Liberals aim low with their latest anti-poverty plan

The past 50 years of social policy in Canada reflect a history of missed opportunities to use our shared wealth to put an end to poverty. And two examples stand out — both in terms of their potential for transformative change, and their ultimate failure for political reasons.

The Mincome project, conducted among small target populations in Manitoba in the 1970s, remains one of the world’s most important experiments with a basic income. But changes in the provincial and federal governments resulted in the program being scrapped, and its research — which showed the basic income to be a stunning success — gathered dust for decades before resurfacing in recent years.

And the 1989 unanimous agreement in Canada’s Parliament to end child poverty by the year 2000 offered a powerful combination of an unambiguously desirable goal and all-party agreement to its pursuit. But the Chretien/ Martin Liberals chose to focus first on deficits, then on tax cuts, at the expense of people’s well-being. The scourge of child poverty actually grew, while poverty generally has received short shrift as a federal policy priority.

This week, the latest Liberal government unveiled a poverty reduction strategy of sorts — hinting at the possibility the moral impetus to elevate people out of poverty might lead to action. But there’s a real danger the strategy has been set up to fail.

Part of the problem lies in the Liberals’ glaring lack of ambition. Where it was once possible to achieve agreement on eradicating child poverty in 11 years, they’ve now set only targets to reduce poverty in general (along with other related problems) over a period of 12 years — meaning that a substantial level of continued poverty is being treated as an acceptable end result.

Even worse, the Liberals’ announcement didn’t include any new programs or funding, hinting at a lack of willingness to move beyond lip service to meaningful action.

To be fair, there are elements of the Liberals’ plan which offer steps in the right direction.

The anticipated development of an official poverty line may offer an improved frame of reference to measure the problem of poverty and the effectiveness of programs to combat it. An advisory council should ensure at least some continued attention to the issue.

And while we shouldn’t accept poverty or chronic homelessness at a level above zero, it’s better to have set some reduction targets than to merely accept their persistence at current or even higher levels — as far too many governments have been willing to do.

But as should be evident from Doug Ford’s knee-jerk cancellation of Ontario’s recent basic income pilot project, a small-scale research framework divorced from widespread improvement in people’s lives is easily dismantled by a future government which simply doesn’t care to help people in poverty. And the fact that Ford has relented somewhat only in terms of the direct impact on participants — not in completing the underlying study — confirms what should be obvious.

While a system of consultations, targets and measurements is important in ensuring the success of investments in poverty elimination, it will be highly vulnerable to the political winds unless it’s paired with high-impact and widespread investments which can earn public support.

Unfortunately, the primary lesson the Liberals seem to have taken from the missed opportunities of the past is to aim lower and deliver less, rather than to make sure their investment matches the scale and importance of the problem of poverty. And that increases the risk that the new strategy will prove to be just one more entry in the list of failures.

Even worse, the Liberals’ announcement didn’t include new programs or funding.