Poverty In Canada

For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada's neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health. Silver also highlights the ways in which poverty is intimately connected to colonialism and racial and gender discrimination, and finds that the political and economic policies enacted by the Canadian government serve only a powerful minority, while producing a range of negative outcomes for the rest of us, especially the poor. Silver points out that the costs of poverty -- relating to health care, crime, education and unemployment -- are higher than the costs of solving poverty, and he lays out an achievable strategy for its dramatic reduction in Canada. When poverty is understood as resulting from political choices, its elimination requires putting pressure on governments to ensure that different choices are made.

In the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War and an international decolonization movement, development advocates believed that poverty could be ended, at home and abroad. The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada explores the relationship between poverty, democracy, and development during this remarkable period. Will Langford analyzes three Canadian development programs that unfolded on local, regional, and international scales. He reveals the interconnections of anti-poverty activism carried out by the Company of Young Canadians among Métis in northern Alberta and francophones in Montreal, by the Cape Breton Development Corporation, and by Canadian University Service Overseas in Tanzania. In dialogue with the New Left, liberal reformers committed to development programs they believed would empower the poor to confront their own poverty and thereby foster a more meaningful democracy. However, democracy and development proved to be fundamentally contested, and development programs stopped short of amending capitalist social relations and the inequalities they engendered. The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada explores how Canadians engaged in informal and formal politics in the course of their everyday lives, locally and transnationally. Langford provides an enduring record of otherwise fleeting anti-poverty programs and their effects: the lived activism and opinions of development workers and ordinary people.

The " Fact Book on Poverty " clearly indicates certain groups in our society are especially vulnerable to poverty. They include the old, the long-term unemployed, and female heads of households.

Now in its third edition, this comprehensive text provides an in-depth examination of poverty and its impact on the health and quality of life of Canadians. Considering a broad range of topics, Dennis Raphael covers the central issues of defining and measuring poverty; situational and societal causes of poverty; health and social implications for individuals, communities, and society as a whole; and the means of reducing poverty’s incidence through public policy action. Poverty in Canada will foster greater insight into the repercussions of poverty throughout society, encouraging readers to reflect on provocative questions at the end of each chapter. Well updated to reflect current statistics and recent public policy changes, this new edition explores why specific groups of Canadians are over-represented amongst those living in poverty and provides a more developed analysis of the barriers to reducing poverty, including economic globalization and the increased power and influence of the corporate sector under neo liberalism. Emphasizing the lived experiences of poverty, this interdisciplinary volume is a valuable resource to those studying or working in health studies, social work, sociology, and equity studies.

Poverty in Canada is on the rise, particularly among certain groups. While in developing countries poverty may affect much of the population, in a more developed country such as Canada it is largely restricted to specific groups. Such groups are often excluded from full participation in our social and economic institutions. There are many factors behind this lack of wealth and opportunity; addressing the phenomenon of poverty can be a complicated matter. Government demographer and lecturer Raghubar D. Sharma provides the first concise discussion of the specific groups that are affected by poverty, including the elderly, ethnic poverty, child poverty, and the "working poor." Chapters focus on these groups and explore the circumstances behind their exclusion. Sharma also looks into a larger trend behind the rise of poverty: a massive economic transformation akin to the Industrial Revolution of the early 1700s has been underway since the 1980s. This phenomenon of "globalization" is elim

At the time of this study's publication in 1984, 26 per cent--2.3 million--Canadian households lived below the poverty line; over 100,000 families subsisted on less than $5000 a year; social assistance rates provided about half of what a family required to survive. Not Enough: The Meaning and Measurement of Poverty in Canada, the report of a national task force on poverty, asserts that "serious deprivation does exist in Canada." Not Enough provides a range of detailed information, charts and graphs dealing with the extent, depth and length of poverty in Canada in the 1980s. The report is especially attentive to the regional distribution of poverty, to its increasing "feminization", and to the difficulties disabled people face maintaining their dignity in the face of chronically restricted budgets. Not Enough is a detailed snapshot of the recent past of a crippling social problem that remains with us today.