The hard-working face of poverty

The National Council of Welfare has released its most recent annual report, suggesting that not only is one full-time job insufficient to keep a lot of families out of poverty, but even two falls short of the mark in a large number of cases:

A job, even two, is no guarantee against poverty, indicates a new report, which notes one-quarter of poor families in Canada have a breadwinner who works full time.

"Employment is vital to avoiding poverty, yet, many jobs do not pay enough to keep a family out of poverty," the National Council of Welfare says in its latest annual report on poverty in Canada for the year 2003.

Even having two earners in a family is not always enough to lift a family above the poverty line, the federal advisory council says, noting 6.2 per cent of two-earner families were living below the poverty line.

Of course, since the report is discussed is in a CanWest article, there's bound to be some attempt to pretend that government can't do anything to help the situation. And sure enough:

Meanwhile, the report also notes that despite the impact of government transfers and income taxes the gap in after-tax incomes between rich and poor has widened.

Since 1980, the average income of the poorest 20 per cent of Canadians has, after discounting inflation, increased by four per cent to $12,000 while that of the richest 20 per cent has surged 14 per cent to $105,800.

It shouldn't have taken too much research to determine that the gap could easily be explained by decreasing government involvement via the mid-90s cutbacks and ensuing anti-tax fixation. But far easier to pretend that "government transfers and income taxes" have stayed constant yet failed to alleviate the hardships facing low-income workers.

Of course, that type of obfuscation is needed to try to pretend there's no available answer to a situation which all but the most extreme right-wing theorist would recognize to be a problem. It's painfully clear that many Canadians are indeed working extremely hard and playing by the rules, and still facing life below the poverty line as their reward. And that shouldn't be an acceptable outcome regardless of one's political stripe.

Update: The C.D. Howe Institute, meanwhile, is criticizing Canadians who don't want to pull up stakes and race to where the jobs are, with no apparent regard for the fact that the areas booming most also have severe housing and infrastructure shortages which could eat into any employment income in a hurry.