Development & Aid, Headlines, North America, Population

SOCIETY: Canada Finds More Poor with New Measure

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Jun 10 2003 (IPS) - Because of dramatic cuts to social programmes, Canada is in danger of going down the U.S. road of rich-poor polarisation and increased disparities in income based on ethnicity and race, says John Anderson, an economist and the vice president of research at the Ottawa-based Canadian Council on Social Development.

Among the people most affected are recent immigrants, many of who come from east and south Asia and are well educated. Some have complained of discrimination by employers and the self-governing professions, including doctors, engineers and pharmacists, which refuse to recognise foreign credentials.

”We are telling people that this is a great land of opportunity, but in fact we are unable to deliver,” says Anderson.

That is the sort of analysis that conservative groups like the Fraser Institute think tank hoped to end when they asked the federal government in Ottawa to develop a new measure of poverty that would present a more ”realistic” picture (one the groups assumed would reveal fewer poor people).

Instead, according to the just released Market Basket Measure (MBM), 13.1 per cent of Canadians are poor (after taxes are paid), a jump from the 10.9 per cent that government agency Statistics Canada had calculated using the previous complex and much criticised measure.

But officials from another government department, Human Resources Development Canada and Ontario (the largest province in Canada, which has led in chopping social assistance benefits) insist that the new measure is not an ”official” measurement of poverty.

Poverty measurement is ”so subjective”, says Christine Bujold, a spokeswoman for the Ontario Ministry of Social Services. “(MBM) is just one of many tools; I don’t think there is a 100 per cent way to measure this sort of thing.”

One critic calls that an ”Orwellian” twist of language. The MBM, says social policy analyst Richard Shillington, was specifically developed to assess the impact of the national child tax credit programme that Ottawa created to try and counter the slew of cutbacks by federal and provincial governments. The credit ”is an anti-poverty programme”, he adds, so the new measure must be gauging poverty.

It also appears to have a better handle on what people spend in their local community on essentials like food, shelter, transportation and clothing, Shillington told IPS, while the previous poverty measure was based primarily on income.

Among its other findings, Statistics Canada discovered that the rate of poverty for children living in immigrant families and whose parents arrived in Canada in the past 10 years was 39 per cent during the 1990s.

Anderson says a series of political decisions at the national and provincial levels during the 1990s had a particularly negative impact on immigrants, women, indigenous people and youth. These include frozen welfare rates and minimum wage rates, cuts to assisted housing, inadequate childcare, a weakened public health care system and the tightening of eligibility requirements for unemployment insurance (now ”Employment Insurance”) and retraining allowances for laid-off workers.

The only major social initiative undertaken by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and his Liberal party government after almost 10 years in office was the national child tax credit, designed to assist low-income families, he adds. But many provincial governments, which run their own welfare systems, ”claw back” or tax all or part of the credit that goes to families on welfare, says Anderson.

All of the cuts leave the country ill prepared for the economic downturn coming in the next several months, predicts Kevin Hayes, an economist with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC).

Hayes blames the following factors for the impending end to the current economic boom: weaker auto, airline and aerospace manufacturing sectors; a higher Canadian dollar that has raised the prices of products and services exported to the United States (almost 90 per cent of Canadian trade is with its southern neighbour) and the scare surrounding severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and mad cow disease.

Many workers laid off from Toronto-area hotels and restaurants because of SARS and the downturn in the tourism trade, cannot qualify for Employment Insurance benefits or training allowances because of the complex hours and regionally based eligibility rules that discriminate against part-time and casual work, added Hayes in an interview.

”Even if unemployment suddenly surged, there are not a lot of people who would be covered because of the way that the rules work.” ***** +Canadian Council on Social Development http://www.ccsd.ca/pr/2003/censusincome.htm) +Canadian Labour Congress (http://action.web.ca/home/clcpolcy/en_issues.shtml?cat_name=Unemployment+Insurance)

(END/IPS)