information for practice

Canada’s declining poverty rate over the last decade is evidence of substantial social policy success, which should be reflected in future policy approaches to battling poverty. Over the last decade, Canada’s unemployment rate has fallen; the employment rate has risen; and the overall poverty rate has declined. While not all is right with Canadian social policy, these trends suggest that some things are going well. A combination of favourable labour-market changes and effective policy changes has had a beneficial impact on poverty in Canada. In particular, the link between Canada’s rising employment rate and falling poverty rate over the last decade has been very strong. The impact on employment among those at high risk of incurring poverty should always be a criterion for assessing proposed policy reforms, and policies that embody powerful incentives to enter the labour market usually make sense. For instance, the introduction of new provincial welfare protocols probably explains much of the last decade’s increase in the employment rate among groups with high rates of poverty. At the heart of new protocols has been a stricter exercise by social workers in judging whether a welfare applicant is or is not employable. Admittedly, making these judgments is prone to error, and good welfare policy means much more than restricting access among those classified as employable. However, in three of the four large provinces the changes in welfare policies and the magnitude of decline in caseloads have been dramatic.