ONTARIO, THE POVERTY CAPITAL
The proportion of Ontarians living in low-income rose a scandalous 26 per cent from 2003 to 2016. No other province even comes close to performing that badly. Most provinces actually made significantly progress in terms of people moving out of lowincome situations: the rate of low-income incidence fell in every province except Ontario and Prince Edward Island between 2003 and 2016.
As a result, the latest Statistics Canada data show that in 2016, the percentage of Ontarians living in low-income exceeded the national average for the fifth straight year. This was despite the fact that in 2003, only 10.9 per cent of Ontarians lived in low-income, well below the national average of 13.2 per cent at the time.
If we look at the statistics for children, the numbers are even worse for Ontario. From 2003 to 2016, the proportion of Ontarians under the age of 18 living in low-income rose from 13.3 per cent to 16.2 per cent. Meanwhile children elsewhere in Canada fared much better, with the low-income incidence rate nationwide falling from 16.1 per cent to 14.0 per cent over the same period.
Ontarians are struggling to get by, even as people living in other provinces are progressing out of lowincome situations and bad provincial policy is surely to blame, given how poorly Ontario contrasts with nearly every other province. And it’s not just incomes that have been battered down by Liberal government policies: the 2016 Hunger Report by the Ontario Association of Food Banks contained a special feature on “energy poverty,” describing how Ontarians were suffering from “the rapidly increasing cost of hydro,” created by the Ontario Liberals’ “green” restructuring of the electricity grid.
People living in poor households and in rural areas are hit hardest by high hydro bills. “Ontario’s food banks are seeing an increase in the number of clients who say that they simply cannot keep up with their rising hydro bills,” the report warned. To compound the problem, food banks “with limited budgets are finding it increasingly difficult to pay the monthly hydro bill as well.”
Of course, there’s a connection between those rising expenses and people losing income. The food bank association noted that “food bank use began to skyrocket” as a result of the province bleeding manufacturing jobs, an unhappy result from the same bad Liberal policies. A study by energy economists Ross McKitrick and Elmira Aliakbari found that from 2008 to 2015, Ontario’s reckless energy policy was responsible for killing 75,000 manufacturing jobs.
Even when the Ontario government is claiming to help the poor, they are doing more harm than good. The best example is the Liberals aggressive increases to the minimum wage. A study published in 2014 by a government-sponsored think tank (which was established by Ontario’s Liberal McGuinty government in 2012), concluded that the “Canadian evidence is more in agreement that minimum wages have no effect on reducing poverty and may even exacerbate poverty slightly.”
Morley Gunderson, a labour economist at the University of Toronto and author of the study, wrote that increasing “minimum wages results in greater unemployment, and unemployment reduces total family income, pushing more families into poverty or making those who were already poor, worse off.”
When Ontario’s Liberal government announced last year that the minimum wage would be hiked from $11.40 to $15, the province’s Financial Accountability Office predicted 50,000 job losses, and its analysis labelled the minimum wage as both an inefficient and ineffective tool for reducing poverty. Other estimates were even gloomier: TD Bank predicted 80,000 to 90,000 jobs would be destroyed, while National Bank estimated 124,000 jobs would be lost.
As Ontario restaurants have already had to raise prices to deal with the minimum wage hike, another cycle promoting poverty continues. In addition to making food more expensive for poor families, the sure result of more expensive restaurant meals is that fewer meals will be sold. If fewer meals are sold, then there will be fewer restaurant workers with jobs. These are the same workers the Liberals claim to be helping with their policies.
THE PERCENTAGE OF ONTARIANS LIVING IN LOW-INCOME EXCEEDED THE NATIONAL AVERAGE FOR THE FIFTH STRAIGHT YEAR.