Category: Blog

  This post is a work in progress - comments welcome! Poverty is a rare concept in that it is moral, economic, statistical, and personal all at once. It can be counted, described, and lived — but never fully captured by a single definition. Four things over the long haul keep you out of income poverty: Get a job – any job – and keep it Get a good partner and keep them Get training and/or education until you get certified in something that’s needed; and Make sure you chose your parents wisely (unserious but true) Over time, different thinkers have tried to explain what causes poverty and how to solve it. Some look at personal capacity, others at economic structures, others at social isolation or the mental strain of…

The Roadmap for Income security Reform is still available online here . It is archived. Perhaps that's symbolic. The story of Ontario’s social assistance system is not one of inadequacy alone — it is a story of bad design. The tragedy is not only that people receive too little to live on, but that the architecture of income and rent programs has quietly decayed. Rules that once made sense have been left to atrophy. Exemptions, formulas, and categories that should have evolved with the economy - prices and wages - have in some instances stayed frozen for decades. We now have a system that produces even more poverty than inadequate benefits would normally predict. A System Frozen in Time Consider three simple examples. A single person on Ontario Disability Support…

Every week for 18 years, through Meals on Wheels, I met older adults who were determined to live in their own homes for as long as possible. Others I met came to my seminars on low income retirement. Their houses are full of memories: wedding photos, children’s drawings, a worn chair by a window that still looks out on a tree they planted fifty years ago. For them, leaving that space felt like giving up the last piece of independence they had left. We should respect that feeling. But we should also be honest about what it costs — and what it risks. The dream of aging in place For years, “aging in place” has been an almost unchallenged ideal of seniors policy in Canada. Advocacy groups, health agencies, and…

When I talk with low-income retirees, one theme comes up over and over again.People want certainty. They want to know how much money they’ll have for the rest of their lives — not a guess, not a maybe — a number they can count on. It’s easy to understand why. For people who have lived through unpredictable jobs, changing benefits, or health scares, certainty is a kind of peace. It’s the feeling of standing on solid ground after a lifetime of shifting floors. But there’s one fact that makes financial planning after 65 unlike any other kind of planning: none of us know how long we’ll live. And even if we could find out, most of us would rather not know the date of departure from the Planet. That makes…

The Federal Court’s decision in Leclerc v. Canada is one of hundreds of small-dollar pandemic benefit cases still winding through the justice system more than 5 years after the pandemic began. Like many others, it deals with a modest sum — a few thousand dollars in CERB or CRB payments — but by the time the government and the courts are finished, the public will have spent more on the litigation than the benefit was ever worth. This is not justice. It’s arithmetic gone wrong. The arithmetic of negative returns When the Department of Justice and the Canada Revenue Agency pursue a case all the way to judgment, the public cost is substantial. Once you add counsel time, CRA and ESDC preparation, court staff, registrars, translation, and expert work, each…

When I ask Ontario Works recipients what they think welfare investigators looked for during the “fraud sweeps” of the 1930s, they almost always guess right: owning a radio, a telephone, or a working automobile. They understand instinctively that poverty surveillance has never really been about catching fraudulent activity. It has been about defining the boundary between those entitled to connect and those entitled only to survive. Significantly, when I ask friends and colleagues the same question about disentitlement in the 1930’s, they seldom guess radios, telephones or automobiles. It shows that the public is separated not just from low income people but from the logic and rules of the world low income people live in. As historian Margaret Little documented in “No Car, No Radio, No Liquor Permit”, single mothers…

Some years ago. I attended a series of focus groups where the question for participants was:  “What should one do to escape poverty?” I sat on a chair on the other side of a two way mirror. I have told this story before. The people ushered into the room to discuss the question were selected  by a genius. They looked exactly like the same people you would see on a subway car: old, young, various ethnicities, widely varying dress and deportment, well to do, not so well to do. When they heard the question for discussion, they clearly hadn’t heard what would be asked. Most looked startled. Most looked like they had never ever considered the question. They looked at each other in silence. But once they got going, each…

Workforce development has become a cornerstone of social and economic policy. Across Canada, governments and community agencies have embraced it as a way to connect jobseekers with employers, reduce unemployment, and close skills gaps. Done well, it bridges education, training, and industry need — preparing people for work and helping businesses fill vacancies. It’s an appealing model: identify what employers want, train people to meet those needs, and match the two sides. The logic is tidy and the results can be tangible. Workforce-development programs have helped thousands of people build credentials, re-enter the labour market, and stabilize their lives. But beneath that success lies a quiet assumption — that the employer side of the labour market already works perfectly. That jobs are available, fairly paid, and accessible to anyone who…

On November 4, 2025, we will see Mark Carney’s first federal Budget — one that, if rumours hold, will bear the earmarks of austerity. It will be described as “responsible,” “fiscally disciplined,” and “focused on productivity.” But those adjectives tell us little about whether the Budget will do what matters most in human terms: whether it will reduce poverty, secure incomes, and make life less precarious for millions of Canadians. Carney, of all people, understands that money is never just arithmetic. In Values: Building a Better World for All, he wrote that markets and morals are intertwined — that societies fail when price displaces value, and when we forget that economic growth has meaning only if it enhances dignity and opportunity. Carney understood that a changing world and international imperatives…

Across Canada, food banks consistently call on governments to ramp up income supports, social policy and structural measures so that fewer people are forced to rely on charitable food assistance. For example, Food Banks Canada emphasizes that rising food‐bank usage signals a broken safety net and demands stronger public policy. Yet strikingly, one major stakeholder in the food system is rarely asked to step up: the large food-processing, retail, agricultural/assembly and distribution firms (which we might label the “PRAD” sector). Of the 40 billionaire families in Canada, eleven of them have fortunes of over $4 billion (at least 4,000 million dollars) made in whole or in part from food - and this does not count those that made their fortunes in hospitality that includes food somewhere along the way - another…