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Leadership is still missing in action in Canada’s war on poverty

I was stirred into sadness last week when I started to read the 112-page federal report Canada’s First Poverty Reduction Strategy . The data about distress drained me. I was infuriated by the time I concluded it.
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I was stirred into sadness last week when I started to read the 112-page federal report Canada’s First Poverty Reduction Strategy. The data about distress drained me.

I was infuriated by the time I concluded it. The picture of a poor-yet-rich country is so dire, the prescription so lacking and the pretension about addressing it so laden with conceit that I wanted to holler at the computer screen.

Incredible. Here we are, thick of the summer, the dog days in which governments bury news as a nuisance, declaring the extraordinary goal of a “country without poverty.” Were that to happen, it would be the signature accomplishment of any government since Confederation.

But I ask: if this is a serious war to wage and win, where was the plan, the inspiring call to action, and in particular, where was our prime minister? Why send a junior minister, with no strategy, in the dead of the heat, to express the insulting aspiration of a 20% reduction by 2020, a 50% reduction by 2030?

The government’s moon             shot lacks even the blueprint to build the rocket. This is a matter of ready, aim and we will one day tell you how we are figuring out how to fire. It is a signal cruelty to those suffering.

For the unfortunate record, the report concludes one in eight Canadians lives in what we now officiously call “income poverty.” Well done, bureaucracy, finally in 2018 there is now a financial definition of what it is to be poor. Pat your backs.

In Vancouver’s case, it means a family of two adults and two children whose household income totals about $40,000 a year for clothing, transportation, food, shelter and the other necessities. It’s a few thousand dollars less in rural and smaller-town British Columbia. Cut those totals in half for the poverty line for a single person.

And, yes, there are more expensive places and slightly higher cutoff points for poverty in Canada, like Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa, small- and medium-sized towns in Alberta, even small-town Newfoundland.

If you can afford to subscribe to this newspaper or even log on with your costly broadband connection to this website, you are very likely in a world apart from those in income poverty.

I grew up in that other world and thankfully escaped it, even if the hunger pang never leaves your memory. The optimist in many believes the people who wrote the report could not have occupied it, for in good conscience no one who has would have permitted poverty’s description without the prescription.

What we got, after three years in government, was a status report on substandard life. Our map forward has a destination but no route.

Governments deflect poverty reduction like a goalie deflects shots into the corner, an inconvenience to be studied early in a mandate and (to mix my sports metaphors) punted down the field or to be made a latent priority in its deathbed repentance phase.

Justin Trudeau’s strategy seems to be: we’re on it, poor people, see you after the next election, you now know who to vote for.

We have known enough about poverty to do enough about it for as long as I have lived, but it does not rank as an important goal because it is not a politically rewarding one. The financial re-engineering is formidable to effect meaningful change, so it is easier to fiddle at the margins – and last week’s report does little to disturb that view.

Like our city’s well-known and critiqued plan to end homelessness, the target of a country without poverty is a hollow hope that only compounds the trauma of a life without enough money.

If there is a whiff of how government will get us there, buried in its report was a pledge to create yet another advisory council on poverty and a law – a law, no less – “to entrench the targets.” How it can fulfil that is even a magician’s guess, but then again, in politics if you say something often enough, you can believe it to be true.

Our province will weigh in with its poverty reduction plan in the next few weeks. Bring your teeth, please. •

Kirk LaPointe is editor-in-chief of Business in Vancouver Media Group and vice-president, editorial, of Glacier Media.