Social Activists and Poverty

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Chris Sarlo

The days of social action groups and individuals dominating the social policy agenda in Canada are over. One need look no further than their credu- lity-straining claims regarding poverty for evidence that their sun is setting.

There are now over 5 million Canadians living in poverty, according to the National Council of Welfare, a government-created, social policy think tank. This means that fully one-sixth of all Canadians is impoverished. One sixth! The rate of poverty, we are told, is higher now than it was 20 years ago. In addition, one-fifth of all Canadian children live in poverty, according to the same source. But what are they using as a poverty line? They use Statistics Canada's Low-Income Cut-Offs (LICO) as poverty lines, despite the fact that Statistics Canada has issued repeated disclaimers that the LICO are not poverty lines and were never intended as such.

The Low-Income Cut-Offs are simply not credible as poverty lines. They are too high to be reasonable as poverty lines. Does anyone who has any understanding of the costs of living in Canada really believe that a family of four in a major Canadian city (Edmonton, let us say) requires an income of $33,000 to escape poverty? Or that a single person (perhaps a college student or a pensioner) needs almost $17,000 to avoid impoverishment? The LICO lines are also purely relative because they move up with rising living standards. Yet social action groups and individuals, apparently oblivious to any of this, continue to forge ahead confidently telling Canadians that poverty in Canada is a crisis.

It seems that both the federal and provincial governments are more than a little annoyed with the preposterous claims of the social action establishment. The federal government has put literally tens of billions of dollars into anti-poverty programs in recent years (the child tax credit/benefit, for example) and are justifiably puzzled to be informed that rather than falling, poverty in general and child poverty in particular, are actually rising. Across the board, provincial governments are told that the amounts that welfare recipients get are "abysmally low" because they are well below the "poverty line" (the LICO lines). Indeed, the provincial governments are continually ridiculed by social activists for their "mean-spirited" welfare rates which fall many thousands of dollars below the LICO. The provinces, I have been told, view the LICO lines as a joke. No one takes them seriously. It has been widely publicized that a federal-provincial task force is currently working on a market basket poverty line that would more realistically reflect what poverty means.

There seems to be a denial among social action types about the criticism of the LICO lines being used as poverty measures. They have simply not acknowledged the imposing weaknesses besetting their relative indicator, and have continued to foist their flawed statistics on an increasingly sceptical public. Often, social activists will use ad hominem arguments when faced with criticism rather than dealing with the critique.

More recently, a common response by social action groups to the challenge of alternative poverty lines is to say something like: "Why are we spending our time arguing about statistics and definitions when so many Canadians are increasingly poor?" In other words, "I already know what the truth is. Why should I allow any questioning of my basic assumptions or definitions?" The social activist's trump card is to maintain that the critics lack compassion. The critics just don't care about the poor. Those of us who dare to critically evaluate the basis for most current poverty claims should be ashamed of ourselves, evidently.

This is not the way to conduct a credible analysis of an important social and economic issue. Incredibly, no one has ever bothered to investigate in a scientific way the manner in which those at the very bottom of the income scale live. Despite the social activists' confident claims that there is a poverty crisis in this country, we don't know if most of these people are hungry. We don't know the extent to which they are deprived. The fact is that we know very little about the nature of poverty in Canada.

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