Poverty in Ontario

Jon sent along this link to a Toronto Star article, with the comment that "this cannot be a Toronto Star editorial!" It is rather surprising to find that paper taking a such a careful stance on this notoriously hot-button issue:

Tempting as it may be for social activists to portray the poor in romanticized terms, it is not the basis for sound public policy. That is one of the lessons that emerges from a three-year study of 40 lower-income families struggling to survive in Ontario in the late '90s. The final report, entitled Telling Tales: Living the Effects of Public Policy, was released yesterday.

It is a useful antidote to a lot of the fuzzy thinking, academic theorizing and simplistic analysis that goes on in the social policy field.

The first quoted paragraph is already enough to have me checking the date, to ensure that it's not an April 1st story. But it gets more interesting still:

Not surprisingly, they found that almost none of their subjects moved up the socio-economic ladder. Even those who found work slipped back into poverty over the course of the study.

But there were surprises in the reams of data the researchers collected.

One was that a job — long considered the mainstay of a household's survival — actually plays a fairly limited role in keeping low-income families afloat. Participants cobbled together income from a variety of sources, got help from relatives and friends and depended on social supports such as subsidized housing and food banks. If any of these lifelines snapped, they were in crisis.

In other words, having raised a couple of generations of Canadians who accept and are perfectly comfortable with the concept of being dependent on others, there are now significant numbers of low-income families who are totally dependent on others for their necessities of life. The plight of those individuals and families when circumstances change is desperate indeed: they have no other resources to draw upon.

A second eye-opener was that people who have been cruelly stereotyped often do the same thing to others. It didn't take long for some of the study's participants to display racist, sexist, anti-immigrant and homophobic attitudes.

This one flabbergasted me. I grew up in relatively low-income areas, and it was far more common to hear all sorts of attitudes that — even for that time and place — were significantly more intolerant than would be acceptable in the wider society. I don't know whether the surprise is greater for the researchers or for the reporter, but clearly one or both are less familiar with life in poorer areas of town than they should be.

A third finding that caught them off-guard was that sole-support mothers don't want the government to hound "deadbeat" dads. Experience has taught them that these policies don't work, infuriate their former spouses and place them and their children in danger.

Another "duh" finding, but perhaps I should be happy that they were willing to publish it: it's certainly true that the current emphasis of the courts — punishing most or all non-custodial fathers pre-emptively — is a disaster for the very people who are supposed to benefit, the custodial parent and the children themselves.

Finally, the authors discovered to their dismay that most of the training programs offered by Ottawa and Queen's Park are totally out of synch with today's job market. They are designed to deal with brief interruptions in employment. Yet most of the participants in the study had never known — and never expected to know — steady work. They juggled two or three minimum-wage jobs or hired themselves out through temp agencies. The last thing they needed were courses in résumé writing or job-search techniques.

The Canadian government has been moving towards more private solutions to the unemployment and job-retraining areas, but the problem seems to be that public-service inertia transfers to the private firm, rather than initiative and task-orientation transferring to the public sector. This is typical of the kind of "privatization" governments tend to prefer: block transferring a job to a sole-supplier who is partly or wholly bound by pre-existing public service rules.