Arbeitslosenselbsthilfe O l d e n b u r g
Kaiserstr. 19
D-26122 Oldenburg (Oldenburg)
Absender : kenpat@ns.sympatico.ca (Ken Summers) Org.-Empf. : psn@csf.colorado.edu Weiterleiter owner-psn@csf.colorado.edu Betreff : Canada/US poverty rates Datum : Fr 15.05.98, 22:08 (erhalten: 17.05.98) Groesse : 2645 Bytes ----------------------------------------------------------------------
JoAnne Roulston refers to Canadian "cuts to social programs of all kinds in recent years (by all levels of government)". I thought I would expand a bit for Americans: one important program is unemployment insurance which is national and Canada, and which was until recently much easier to qualify for in Canada. The numbers who drop over the edge from not qualifying continues to increase long after regulation changes took effect.
Also the variety of transfer programs have always meant that the poorest in Canada derive a higher proportion of their total incomes from transfer payments of one kind or another. So when those are decreased, the effect in Canada is more dramatic.
There is also a time factor involved: in Canada we are still relatively early in the turning of the vice. There is also the time difference in the economies: poverty rates [and unemployment levels] began to drop in the US a few years after the economy began improving. In Canada we are only a little over a year into that kind of improvement. But there are a lot of reasons to doubt whether several years of "recovery" will result here in a decline in poverty [not to mention that economic improvement here comes several years after improvement in the US, while a downturn is transmitted immediately].
There MAY be political reasons that to think that the increase in poverty rates will last fewer years here than in the US: the public seems to favour some kind of a pull back from the nasty cutting [though health care comes first here and is far more expensive than income maintenance programs]. But with the current fragmentation of Canadian politics it is hard to tell where this is going.
One interesting comparison is that in Canada poverty has always been first of all a rural and regional phenomena [our inner cities have only had decay, not decades of utter collapse]... but we are seeing an increase in inner city poverty, I think for the first time. Joanne Roulston would know more and might comment on this, but I get the sense that there is good reason to fear that this is just the beginning of the kind of extreme and obvious polarization in the US that we have so far missed out on.
But just in case someone is inclined to think that the comparison of rates might indicate something must be positive with US welfare policies.... If you severely beat a dog, but stop short of killing it, it is bound to eventually show signs of improvement.
Ken Summers
Minasville, Nova Scotia
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Last Modified: July 1998