Now in its third edition, this comprehensive text provides an in-depth examination of poverty and its impact on the health and quality of life of Canadians. Considering a broad range of topics, Dennis Raphael covers the central issues of defining and measuring poverty; situational and societal causes of poverty; health and social implications for individuals, communities, and society as a whole; and the means of reducing poverty’s incidence through public policy action. Poverty in Canada will foster greater insight into the repercussions of poverty throughout society, encouraging readers to reflect on provocative questions at the end of each chapter. Well updated to reflect current statistics and recent public policy changes, this new edition explores why specific groups of Canadians are over-represented amongst those living in poverty and provides a more developed analysis of the barriers to reducing poverty, including economic globalization and the increased power and influence of the corporate sector under neo liberalism. Emphasizing the lived experiences of poverty, this interdisciplinary volume is a valuable resource to those studying or working in health studies, social work, sociology, and equity studies.

For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada's neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health. Silver also highlights the ways in which poverty is intimately connected to colonialism and racial and gender discrimination, and finds that the political and economic policies enacted by the Canadian government serve only a powerful minority, while producing a range of negative outcomes for the rest of us, especially the poor. Silver points out that the costs of poverty -- relating to health care, crime, education and unemployment -- are higher than the costs of solving poverty, and he lays out an achievable strategy for its dramatic reduction in Canada. When poverty is understood as resulting from political choices, its elimination requires putting pressure on governments to ensure that different choices are made.

Poverty and Policy in Canada provides a unique, interdisciplinary perspective on poverty and its importance to the health and quality of life of Canadians. This original volume considers a range of issues that will be of great interest to a variety of audiences - Social Work, Health Sciences, Sociology, Political Science, Policy Studies, Nursing, Education, Psychology, and the general public. Central issues include the definitions of poverty and means of measuring it in wealthy, industrialized nations such as Canada; the causes of poverty - both situational and societal; the health and social implications of poverty for individuals, communities, and society as a whole; and means of addressing the incidence of poverty and improving its effects. Particular emphasis has been placed on the lived experiences of poverty throughout the book. This new book has three, straightforward goals: to provide a range of approaches for understanding poverty and its effects to help readers understand the structural antecedents of poverty - that is, how society and its distribution of resources are the primary determinants of poverty to provide realistic solutions to poverty

Combating Poverty critically analyses the growing divergence between Quebec and other large Canadian provinces in terms of social and labour market policies and their outcomes over the past several decades. While Canada is routinely classified as a single, homogeneous 'liberal market' regime, social and labour market policy falls within provincial jurisdiction resulting in a considerable divergence in policy mixes and outcomes between provinces. This volume offers a detailed survey of social and labour market policies since the early 2000s in Canada's four largest provinces - Ontario, Quebec, British Columbia, and Alberta - showing the full extent to which Canada's major provinces have chosen diverging policy paths. Quebec has succeeded in emulating European and even Nordic social democratic levels of poverty for some groups, while poverty rates and patterns in the other provinces remain close to the high levels characteristic of the North American liberal, market-oriented regime. Combating Poverty provides a unique and timely reflection on the political implications and sustainability of Canada's fragmented welfare state.

Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History traces the history of social policy in Canada from the period of First Nations’ control to the present day, exploring the various ways in which residents of the area known today as Canada have organized themselves to deal with (or to ignore) the needs of the ill, the poor, the elderly, and the young. This book is the first synthesis on social policy in Canada to provide a critical perspective on the evolution of social policy in the country. While earlier work has treated each new social program as a major advance, and reacted with shock to neoliberalism’s attack on social programs, Alvin Finkel demonstrates that right-wing and left-wing forces have always battled to shape social policy in Canada. He argues that the notion of a welfare state consensus in the period after 1945 is misleading, and that the social programs developed before the neoliberal counteroffensive were far less radical than they are sometimes depicted. Social Policy and Practice in Canada: A History begins by exploring the non-state mechanisms employed by First Nations to insure the well-being of their members. It then deals with the role of the Church in New France and of voluntary organizations in British North America in helping the unfortunate. After examining why voluntary organizations gradually gave way to state-controlled programs, the book assesses the evolution of social policy in Canada in a variety of areas, including health care, treatment of the elderly, child care, housing, and poverty.

The strengths and abilities children develop from infancy through adolescence are crucial for their physical, emotional, and cognitive growth, which in turn help them to achieve success in school and to become responsible, economically self-sufficient, and healthy adults. Capable, responsible, and healthy adults are clearly the foundation of a well-functioning and prosperous society, yet America's future is not as secure as it could be because millions of American children live in families with incomes below the poverty line. A wealth of evidence suggests that a lack of adequate economic resources for families with children compromises these children's ability to grow and achieve adult success, hurting them and the broader society. A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty reviews the research on linkages between child poverty and child well-being, and analyzes the poverty-reducing effects of major assistance programs directed at children and families. This report also provides policy and program recommendations for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the United States by half within 10 years.

In the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War and an international decolonization movement, development advocates believed that poverty could be ended, at home and abroad. The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada explores the relationship between poverty, democracy, and development during this remarkable period. Will Langford analyzes three Canadian development programs that unfolded on local, regional, and international scales. He reveals the interconnections of anti-poverty activism carried out by the Company of Young Canadians among Métis in northern Alberta and francophones in Montreal, by the Cape Breton Development Corporation, and by Canadian University Service Overseas in Tanzania. In dialogue with the New Left, liberal reformers committed to development programs they believed would empower the poor to confront their own poverty and thereby foster a more meaningful democracy. However, democracy and development proved to be fundamentally contested, and development programs stopped short of amending capitalist social relations and the inequalities they engendered. The Global Politics of Poverty in Canada explores how Canadians engaged in informal and formal politics in the course of their everyday lives, locally and transnationally. Langford provides an enduring record of otherwise fleeting anti-poverty programs and their effects: the lived activism and opinions of development workers and ordinary people.