Getting Real On Poverty

Helping Canada’s poor means setting realistic goals with benchmarks to measure success against.

Whether they are on the right, left, or in the centre, every political party will tell you that poverty is one of their top priorities. The “market is always right” folks on the right believe that strong, unfettered markets will cure poverty by fostering economic growth that, in turn, creates jobs. In a healthy free market, the logic goes, there will be jobs available for all people able to work. Government assistance should be reserved only for those few who are unable to work due to medical, mental, or family circumstances.

The left, meanwhile, believes that government intervention is the best way to deal with poverty. If the government would just create new programs, build more social housing, increase funding to non-profits, hire more social workers, and keep spending money, poverty will be cured. Largely missing in this approach is the private sector, which is viewed with suspicion as a contributor to poverty, not a partner in its eradication.

As far as I can see, neither of these approaches has ever worked in the past, nor provides a realistic answer today. It seems likely that for any anti-poverty strategy to succeed, it must strike a balance between carefully targeted government intervention and market action. Governments and the private sector must work together if a practical, effective anti-poverty program is to be designed and implemented.

While I have no easy answer to such a complex problem, I would like to help frame the discussion by putting forward the following observations:

First, poverty is a multi-headed monster that will not be eliminated by any single strategy. The problem of street people, for example, is as much a mental health or substance abuse issue as it is an economic one. The working poor are the byproduct of economic forces, coupled with a mélange of educational, linguistic, and immigration issues. Child poverty is closely related to family poverty, which in turn can be affected by culture, education, or other factors. Eradicating poverty means finding ways to effectively address all of its root causes.

Second, as Mr. Layton noted in his article earlier this month, child poverty is perhaps our most serious concern. Dealing with it means we also must deal with families. This raises a number of serious questions: Is simply handing out money to poor families the answer, or should there be conditions attached? Are we willing to require that recipients of assistance learn parenting and nutrition strategies, or take employment training? Will we place time limits on support? How far are we willing to intrude into people’s lives? These questions and others must be researched, examined, and debated before we can implement an approach that serves the needs of both the poor and our society.

Third, government anti-poverty programs have traditionally been long on good intentions but short on meaningful performance metrics. They tend to have as their legacy a self-perpetuating “culture of poverty,” complete with a growing body of multi-generational dependent families serviced by an increasingly costly social service bureaucracy. In this world, people can eke out a living working the system instead of a job. And the system itself has built-in incentives for single-parent families and disincentives for two-parent households.

Fourth, a successful anti-poverty initiative must be comprehensive and client focused. Each case must be individually assessed and a custom solution devised that will move the client closer to self-sufficiency. A solution could include income supplements for the working poor, education, job or social skills upgrading, housing assistance and rent supplements, day care, parenting skills development, or whatever other resources are needed. Success in each case will come when a client no longer needs support, or where this is clearly impossible, when the minimum amount of social assistance is needed to keep the client out of poverty.

Finally, it will probably be impossible to eradicate poverty without significantly higher taxes and a radical reengineering of our social service and educational systems. We will have to throw out some programs, introduce new ones, and rethink how we coordinate service delivery. Do Canadians have the will to tolerate such a disruptive transformation? Are governments willing to embrace changes that will mean a seismic shift in what they do and how they do it? Will the social services sector, which has long been relatively free of clearly defined goals and meaningful measures of success, embrace a tighter approach to management?

Poverty is a complex and systematic problem. To fight it, our goals must be realistic. Whatever anti-poverty strategy we decide on must have clear-cut objectives and defined benchmarks for measuring success. Without realistic metrics and accountability throughout any programs we initiate, it is likely that we will end up with yet another bloated, self-perpetuating bureaucracy.