of course, events (the poverty line high jump, the welfare hurdles, the broad jump over bedbug-infested […]
Read more“Targets and timelines” is the new mantra for anti-poverty activists, and increasingly, governments. When it comes to climate change, taking it seriously means setting goals and deadlines to meet them, a process now underway, if perhaps too slowly. The same is true for poverty reduction. If we are serious about eradicating poverty (say, over the course of a generation) we […]
Read moreI’ve posted below a link to a column in the Guardian by Polly Toynbee re the child poverty target in the UK. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2225566,00.html If you follow the comments below her column, it is striking how the response from the right precisely matches the recent discourse in Canada and comes with the same manifest untruths (eg that relative poverty must always […]
Read moreMy recent paper that found the top 1% of earners actually pay slightly lower tax rates than the bottom 10%, and much less than those in the middle- to upper-middle range, seems to have touched a nerve with my proposal that the rich actually pay more in taxes. For the defenseless and concerned wealthy out there, worry not, because Randall […]
Read moreA dispatch from PEF member (and essay contest winner!) Nick Falvo in Toronto: Just last week, the United Way of Greater Toronto released a report entitled “Losing Ground: The Persistent Growth Of Family Poverty In Canada’s Largest City.” Some of the findings are very disturbing. -After-tax median family income in Toronto is $41,500 ($6,100 less than in 1990, in constant […]
Read moreJohn Myles (University of Toronto) points out that his research on the decline of poverty among lone mothers, cited by Richards, shows that “soft love†(day care in Quebec) probably has the biggest “social policy effect.†He notes that “tough love†does “workâ€Â in the following sense. Cut other cash benefits to the bone and employment levels among lone mothers […]
Read moreI was a friend of John Richards many years back, in the late 70s, when we shared a common passion for prairie left populism. He’s a bright guy, and a great writer. What bugs me is that he is still treated as a progressive by the media – based on his very brief history as an NDP Saskatchewan MLA in […]
Read moreOne of my colleagues likes to say, “if you throw a rock in a barn and hear a squeal, you know you’ve hit a pig.” So it goes with a National Post column attacking my tax incidence paper. I guess my study caught their attention, though I feel like I really deserved a rebuttal from a first-line player like His […]
Read moreHere’s a really useful commentary from the Caledon Institute on the substance of the Liberal poverty reduction plan, especially emphasising its timidity in terms of reversing the ill thought- out Conservative changes to child benefits. They share my view that we need a better poverty target.  http://www.caledoninst.org/Publications/PDF/659ENG%2Epdf
Read moreI’m a big fan of setting clear and attainable targets and timetables to eliminate poverty, and applaud last week’s Liberal Party commitment to reduce the number of those living in poverty by 30% and the numbers of children living in poverty by 50% within 5 years. http://www.liberal.ca/story_13293_e.aspx Clear targets and timetables have recently been called for by the National Council […]
Read moreYay, we’re winning the war on poverty, says Margaret Wente. Her recent column is based around the fact that the poverty rate has fallen in recent years. Wente uses this to go on a latte-fuelled SUV romp over the bodies of people who work with (and give a shit about) the poorest in our society. The sum total of statistics […]
Read moreA dispatch from Nick Falvo, the winner of the undergraduate prize in the 2007 PEF essay contest. Nick works for Street Health in Toronto, and speaks to a newly released report: In 1992, Street Health conducted a groundbreaking research study on homeless people’s health and access to health care. The updated 2007 study finds that the shocking rates of violence, […]
Read moreMy office window looks out over Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area notorious for being Canada’s poorest postal code. Back when Vancouver was awarded the 2010 Olympics, we pointed out that the world’s media would be stationed just ten minutes walk away from truly abject poverty, and when the cameras started rolling, it may not be gorgeous mountain backdrops they would […]
Read moreHuman Resources and Social Development Canada have posted a research report http://www.hrsdc.gc.ca/en/publications_resources/research/categories/inclusion/2007/sp_680_05_07_e/sp_680_05_07e.pdf It is no secret or surprise that new immigrants (86% of whom are workers of colour) face more significant labour market barriers than other working-age Canadians, and that they are at greater risk of experiencing poverty. But more empirical detail is always useful. This study uses StatsCan (SLID) […]
Read moreOn Monday, Ontario’s Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity released a paper entitled, Prosperity, Inequality, and Poverty. As Andrew Sharpe pointed out in a review of Jack Mintz’s book, free-market “policy entrepreneurs” often completely ignore the distributional consequences of their recommendations. The Institute deserves credit for trying to grapple with distributional issues (and also for quoting Sharpe extensively). The Institute observes […]
Read moreThe August issue of the Journal of Primary Prevention is dedicated to articles on homelessness, addictions and mental illness. It has a US focus but many of the problems will be familiar to Canadians, too. A guest editorial (pdf) kicks off the issue by scoping out the problem, with a good summary of studies on the hidden financial costs to […]
Read moreSome sobering data from the Canadian Community Health Survey http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/surveill/nutrition/commun/income_food_sec-sec_alim_e.html#lex It is recognized that “food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.” (Food and Agriculture Organization 1996). This report reflects the characteristics of food […]
Read moreare high, according to a new report, summarized by Gordon Laird in the Toronto Star: According to a new report from the Sheldon Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership, Shelter: Homelessness in a Growth Economy, homelessness is costing Canadian taxpayers $4.5 billion to $6 billion a year. Canada in 2007 collectively spends more managing homelessness than it spends on international […]
Read moreWhile William Watson and Margaret Wente are shrugging their shoulders at growing inequality in Canada, and endorsing policies that would make our income distribution more like that of our southern neighbour, concerns in the US about rising inequality are actually getting a better hearing. An example is the following article in Business Week (The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies’ audacious […]
Read moreLAUREL ROTHMAN AND ARMINE YALNIZYAN Special to Globe and Mail Update May 8, 2007 at 12:37 AM EDT Canada‘s child and family poverty rate is down to 11.7 per cent in the latest Statistics Canada report, released last week. So why aren’t anti-poverty activists breaking out the bubbly? Because that rate is exactly what it was in 1989, when parliamentarians […]
Read moreCrawl Across the Ocean, which has infrequent but excellent posts, features an amusing and accurate critique of the Fraser Institute’s “Consumer Tax Index.† MORE (April 29): In particular, this critique points out that the political right defines “essential” very narrowly when measuring poverty or railing about taxes, but very broadly when limiting the right to strike.
Read moreThe annual G8 meetings often result in a group hug (aka the “summit declaration). Much of the time, when the goals are laudable, they fail to achieve the desired result, as Sachs comments below on the MDGs, or they misrepresent what they are doing in the first place (remember the 2000 release that “ended” third world debt?). The Millennium Development […]
Read moreThe story below was the banner headline piece on page one of today’s Vancouver Sun, and is a perfect choice for the “we told you so” file. Three years ago, after being awarded the 2010 Olympics, our BC Solutions Budget (and in subsequent editions) made many of the same points as the Olympics Housing Roundtable’s soon-to-be-released report. This report, and […]
Read moreThere is an astonishingly large underclass in the world’s richest nation: Gov’t estimates 754,000 homeless people By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press The nation has three-quarters of a million homeless people, filling emergency shelters through the year and spilling into special seasonal shelters in the coldest months, the government said Wednesday. The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimated there were […]
Read moreThis story in the Star points at (another) re-announcement of the Working Income Tax Benefit (WITB), a Canadian version of the US Earned Income Tax Credit first announced by then-finance minister Ralph Goodale in his economic and fiscal update prior to the last election. In the 2006 federal budget, the Tories announced they were continuing with the WITB, due to […]
Read moreVancouver is suffering from a plague of poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, mental health issues and crime. The good news is that all of these are inter-related, and that senior governments have the funds to make a difference. So with the Olympics coming is just three years, the political culture of neglect is showing signs of activism. Vancouver’s Mayor Sam Sullivan […]
Read moreAs Marc noted, the Toronto Star is waging a journalistic “war on poverty”. The editorial in Monday’s National Post chastised “The Toronto Star’s poverty scam” for using the Low-Income Cut-Off, a relative measure, as an indicator of poverty. Today’s National Post includes the following letter from yours truly: In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith, the founder of free-market economics, wrote, […]
Read moreThe latest from the Toronto Star “war on poverty” series. Here is David Olive: A constant state of dread TheStar.com – News – A constant state of dread If the poor weren’t so conveniently invisible, maybe we’d come to our moral senses and devise a national strategy for eliminating poverty. But the one in six Canadians trapped in poverty […]
Read morePhilosopher Peter Singer asks what the super-rich should give in order to reduce global poverty. Drawing on Piketty and Saez, Singer finds that doing the right thing would barely be noticeable to their standard of living. From New York Times Magazine: What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You? By PETER SINGER December 17, 2006 The rich … […]
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