Poverty and Policy in Canada

Paper Summary:

This paper asserts that Canada's public policy towards poverty is failing miserably. To underscore this point, time is devoted to looking at what it means to be poor in the Toronto of 2007 (and, by extension, what it means to poor in Canada), who is suffering most, what Canada is doing to large numbers of its children, and what factors - particularly politically and socially - are thwarting efforts to get poverty back on the public agenda. Finally, with the bleak picture painted for all to see, the paper concludes by looking at some options that might reduce a social pox that threatens to grow worse, not better, in the years ahead. It contends that in the end, an educated and engaged citizenry is needed, capable of turning the political process back over to the people and away from self-interested elites.

From the Paper:

"Poverty in Canada is measured in many ways - which may explain why we have yet to come up with a really unified means of dealing with it. As it stands, Canada has three primary measures of poverty: the Low Income Cut-offs or LICOs, the Low-Income Measure, and the Market Basket Measure (Raphael, 37). Of the various Low-Income Cut-Offs the government has at its disposal, the pre-tax LICOs seem to be the most efficacious at assessing poverty rates - mostly, it seems, because the post-tax measures are widely perceived by poverty rights advocates as artificially lowering the poverty rate in this country so that government negligence is less apparent (Raphael, 41)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Raphael, Dennis. Poverty and Policy in Canada: Implications for Health and Quality of Life. Canada: Canadian Scholar's Press, 2007.

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