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Cycles and Spaces of Child Poverty in Ontario

Sydney Chapados (Carleton University, Canada)

Sociological Research and Urban Children and Youth

ISBN: 978-1-80117-445-9, eISBN: 978-1-80117-444-2

ISSN: 1537-4661

Publication date: 2 October 2023

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Abstract

In 2009, the Liberal government of Ontario released their first “streamlined” poverty reduction strategy to end child poverty in the province. The strategy was renewed in 2014, and an updated strategy was released in 2021 by the Conservative government of Ontario. Based on ongoing research, this chapter explores how these Poverty reduction strategies mobilize a historical conception of low-income urban environments as threats to child development. I show that, rather than end poverty, these conceptions are used to justify community revitalization efforts that displace low-income populations while prioritizing and benefiting private market investment. Central to these strategies is the figure of the child, who is constructed as innocent and vulnerable, requiring protection and saving from the perils of poverty by middle- and upper-class interventions. The chapter concludes by examining the neoliberal logic that continues to inform the 2021 strategy.

Keywords

Citation

Chapados, S. (2023), "Cycles and Spaces of Child Poverty in Ontario", Berman, R., Albanese, P. and Chen, X. (Ed.) Sociological Research and Urban Children and Youth (Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, Vol. 32), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 139-154. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1537-466120230000032009

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2023 Emerald Publishing Limited

Introduction

In 1989, the Canadian House of Commons unanimously committed to eliminating child poverty by the year 2000. Members of Parliament (MPs) across the political spectrum expressed deep concerns for children living in poverty, including increased exposure to violence, disease, malnutrition, educational failure, mortality, dangerous environments and changing family structures (Canada Parliament, 1989). At the time, in those debates, MPs referenced the recently signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) that granted special rights for children, including Article 27: the right to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development (Canada Parliament, 1989). Despite a lack of consensus on what the solutions to child poverty should be, all agreed that Canada should create a “seamless approach” that addresses poverty-related problems (Canada Parliament, 1989).

As the year 2000 approached in the Canadian province of Ontario, child poverty rates had more than doubled since 1989, representing a 118% increase (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000). At this time, George Smitherman, the Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for the neighborhood and riding of Toronto Centre-Rosedale, lamented how the government was actively creating “ghettos of poor people” as others reprimanded the Ontario government for allowing the cycle of poverty to continue (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000). Then-Premier of Ontario, Mike Harris, responded that his government was using a “different philosophy, one of breaking dependence, one of the dignity of the job, one of the value of work” (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000). However, this “different philosophy” was largely unsuccessful at combating child poverty (Kennedy, 2020; Mackie, 2000). At this time, no explicit strategy had been put in place to address child poverty. Instead of addressing child poverty, the Harris government actually made a 21.6% cut to social assistance in 1995, which resulted in a drastic increase in child poverty rates (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000). Subsequent governments have failed to make up the 21.6% cut that occurred nearly three decades ago (Kennedy, 2020).

Twenty years following the 1989 commitment to end child poverty, Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal provincial government moved forward with an attempt to create Ontario’s first “seamless” strategy to address child poverty under pressure from anti-poverty organizations and significant gaps left by the Canadian federal government (Hudson & Graeffe, 2011). Ontario’s first strategy aimed to reduce child poverty by 25% in five years and outlined interventions in health, education and community (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009).

Despite the 14 years that have passed since the introduction of this document, poverty reduction legislation in 2009, significant dollar investments, and the release of two more provincial Poverty reduction strategies, child poverty in Ontario remains dismal.1 This chapter questions how Ontario’s Poverty reduction strategies have prescribed interventions to address poverty in Ontario. I argue that the first two Poverty reduction strategies (2009, 2014) created by the Liberal government of Ontario mobilize a conception of child poverty as a cultural cycle that is concentrated in what they term high needs and urban communities. The strategies employ a preconception of dangerous urban spaces to make the case that poverty threatens the child’s future and society’s economic outcomes. As I demonstrate below, this approach presents urban spaces as requiring significant reform while justifying government neglect of public systems. The most recent strategy produced by the Doug Ford Conservative government of Ontario in 2021 represents further disinvestment from public infrastructure and community care, as it embraces the neoliberal logic of privatization and individual responsibility to an even greater extent.

In the following sections, I examine how the strategies (2009, 2014) draw on theories and approaches to low-income neighborhoods, child development outcomes and cultures of poverty to construct low-income urban neighborhoods as harmful. I then highlight how the proposed responses to poverty in these strategies have been ineffective in addressing child poverty throughout the province. Finally, I conclude the chapter by considering child poverty today, after 14 years of “streamlined” and “efficient” poverty reduction efforts by the Ontario government, including the most recent strategy released in 2021. While these actions against child poverty are marketed as progressive and “the smart thing to do” (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 1), I argue that they remain complicit in, if not directly contribute to, structures that reproduce or perpetuate child poverty. In unpacking some of the flawed assumptions that make up Ontario’s Poverty reduction strategies, we can move toward other possibilities for addressing child poverty.

Mobilizing a Spatial Framework to Understand Poverty

In a ground-breaking 1987 text, William Julias Wilson documented how poverty was increasingly concentrated in certain spaces in the United States. He argued that concentrated poverty both magnifies and reproduces poverty by creating a distinct “underclass” characterized by crime, welfare dependency, single motherhood and joblessness (Wilson, 1987). Similar trends toward concentration were noted in Canada at this time (Dear & Wolch, 1987; Hajnal, 1995). The spatial framing of poverty and the entrenchment of ideas about the “underclass” have influenced the discursive characterization of low-income neighborhoods as distinctly dangerous, unstable or barren (Wacquant, 2007). Work supporting this understanding of low-income neighborhoods argues that a lack of material resources does not only cause problems for residents. Instead, they document how the physical spaces themselves take on a distinct form that exacerbates problems of poverty (Dear & Wolch, 1987; Wilson, 1987).

Affirming the growing spatial concentration of poverty in Ontario, the United Way (a major Canadian non-governmental organization) released a pivotal report, Poverty by Postal Code, in 2004. This report documented an increase in poor urban neighborhoods in Toronto, Ontario’s most populous city, since the 1980s (which they call “priority neighbourhoods”) (United Way, 2004). The report urges policymakers to understand poverty as a spatial phenomenon and centers on two overarching concerns about low-income neighborhoods. First, living in a poor neighborhood has adverse effects on residents. Second, these neighborhoods can decline further, leading to increases in crime, retreat by residents and businesses and adverse social and economic effects (United Way, 2004). Alongside the general adverse effects of low-income neighborhoods they describe, they ask a crucial question: what does the increase in low-income neighborhoods mean for children and their development? To answer this question, the writers highlight how children and youth growing up in concentrated poverty experience significant stigma, negative peer influence and developmental problems (United Way, 2004), affirming the link between low-income neighborhoods and poor child outcomes in Ontario.

Ontario’s first Poverty reduction strategies draw on the United Way’s (2004) concept of “priority neighbourhoods” from the Poverty by Postal Code report. According to the strategies, strong and healthy communities are crucial to producing strong and healthy children. Inversely, unhealthy communities (priority neighborhoods) produce unhealthy children. The strategies outline their vision of healthy communities:

Where every person has the opportunity to achieve his or her full potential, and contribute to and participate in a prosperous and healthy Ontario. (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 5)

These communities are characterized by good schools, resources, safe play places and opportunities for upward mobility. Children are free from danger, and residents care for their homes and neighbors (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, 2014).

By describing what these strategies seek to create, they also highlight the perceived deficits in these “urban and priority” neighborhoods where “high needs” concentrate. In contrast to healthy communities, these spaces are perceived as places where people do not care for their surroundings, schools are under-resourced or unsafe, community resources are difficult to access and the streets are dangerous. Consequently, children are isolated from positive influence, unhealthy and unable to access upward mobility (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, 2014).

Approaching poverty as a spatial phenomenon is not new. While researchers such as Wilson (1987) have documented a move toward concentrated poverty since the 1970s, concern about urban environments negatively influencing children has a long history. The Canadian social reform movement at the end of the nineteenth century perceived cities as locales of decay where poverty could fester and described the urban slum as a “dark, seething mass of vice” characterized by areas of “poor, unsanitary housing, overcrowded, insufficiently lighted, badly ventilated, with unsanitary and, in many cases, filthy yards” which posed simultaneous threats to the health, prosperity and morality of society (Valverde, 2008, p. 132). Reformers believed that these overcrowded, dark and dirty spaces produced deviance because they exposed children to vice, violence, neglect and disease.

A critical component of the reform movement was child saving, which drew attention to children’s treatment in these spaces. Child-savers expressed significant concern that children raised in deviant environments would be morally corrupt due to parental neglect and influences from the unregulated and dangerous streets (Chen, 2005). Reformers engaged in charity projects where middle- and upper-class people would either visit or move into slums to model appropriate citizenship through productive habits and proper housekeeping (Valverde, 2008). The rationale behind these practices was that cleanliness in one’s physical space was the visible manifestation of purity in one’s body, mind and soul (Valverde, 2008). By cleaning up the physical spaces in which children lived and the moral character of their parents, children would be better positioned to receive proper values and become good adult citizens.

While the social reform movement focused on concerns about children’s moral development and problematizing how they were raised to become deviant adults, current approaches to spatialization resist naming children’s morality as their concern. Instead, they use psychological and neuroscientific language to document how urban neighborhoods impact children’s physical, cognitive and emotional development. For example, the 2009 strategy writes that “the evidence in the area of human development … demonstrates how important it is that our children get off to the very best start possible” and that children in poverty are born “already, a little behind” their peers regarding health and education due to prenatal health (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 8). What is consistent across these depictions of the urban is the significant concern for children’s development and an urgency for middle- and upper-class citizens to intervene in these spaces.

Since the explosion of scientific interest in child development in the twentieth century, low-income environments have been conceptualized as a severe threat to child development. There is an expansive body of scholarly research that links experiences of child poverty and growing up in a poor neighborhood with poor future outcomes (Hertzman & Boyce, 2010; Jackson et al., 2009; Kohen et al., 2002; Minh et al., 2017). Researchers have demonstrated how children who grow up in low-income neighborhoods are more likely to experience malnutrition, poor education, stagnancy, antisocial peer influences, aggressive parenting styles, environmental hazards and victimization, all of which lead to worsened physical, cognitive and emotional development for children (Hertzman & Boyce, 2010; Jackson et al., 2009; Kohen et al., 2002; Minh et al., 2017).

Documenting the significant increase in empirical research that connects neighborhood poverty to developmental outcomes, Minh et al. (2017) argue that this body of research primarily draws on Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) bio-ecological framework of human development. This framework understands child development as a product of sustained interaction between the child and their environment. In this understanding of development, the neighborhood significantly influences children’s development as they grow up and respond to the world around them (Minh et al., 2017). Thus, emerging research that uses this developmental framework consistently reaffirms the link between living in poor neighborhoods and poor developmental outcomes.

The developmental approach to childhood has been problematized by theorists, particularly sociologists of childhood, as it searches for a universal and natural process that all children evolve through to become well-adjusted adults (Lee & Motzkau, 2011). Developmentalism thus collapses every child into one single and alike category that is held up against the same standard, primarily based on middle-class, white, able-bodied, heterosexual and global north norms (Kehily, 2013). Consequently, other ways of being are deemed pathological by developmental research (James & Prout, 1990; Kehily, 2013).

Developmentalism has also been criticized for reinforcing an arbitrary adult/child binary (the idea that adults and children are fundamentally distinct) which contributes to the marginalization of children, as adults are inherently assumed to be more rational and intelligent (Lee, 2001; Qvortrup, 2009). Using a developmental paradigm, childhood is conceptualized as a passive journey toward adulthood and children as incomplete adults-to-be (Lee, 2001; Qvortrup, 2009). What constitutes a good and normal childhood under the developmental paradigm is one that would (supposedly) lead to the best possible outcome in adulthood. The best possible outcome in adulthood is also shaped by political-economic circumstances, where the optimal adult is imagined to be flexible, competitive and rational.

Empirical research on neighborhood poverty and poor childhood development outcomes has received criticism. Van Ham and Manley (2012) have argued that this body of research provides evidence of a link between neighborhood and development outcomes without providing significant explanatory power for how or why this link comes to be. This link comes to operate as a taken-for-granted, scientific fact that is absorbed into institutional responses to poverty, thus reproducing this link in theory and practice (Jencks & Mayer, 1990). The second strategy, Realizing Our Potential (2014), falls into this trap, as they suggest that “all parents know” that we are “shaped by the quality of our childhood” and that “research backs this conventional wisdom” (para. 36). By pairing conventional wisdom with research, they describe this notion that children raised in low-income environments will be negatively impacted by those environments as both common knowledge and scientific fact.

Drawing on these critiques, the foundational assertion in the Poverty reduction strategies that growing up in low-income neighborhoods will automatically lead to poor child development reinforces harmful stereotypes about low-income populations as unable to raise their children properly. This assertion values narrowly defined developmental outcomes for children over their current status and responsibilizes low-income communities for structural problems and government neglect.

Loic Wacquant’s (2007) concept of territorial stigmatization is helpful for analyzing how urban low-income neighborhoods are discursively marked by media, policy and the public as negative spaces characterized by crime, violence and dilapidation. Wacquant (2007) highlights that it does not matter whether the actual conditions of these spaces are as problematic as they are said to be. Their differentiation as peripheral and deviant pollutes their identity and impacts how insiders and outsiders conceptualize and relate to these spaces. People who reside in these neighborhoods become ashamed of them, and collective bonds are weakened due to feelings of vulnerability for residents (Wacquant, 2007). Authorities also increase measures and interventions in these spaces that can make residents unsafe. For example, Greene et al. (2022) have documented how perceptions of low-income and racialized neighborhoods in Toronto have led to over-policing and everyday police violence against marginalized people. Low-income neighborhood residents are perceived to be perpetrators of violence; however, this conceptualization omits how low-income people often have their own experiences of victimization due to these perceptions (Greene et al., 2022; Novac et al., 2009).

The strategies construct urban neighborhoods as threats to the children who live there. These spaces are described as unable to provide an appropriate environment for children to learn proper values and actively corrupt children through antisocial elements such as crime and violence. Considering the history of urban neighborhoods conceptualized as spaces of vice (Valverde, 2008), media representations of urban environments across Canada as dangerous or dirty (Ballard, 2021; Butler, 2021; CBC News, 2018; CTV News, 2018; Delaney, 2022; Mckenzie, 2019; Spalding, 2017), legislative debates describing “ghettos” (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000), and policy responses detailing the various problems that concentrate in these neighborhoods, the strategies draw on preconceived notions and public imaginations of the urban to make their case that these neighborhoods are one of the primary sources of problems for children in poverty that must be fixed.

Alongside the urban construct, the strategies assert a significant description of the child figure as needing protection from poverty:

When children live in families experiencing poverty, especially prolonged poverty, they can’t find a way out on their own. Children are the most vulnerable to the effects of poverty. (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2014, para. 38)

These images, the urban neighborhood and the vulnerable child, work together to position children in poverty as innocent victims of their deranged settings. As Hacking (2000) notes, causing harm to innocents is an ultimate moral evil. This opposition vilifies the communities that children come from and positions them as disordered spaces that must be either left or changed. While the strategies express their concerns based on neuroscience and biology, these are not neutral fields. Their decontextualized assertions against the low-income neighborhood continue to position these settings and the adults who live there as profoundly immoral.

Education as the Solution to the Culture of Poverty

In prevailing discourse about child poverty, such as in the strategies, the concentration of poverty in low-income neighborhoods is generally isolated from the macro factors that lead to poverty, such as Canada’s housing and affordability crisis, the increasing precarity of jobs, government neglect of public infrastructure and meager social assistance rates (Citizens for Public Justice, 2017). Instead, poverty is viewed through an abstract lens of culture. The culture of poverty framework, a prominent anthropological theory from the 1960s, contends that poverty is not just a material experience but a subculture with a unique value system that magnifies the effects of poverty and prevents people from escaping it (De Antunano, 2018). Scholars have heavily criticized the theory for relying on a psychological-deterministic explanation of poverty that blames and pathologizes people who experience poverty while ignoring systemic causes of poverty (Baker-Collins et al., 2020; De Antunano, 2018; Ladson-Billings, 2017; Leacock, 1971; McDermott & Vossoughi, 2020; Rogalsky, 2009). Despite these criticisms, the culture of poverty logic has been grasped tightly by those too willing to see poverty as an individual phenomenon (Cohen, 2020; McDermott & Vossoughi, 2020).

In a 2005 text to educate teachers, Ruby Payne, an education consultant who contributed to the entrenchment of the culture of poverty thesis in the North American education system (Bomer et al., 2008), reinforces the culture of poverty by describing the differential value systems of students from different classes. Here, Payne (2005) describes people in poverty as survival-focused, feeling-based people who overspend, do not value education and are pessimistic about their capacities to change their lives. In contrast, she describes the middle-class as self-governing, stable and future-focused people who value achievement, enjoy their life, value education, manage their finances and believe in the power of making good choices (Payne, 2005). Finally, Payne (2005) describes the wealthy as investment-focused citizens who value their connections with others, respect tradition and history, view education as necessary and believe that anything can happen if they put their minds to it.

As exemplified by this work, the culture of poverty theory problematically posits that material relief will not alleviate poverty. Instead, it is necessary to provide value-based education that will teach children how to behave in middle-class settings and how best to approach their socio-economic circumstances. Here, poverty is conceptualized as a pathological relationship with money, education and community. In contrast, the middle and upper classes are described as managing their money correctly, understanding the importance of education and making good choices to change their circumstances. Using this paradigm, class differences are justified as cultural gaps in the fundamental knowledge and values required of good, self-governing citizens rather than structurally mediated impacts of economic disparity.

The 2009 and 2014 strategies use the language of the “cycle of poverty” to describe how this culture of poverty is reproduced in low-income neighborhoods, as children do not receive the proper knowledge and values required for upward mobility. Instead, children are thought to absorb negative influences from their environments leading to several adverse outcomes, as supported by the neighborhood development research mentioned above:

The research is clear. Children who grow up in poverty are at a higher risk of living in poverty when they’re adults. They’re less likely to graduate from high school and less likely to go on to post-secondary education. They’re more likely to rely on social assistance as adults and more likely to have children before they are able to support them. (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 7)

The two strategies, Breaking the Cycle (2009) and Realizing Our Potential (2014), advance an understanding of poverty as a cultural gap to explain how growing up in a low-income neighborhood is a significant threat to the individual’s future, the economy and society. They thus direct their primary intervention into poverty through the education system in “Urban and Priority Schools” (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, 2014). Breaking the Cycle states that “the most effective tool” for breaking the cycle of poverty is education because it gives children mentors outside of their immediate surroundings who will teach them “how to think, how to behave, and how to become productive and successful members of a society” (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 10). The strategies imply that, without this middle-class educational intervention, children in poverty will absorb the value systems surrounding them and become unproductive and unsuccessful people destined to reproduce the culture of poverty with their children.

The strategies aim to provide children with essential resources to help them become physically and mentally healthier. Still, these resources are always provided alongside educational intervention, stressing that poverty is not a lack of resources but of intergenerational knowledge and desire. Writing in the United States context, Ladson-Billings (2017) highlights a key point: the worsened educational outcomes of children in poverty are often used to present children in poverty as coming from homes that do not value education. However, several structural impacts prevent them from participating in school, including food deserts, state violence, purposeful medical neglect and under-resourced schools that are entirely government responsibilities (Ladson-Billings, 2017). In the Canadian context, Sokal and Katz (2015) and Vetrone et al. (2022) contextualize the so-called “achievement gap” by highlighting how schools are often unsafe places for low-income and street-involved youth due to discrimination, as well as barriers to attendance such as transportation issues, a lack of space or technology to complete schoolwork or a lack of time due to work demands. Milne and Wotherspoon (2020) have also demonstrated how schools continue to be unsafe places for Indigenous children due to the Canadian government’s history of residential schooling, child welfare apprehension and racism from teachers and peers rather than a value difference.

Conducting fieldwork in Southern Ontario, Baker-Collins et al. (2020) interviewed parents drawing social assistance who were resistant to ideas about intergenerational transmission and wanted to ensure that their children would have better opportunities (Baker-Collins et al., 2020). These participants countered negative stereotypes about social assistance dependency by internalizing stigma and hiding their status from their children. Baker-Collins et al. (2020) highlight that if poverty persists intergenerationally, it is due to features of the social environment, such as lack of access to well-paying employment rather than values or parenting.

The strategies draw on the notion of a self-reproducing culture of poverty to direct attention away from institutionalized government neglect while highlighting these outcomes as personal failures and knowledge gaps that must be filled through middle-class education. Writing education as “the most effective tool,” in fact, overvalues the power of education to end child poverty while ignoring systemic factors that prevent children from attending school safely or accessing upward mobility.

Community Revitalization Concerns

The strategies’ other main approach is revitalizing low-income neighborhoods. As these neighborhoods are conceptualized as the central loci of poverty where all other factors concentrate and damage children, they are identified as the target of potential solutions to poverty. The logic is that if the spaces could be made healthier, cleaner and safer, children would no longer be at risk of learning from their unregulated and contaminating environments. Instead, they would have access to the support they need, absorb proper value systems from mentors and invest back into their communities.

Breaking the Cycle (2009) and Realizing Our Potential (2014) suggest doing this through “building community” by creating “healthy, mixed-income, and sustainable communit[ies]” in previously “deteriorating” spaces (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 24). These projects aim to make areas clean and valuable by bringing in more expensive, private-market housing options. The mixed-income community is valorized as a solution that will target the achievement gap between low- and high-income children and the dilapidation of urban neighborhoods, assuming that middle- and upper-class people will be more invested in caring for their spaces and model good behavior for their lower-class counterparts.

The strategies also tout the benefits for people in poverty to become involved in revitalization efforts as a “critical component of any poverty reduction strategy”:

Strong communities can be an extremely positive influence on the health and economic prospects of the people who live in them and inviting people to take responsibility for the strength of their own communities can only increase their social cohesion and mobility. (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 19)

Involving residents in revitalization processes influences the physical space and markets revitalization as something inherently good for residents. To this point, Breaking the Cycle (2009) states that every community has a “shared interest in everyone being at their best” (p. 19) and Realizing Our Potential (2014) states that “every Ontarian” (para. 24) will benefit from community-building.

August (2016), a Canadian urban planning and housing scholar, highlights how community revitalization in Canada often removes the previously existing public housing stock, builds newer units (usually fewer) and then mixes in private-market housing options. While the general public perceives this as a positive step, it has been critiqued for displacing low-income and racialized communities, increasing the cost of living in previously affordable neighborhoods, damaging social networks and exposing residents to increased surveillance and regulation (August, 2016; Crump, 2002; Hackworth & Moriah, 2006). Community revitalization’s touted benefits are unrealized, as employment, income, education and health do not improve due to community revitalization (Goetz & Chapple, 2010).

The expected benefit of the mixed-income community relies on a homogenized construction of people in poverty by suggesting that their relationships with one another produce deviance and that middle-class role models are required to access social mobility. However, mixed-income communities do not create desperately needed employment and income, make life more affordable or “increase social cohesion and mobility” as the strategies say they would (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 19). Instead, they fit neatly with neoliberal ideologies of privatization and personal responsibility, justifying government disinvestment and dispersal of social housing units while opening up these neighborhoods as new private investment opportunities (Hackworth & Moriah, 2006).

The dispersal of social housing units moves people experiencing poverty, including children, away from the care networks and community connections they have already created. Seitz (2022) and Laughlin and Johnson (2011) highlight how children relate to their communities in ways that contrast how community revitalization projects conceptualize them. They each highlight that children are rarely involved in urban planning processes, even though urban planners frequently justify revitalization as beneficial for children (Laughlin & Johnson, 2011; Seitz, 2022). In Laughlin and Johnson’s (2011) research with children in the Regent Park neighborhood in Toronto, they determined that young people make significant use of public space in their neighborhood and revitalization processes that strictly regulate the boundaries of public/private space would harm them.

Also conducting fieldwork in Regent Park in Toronto, August (2014) produced a counternarrative to stigmatization, arguing that people who live in low-income communities already have strong attachments to their neighborhoods, intense care networks and interdependency with surrounding amenities. Consequently, revitalization and the mixed-income community displace and deepen poverty rather than building community. The strategies seek to capitalize on the “capacity that communities naturally possess” to care for their members (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 19) by co-opting the language of community care. However, their revitalization practices suggest that government reconstruction is required to build more appropriate communities in these spaces. They thus discredit how low-income communities have already created deep networks of aid and solidarity to meet their needs and restrict further community building among low-income residents through displacement instead of addressing child poverty.

Moving Backwards?

In 2018, the Conservative government of Ontario replaced the Liberal government of Ontario. They have enacted several policies that have deepened wealth inequality, including canceling minimum wage hikes and the basic income and pharmacare projects, minimizing health and education funding and removing rent controls (Giovannetti & Younglai, 2018; Merali, 2022; Ngabo, 2019; Regg-Cohn, 2018). Notably, the Conservative government released Ontario’s newest Poverty reduction strategy at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, representing a discursive shift from the previous plans. Over the pandemic, child poverty rates dropped significantly across the country due to increased government assistance through emergency COVID-19 funds (Employment and Social Development Canada, 2022). Despite evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic that social assistance and public investment effectively reduce child poverty rates, this strategy wants to end the emergency COVID-19 assistance by fostering economic productivity. In their opening framework, Building a Strong Foundation for Success (Ministry of Children, Community, Social Services, 2021) states that it “identifies immediate and longer-term areas of action to help those most in need as the province lays the groundwork for its recovery from the economic impacts of COVID-19” (para. 13) and that its primary target is no longer to end child poverty, but to “get more social assistance recipients to move into meaningful employment and financial stability” (para. 12).

The new strategy represents an overt entrenchment of the neoliberal ethic that those who work hard will succeed, as children are further marginalized from policy concerns. Such a focus on individual responsibility turns further away from public health and education systems, reproducing an understanding of poverty abstract from economic inequality and mobilizing economic anxiety post-COVID-19 economic downturn. This “new” strategy is reminiscent of Mike Harris’ (Premier of Ontario from 1990 to 2002 when child poverty rose 118% due to cuts to social assistance) quote in the introduction about his “different philosophy” of “breaking dependency”, “the value of work” and “the dignity of the job” (Ontario Legislative Assembly, 2000).

While there was a significant push for the government of Ontario to release a provincial strategy, it is essential to resist romanticizing these strategies as the ultimate solution to child poverty. What happened over a decade since the release of the first strategy has demonstrated that these strategies cannot end child poverty. Instead, they have problematized, responsibilized and disinvested from impoverished communities and children under the guise of protecting children’s education, health and development. They have scapegoated parents and communities for not raising their children properly, all while removing any capacity they would have to provide for them adequately. The consequences are severe. The government can maintain their systemic neglect of children in poverty while penalizing and criminalizing parents and communities for that very thing.

Despite how these strategies describe poverty, poverty is not a natural or necessary occurrence. In 2020, a United Nations Rapprator stated that “poverty is a political choice” produced and maintained by inadequate social policies and programs (McCloskey, 2020). This reframing of poverty is essential to understanding poverty outside of individual behavior but as a consequence of government (in)action. Again, the reduced rate of child poverty through COVID-19 public assistance measures demonstrates that public investment and robust social assistance programs will significantly reduce child poverty if the political will is seized (Employment and Social Development Canada, 2022; Lemieux-Fanset, 2022).

Before the release of the 2021 Poverty reduction strategy, Campaign 2000, an anti-poverty organization, released its vision for a Poverty reduction strategy. They highlight several tactics that have been successful in reducing poverty in other jurisdictions, including improving working conditions, raising the minimum wage, universal childcare, increasing social assistance rates beyond the poverty threshold, fully funded healthcare and pharmacare, increasing affordable housing supply, applying rent controls, eviction prevention, reducing class sizes and eliminating barriers to post-secondary education (Campaign 2000, 2020a). These calls position government investment in public infrastructure as the necessary solution to ending child poverty instead of individualized value-based education and neighborhood beautification.

In the more than 30 years since the 1989 Commitment to End Child Poverty by the year 2000, children and communities continue to be let down by government neglect, inaction, cuts to social programs and superficial investment. Better methods, like those described by Campaign 2000’s call to action, must be implemented so that all children can live free from poverty, not because they have worked their way out of it but simply because they exist. Ontario has set out its vision of a province “where every person has the opportunity to achieve his or her full potential, and contribute to and participate in a prosperous and healthy Ontario” (Ministry of Children, Community, and Social Services, 2009, p. 5). They have the capacity to make it so.

Note

1

The 2021 Canadian Census reported that child poverty rates had fallen across the country due to significant increases in emergency social assistance measures through COVID-19 (Employment and Social Development Canada, 2022). Still, anti-poverty advocates express concern that the rates will rise again due to the temporary nature of these measures (Lemieux-Fanset, 2022). Despite the rate of child poverty dropping, the impact of poverty on children remains severe due to COVID-19-related isolation and disconnection from essential services (Campaign 2000, 2020b).

References

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August 2016August, M. (2016). Revitalisation gone wrong: Mixed-income public housing redevelopment in Toronto’s Don Mount Court. Urban Studies, 53(16), 3405–3422.

Baker-Collins, Smith-Carrier, Gazso, & Smith 2020Baker-Collins, S., Smith-Carrier, T., Gazso, A., & Smith, C. (2020). Resisting the culture of poverty narrative: Perspectives of social assistance recipients. Journal of Poverty, 24(1), 72–93.

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