How to address the deep poverty of people receiving social assistance
Maytree’s Welfare in Canada, 2024 report remains the benchmark for evaluating how welfare incomes measure up to the human right to an adequate standard of living. Following the report’s release and accompanying policy brief, this discussion highlighted the implications of the findings and explored solutions to address the deep poverty experienced by people receiving social assistance.
This year’s edition introduced new analysis of shelter benefits for people who are unhoused, showing how inadequate supports leave many without access to safe and affordable housing.
The conversation brought together report authors Jennefer Laidley and Tania Oliveira, with insights from Alexi White, Maytree’s Director of Systems Change, and commentary from Leilani Farha, former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and Global Director of The Shift. Elizabeth McIsaac, Maytree President, moderated.
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Transcript
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Today’s presentation by Jennefer, Tania, and Alexi, is based on Welfare in Canada, 2024, and the policy brief, “From data to action, policy implications of Welfare in Canada.”
Jennefer Laidley is a Maytree fellow and lead author of Welfare in Canada since 2020. She has also co-authored this year’s policy brief. Tania Oliveira is a policy advisor at Maytree, and co-author of Welfare in Canada. Alexi White is Maytree’s Director of Systems Change and co-author of the policy brief. We will also later in the session be hearing from Leilani Farha, but I will introduce her at that time.
The reason Maytree continues to compile and publish Welfare in Canada is that the adequacy of total welfare incomes is an important metric of Canada’s commitment to human rights. Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of Canada signing the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, after securing the explicit support of all provinces. The Covenant requires all levels of government to use their maximum available resources to progressively realize the right to an adequate standard of living.
Yet, despite tremendous gains in per capita wealth over the last five decades, the Welfare in Canada report series shows how government systems remain far too inadequate to provide a life of basic dignity. And so, here we are again with another year of documenting that gap, and without further ado, over to you Jennefer.
Jennefer Laidley:
Thank you again, Elizabeth, and hello, everyone. Welcome to our Welfare in Canada webinar, and thanks very much for being here today.
I want to acknowledge first that I’m joining you from the unceded traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw First Nation in British Columbia, and I recognize their Title II and historical stewardship of the land on which I live and work.
Now, before we get into the presentation, we want to give a huge thank you to the officials in the provinces and territories who provided information and confirmed the data in the report. Thanks also to experts at Statistics Canada, who’ve given us very helpful advice and who produce the poverty and low income thresholds that we use. And of course, we want to also thank our hard-working and dedicated colleagues at Maytree and our external editor.
So to start, Welfare in Canada, 2024 is the latest in a series of reports that help us understand the amount and adequacy of the total income of households who receive social assistance from various government sources in Canada. It’s also an important source of information about other aspects of social assistance programs, and that’s organized into a section called Key Features of Social Assistance. And we have a new analysis about shelter benefits and homelessness in that section this year, which we’ll talk about later. We hope that Welfare in Canada is a useful resource for researchers, advocates, government officials, and others in their work, and especially in efforts to improve the lives of people receiving social assistance across Canada.
Tania Oliveira:
Thank you, Elizabeth and Jennefer. Hello, everyone. I will begin by providing the outline of our presentation today. We will start by telling you a bit about the report and its history. Then we will contextualize the data by briefly talking about the methodology. After that, we will move into the analysis of the data in the report.
First, looking at how adequate the welfare incomes were for the example households, including how adequacy has changed over time. Second, we will analyze the percentage change in income from provincial or territorial sources between 2023 and 2024. Third, we’ll share insights from the key features of social assistance section, focusing on the new part on shelter related benefits, a timely addition given the housing crisis. Fourth, we will show the share of welfare incomes from federal sources, leading into a discussion on the new Canada Disability Benefit. And finally, we will share some recommendations.
Jennefer Laidley:
So, just to situate this year’s report in some historical context, in 1987, the National Council of Welfare published a report called Welfare in Canada: The Tangled Safety Net. This report was really groundbreaking, as it was the first comprehensive national analysis of social assistance programs in Canada, and it established the methodology for calculating total welfare incomes and measuring adequacy that we use, and that we’ll talk about next. The council then published annual reports in its Welfare Income series, which ran from 1989 to 2009. After the council was defunded, the Caledon Institute of Social Policy continued the work in a series called Welfare in Canada, which ran from 2012 to 2016. And Maytree picked up this work starting with the 2017 report, in order to ensure we can keep track of government’s international human rights commitments to the right to an adequate standard of living. So, now we have a data series that goes back nearly 40 years.
Alexi White:
The majority of the report is made up of the presentation and analysis of total welfare incomes. So, how do we calculate these incomes? Our methodology has remained consistent since the first Tangled Safety Net report in 1987, and this allows us to maintain the time series and compare data year-over-year. I’ll just note that the report doesn’t reflect every person’s experience of receiving social assistance; it is intended to be illustrative rather than universal.
So in each of the 13 provinces and territories, we looked at the total incomes of four example households. Unattached singles considered employable, unattached singles with a disability, single parents with one child aged two, and couples with two children aged 10 and 15. In total, we looked at the incomes of 56 different households across the country, which includes four extra households. We have one extra in Alberta, one in Manitoba, and two in Quebec.
And something to keep in mind is that we make several assumptions in doing this, and just to mention a few, the heads of households are deemed employable except for the unattached single with a disability. This is, of course, a false distinction. People with disabilities can and do work, and people who are deemed employable often face issues that make them unable to work. But it’s a distinction that continues to be used in social assistance programs across Canada. The households had no employment income and they filed their tax returns, and the households are new recipients of social assistance and started to receive benefits on January 1st of the year in question. And of course, you can find more details on methodology in the report.
Tania Oliveira:
So, when we say total welfare income, what do we mean? We are referring not just to social assistance benefits. The total welfare income of a household is made up of several components, all of each are government transfers. At the provincial and territorial level, this includes the basic and additional social assistance benefits that are regularly provided to all recipients from the program in the jurisdictions where they live. Basic benefits are those for costs like food, clothing, and shelter. Additional benefits are those universally provided for specific costs, like a winter clothing allowance or a disability allowance. It also includes provincial or territorial tax credits and benefits, and child benefits for households with children if their jurisdiction has such a program.
At the federal level, total welfare income also includes federal tax credits and benefits, which are the GST/HST credit and credit supplement, and the Canada Carbon Rebate for households in aid of the provinces, as well as the Canada Child Benefit for households with children.
Jennefer Laidley:
So now that we know the components of total welfare incomes, we’ll look at the adequacy of those incomes. And this is probably the most important analysis in the report because it tells us how well or not well households who are receiving social assistance are doing.
So, how do we measure adequacy? For households in the province, we compare total welfare incomes to the Market Basket Measure, and in the territories we use the Northern Market Basket Measure. And we use these measures because they represent Canada’s Official Poverty Line and are used by the federal government to track progress on poverty reduction. We also compare total welfare incomes to the deep income poverty threshold, which is 75 per cent of the poverty line and represents a severe level of poverty. And mostly for historical reasons, we do comparisons for households in the provinces with the Low Income Measure and the Low Income Cut-Off. We won’t discuss those today, but they are in the report.
Now, the next four graphs will show how adequate total welfare incomes were in 2024 for each of our example households.
Alexi White:
In these next four graphs, we’ll compare the total welfare income for a household shown in the vertical bars here with the Official Poverty Line, which is indicated in the black lines that appear above the top of the bars. It may be a little hard to see, but there are also gray lines partway down, and these lines represent the deep income poverty threshold, which is 75 per cent of the poverty line.
In this first graph, the vertical red bars are the welfare of unattached singles considered employable in each province and territory. So as you can see in all but one case, the red bars are far below the black lines and many are even below the gray lines. This means that all but one of these households were living in poverty in 2024, and all but two were below the deep income poverty threshold.
In Nova Scotia, Nunavut and Ontario, welfare incomes were less than half of the deep income poverty threshold for this household, or about a third of the poverty line. The only households who have an income above the official poverty line is the one in Quebec receiving Manpower Training Benefits. But before you get excited, only a small percentage of social assistance recipients in Quebec actually receive this level of benefits, fewer than 2 per cent. We explain all of this in the Quebec section of the report, so please look at that if you want to understand the numbers for Quebec.
This slide looks at adequacy for the unattached single with a disability household. The Official Poverty Lines and deep income poverty thresholds are exactly the same as those of the unattached single considered employable on the last slide. However, because of the Official Poverty Line not considering the added cost of living with a disability, the poverty of these households is likely underrepresented. But even so, all 15 unattached single with a disability households were living in poverty in 2024, and only four lived above the deep income poverty threshold. These four were in Alberta for households receiving AISH benefits, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon. The household in PEI was right at the deep income poverty threshold, and the least adequate were in Nunavut and in Alberta for households receiving BFE benefits. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia are also quite low at 54 per cent of the poverty line in both cases.
Tania Oliveira:
Here is adequacy for the single parent with one child households. Again, none had incomes above the poverty line in 2024. And in only four jurisdictions were these households living above the deep income poverty threshold: the Northwest Territories, PEI, Quebec, and the Yukon. Here, the least adequate welfare incomes were in Nunavut, Nova Scotia, and Ontario.
And here is adequacy for the couple with two children. All 14 of these households were living at or below the poverty line in 2024. The most adequate income was in the Yukon at 100.4 per cent of the poverty line. Incomes were above the deep income poverty threshold in the Northwest Territories, PEI, Quebec, and the Yukon. All other households were living in deep poverty. The least adequate were in Nunavut, Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick.
Jennefer Laidley:
So overall in 2024, 98 per cent of example households, or 55 of the 56, were living on incomes below the Official Poverty Line. The majority, 40 of the 56, or 71 per cent, were living below the deep income poverty threshold. And 15, or 27 per cent, were living above deep poverty but below the poverty line. So, we can see that total welfare incomes in 2024 were not adequate for people to live with dignity and security across the country and for nearly all households. That’s the major finding in this report, and it really comes as no surprise. Social assistance incomes are deeply inadequate to support those who rely on them, and they’ve been that way for a long time.
Another analysis that we do in the report is to look at how adequate incomes have been historically, and in this slide, we’re highlighting unattached single households because they’re living in the deepest poverty, but the analysis for households with children is also in the report. Now, the data goes back to 2002 for the provinces and 2018 for the territories, and the vertical lines in the provincial data in 2008 and 2018 is when the Market Basket Measure was re-based, which is explained in the report.
And we’re just showing four of the 13 jurisdictions just as examples here: Alberta, New Brunswick, the Northwest Territories, and Ontario. And the first thing we found as a trend is that incomes for the vast majority of households in almost all jurisdictions have been below the poverty line and even below the deep income poverty line, historically. That’s not the case for the Northwest Territories and for the Yukon, where incomes have been above deep poverty and in some years even above the poverty line. But in most other cases, you’ll see incomes below deep income poverty, as we see in Alberta, New Brunswick, and Ontario.
In some instances we find that adequacy is actually improving over time, as is the case in New Brunswick and in Ontario for singles with a disability. We also see this trend in Prince Edward Island, where adequacy for unattached singles increased quite a lot between 2018 and 2023, but then dropped off a bit in 2024. In other instances, adequacy is actually getting worse over time, as we see here for all three unattached single households in Alberta. And note that while the household receiving age benefits is above deep poverty, it’s not above the poverty line, and there’s been a decline in adequacy over the last year. That’s also the case for the unattached single considered employable in Ontario, where benefits have been frozen for the last few years.
Alexi White:
Now we move to more recent history. We did an analysis to see whether any progress had been made on adequacy by the provinces and territories just since last year. Benefits provided by the provinces and territories are the foundational supports that households rely on. They make up the largest proportion of their total welfare incomes. So for adequacy to improve, the amount of these benefits needs to increase.
This graph shows the percentage change in provincial and territorial benefits since 2023. It summarizes the situation for our two unattached single households in all of the provinces and territories, and shows roughly in which parts of Canada these households are better off, thanks to investments by their provincial and territorial governments, and in which jurisdictions households are falling behind. Above inflation increases are indicated by the green bars, and below inflation increases are in yellow. Red bars indicate a reduction in income.
The good news is that most of the unattached single families experienced above the rate of inflation. New Brunswick saw the largest increase, thanks to a new household supplement of $200 a month. And Nova Scotia introduced a new disability supplement of $308 a month that has greatly benefited the unattached single with the disability household.
Unfortunately, households in several provinces saw increases that did not keep up with inflation. And in Alberta, the sun setting of temporary income supports resulted in incomes from these sources declining for two households.
And here’s the same analysis for households with children. Again, most of the households experienced increases above the rate of inflation, with New Brunswick leading the way. However, incomes for households with children declined in Alberta and in Prince Edward Island in the last year. In Ontario, these households saw small increases, but their purchasing power declined once inflation is factored in. Overall, while there was some progress, it is unacceptable that 40 per cent of the households we track were worse off after accounting for inflation. When welfare incomes are already so low and so inadequate, even small price increases can cause families to go hungry or lose their homes.
Jennefer Laidley:
And to switch gears a bit, as we’ve already said, Welfare in Canada contains a section called Key Features of Social Assistance, and that’s where you’ll find data and information about the needs test and how asset limits and earned and unearned income exemptions work to determine eligibility, which benefits are indexed to inflation and which aren’t, and how basic social assistance benefits are delivered, whether in separate or combined amounts.
And this year, we’ve included a new section that looks at shelter benefits and how they relate to households who are unhoused. And in this new section, we looked at two issues. First, we wanted to see how adequate shelter benefits are compared to the cost of housing. Statistics Canada produces a great data set that shows actual asking prices for a room, a one-bedroom apartment, and a two-bedroom apartment in various large urban centers or census metropolitan areas across Canada. So we compared the amount of basic shelter benefits available to an unattached single considered employable household and the asking price of a room in 2024. And we chose a room because that’s often where people receiving social assistance are forced to live because of their low incomes. Now, because this data is only for large urban centers, we could only do this comparison for nine jurisdictions. So Prince Edward Island and the three territories are not included here.
In six of the jurisdictions, a specific monthly benefit is provided for shelter. In the three others however, monthly benefits are provided in one combined amount. So when we did this comparison, and this may come as no surprise, in the six jurisdictions that provide a specific benefit for shelter, that benefit was not enough to pay for the asking price for a room in 2024. Only in Winnipeg was the shelter benefit sufficient. And that’s only for a room, not for an apartment. In the three jurisdictions with combined benefits, only two were enough to pay for a room, but that left only a small amount to pay for everything else that that household would need, like food, clothing, transportation, etc. So we can see why people receiving social assistance, and particularly unattached singles, are struggling to find decent, affordable, adequate housing in Canada.
Now the second part of this new section looks at the amount of benefits available to unattached single people who are housed versus those who are unhoused. And by unhoused, we mean people who are effectively street homeless. That is, they’re living in encampments, emergency shelters, or other situations where they don’t actually pay rent, let alone a mortgage.
And that’s the key here, because the needs test that is used to determine eligibility for benefits in most cases means that if you don’t have a cost, you don’t get a benefit to pay for that cost. So if you don’t pay rent, in most cases, you don’t get a benefit to pay for rent. And we did this analysis by looking at the total amount of base monthly social assistance benefits. We didn’t include any discretionary benefits that someone would have to apply or ask their worker for.
And we recognize that many jurisdictions provide supports to people who are unhoused through other means, like the funding that goes to emergency shelters or other kinds of housing that are paid for through a department or program other than social assistance. We’re not including those here; we simply wanted to see what people who are not paying for shelter and are unhoused receive in basic benefits. And what we found is that in 11 out of 12 jurisdictions, unhoused single adults receive 23 to 77 per cent less in basic benefits than they would if they were housed. And this means that people who aren’t paying for shelter and are unhoused are doubly disadvantaged by the very systems that should be supporting them.
Tania Oliveira:
We are getting near to the end of our presentation, but before we move to our policy recommendations, we want to talk about federal supports and the Canada Disability Benefit. One of the findings in the report is that the proportion of income that households receiving social assistance get from the federal government is very small, and that’s the case especially for unattached single households. In dark blue, this graph shows how much of total welfare income for those households come from the federal government. In light blue, how much comes from the provincial or territorial governments. And we can see that the federal government’s share of the income is between 1.5 and 10.8 per cent. So, given how inadequate total welfare incomes are for unattached singles, there’s clearly a lot more that the federal government can do. In 2024, the federal share declined with the end of the one-time grocery rebate, but rose in eight provinces due to the Canada Carbon Rebate. In 2025, the federal share will be reduced again following the elimination of the Canada Carbon Rebate.
And the proportions are different for households with children, which is primarily because of the Canada Child Benefit. You will see that households with children receive between 19 and 43 per cent of their income from federal sources. So, while the provinces and territories are doing most of the heavy lifting even for households with children, the federal government has really stepped up for these households. They need to do the same for unattached single households who don’t have other sources of income to help fill the adequacy gap, but we know that this isn’t the case.
Alexi White:
One place where the federal government is contributing more is the new Canada Disability Benefit. Unfortunately, though it was envisioned as something akin to the Guaranteed Income Supplement for seniors, the reality of the CDB has fallen short. First, unnecessary application processes and a narrow definition of disability mean thousands of low-income people with disabilities will not access the CDB. Second, the maximum benefit amount of $2,400 per year is insufficient to raise any of our example households out of poverty, where still, the Alberta government has decided that AISH recipients who qualify for the CDB will have their social assistance payments reduced dollar for dollar. This federal investment should go to people who live in poverty, but instead it will be diverted into the province’s coffers. Third, the CDB’s income exemptions are set much too low. Our unattached single with a disability household in the Yukon would receive only 75 per cent of the maximum CDB because their relatively high social assistance income will trigger a federal claw back. Things are worse for, for example, household in the Northwest Territories, who would receive only $350 from the CDB for the entire year. Again, thanks to the federal claw back.
This graph illustrates several of the issues that I’ve just explained. It’s a version of the adequacy graph for an unattached single with the disability shown earlier in the presentation, but the orange bars show how total income would change if these households had been eligible for the CDB in 2024. The jurisdictions have also been ordered based on the size of the gap between welfare incomes and the poverty line, with the least adequate on the left and the most adequate on the right.
The first thing you may notice is that the CDB closes little of the gap between welfare incomes and the poverty line. This is because the maximum benefit amount is too low. The second thing you may see is that the size of the orange bar is smaller in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, illustrating how these households will not qualify for the maximum benefit even though they live in poverty. If the federal government were to raise the income exemptions to a level where all social assistance recipients in Canada received the maximum CDB, the unattached single with a disability household in the Northwest Territories would actually be lifted out of poverty.
Jennefer Laidley:
So just to recap, why does all of the data we’ve shown to you today matter? Well, it demonstrates that the income security system we have via social assistance and associated benefits and credits doesn’t actually provide income security. And this wasn’t only the case in 2024; historically, total welfare incomes have also been very inadequate. It also demonstrates that the housing crisis isn’t only about a lack of housing units, it’s also very much about incomes that aren’t enough to pay for rent. And it shows that the housing and income security crisis is even worse for people who are unhoused. The data also demonstrates that there’s a lot of room for the federal government to do more to ensure that people can live with more security and dignity. And lastly, despite commitments made, the Canada Disability Benefit won’t meet its poverty reduction promise unless some significant policy changes are made. So now, what do we do about all of this?
Tania Oliveira:
We will start with our recommendations for the federal government. As we highlighted, the federal government must deliver a Canada Disability Benefit that is generous, accessible, and supplements existing supports. Other than the CDB, the federal government should invest in targeting income supports for people living in poverty across Canada, which includes increasing the amount of the Canada Social Transfer to provide more funds for provincial and territorial social assistance benefit increases. Expanding existing benefits, including the Canada Workers Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit, and introducing new tools such as the Groceries and Essentials Benefit, which would build on enhancements made to the GST credit in 2022 and 2023.
More broadly, we believe it’s time for greater federal leadership to promote the right to an adequate standard of living, to address arbitrary disparities between jurisdictions. We call on the federal government to convene a national conversation about how to guarantee adequate welfare incomes across the country.
Alexi White:
And our recommendations at the provincial and territorial level are first, investments should be made in higher social assistance benefits and tax-delivered income supports. Second, Alberta should end its claw back of the Canada Disability Benefit. Third, governments at all levels need to index all the benefits provided to low-income households so that they’re not eroded by inflation. And fourth, the amount and delivery of shelter benefits needs to be addressed so that they keep households housed.
Jennefer Laidley:
So once again, thank you all very much for attending the webinar today. We really appreciate your interest and attention, and we look forward to hearing from you in the question and answer segment. Now, I’ll send it back to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Thank you very much, Jennefer, Alexi, and Tania. That was a lot of information.
And in fact, the report, the policy brief and the actual Welfare in Canada report is a lot of data, but there’s a human side to this. And because at Maytree we are trying to understand what a human rights-based approach to understanding poverty and addressing poverty looks like, we thought there was no one better to invite to the conversation than Leilani Farha.
Leilani is currently the Global Director of The Shift, which is a movement to realize the right to housing globally. But importantly as well, she began her career, she’s been in her career entirely around human rights law and poverty. She was the Executive Director of Canada Without Poverty, went on to be the Executive Director of The Centre for Equality Rights and Accommodation. And then went on to, oh, sorry, that was in the wrong order, but then went on to be the UN Rapporteur for six years on the right to housing. So, I don’t think there’s anyone better qualified to comment on some of this and to help us make sense of this in terms of what can we do, using a human rights-based approach.
Leilani Farha:
Thanks so much, Elizabeth and the Maytree team. What a report. I will say, reports like this are so essential because they act as an accountability mechanism or an accountability frame. How do we hold our governments accountable if we don’t have statistics that we can put forward to them? But as you said, Elizabeth, and we all know, this is a story about people, and I’m deeply troubled by what I’ve learned today through the presentation. Actually, admittedly I read it before today, but nevertheless, I am really troubled. And it’s hard to welcome even any of the small improvements because the overall picture is so bleak, and so bleak for how people are being asked to live in this country.
And what I come away with, it actually takes my breath away, to be honest, to think of single moms, racialized community members, persons with disabilities struggling to exist. And what I come away with is a feeling of abandonment. I feel like people have been abandoned by government policy, and I feel like governments have abandoned their human rights obligations. And so that’s for me, the big takeaway, is we’re in this moment of abandonment.
I mean, we have to ask ourselves, what is the consequence of assistance rates being so low that it means a person wouldn’t be able to afford a room in a rooming house, if they could even find one? What does that mean? How is that person supposed to exist? As someone who has spent my entire career thinking about the importance and significance of home and housing, human existence is based in our ability to have a home and a decent one. And so, these policies are actually threatening human existence. And we know what’s happening: people in receipt of social assistance are falling into homelessness. They’re the first group to fall into homelessness. And when they fall into homelessness, they’re pitching tents in public parks and public places because they have nowhere else to go, and then they’re being told they can’t even exist there.
So the jeopardy here is like, what is it, a triple jeopardy, quadruple jeopardy? I feel like we’re in a very cruel moment in our political and socioeconomic history in this country and worldwide, I have to say. There’s a kind of erasure of people that’s happening. I am actually shocked. Some people count and other people definitely don’t count, and that’s being exposed through policies like the ones that Maytree has studied here. And I suppose when I think about this as a human rights lawyer and advocate, we are exactly where we’re not supposed to be in 2025, in one of the richest top ten performing economies in the world, right? Preserving human life, addressing human need is what human rights are supposed to be about.
The idea that states have a moral obligation to ensure human wellbeing came about in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That was the point of that document. And let’s remember that that was at a period of time, 1948, [when] income tax rates were up at about 80 per cent in some nations. And those high income tax rates — this is important, because this is how governments get their money to spend on things like social assistance — continued to be quite high in this country until the 1970s. So we have 1948, the world commits to human wellbeing, to the right to an adequate standard of living. Fast-forward to the ’60s, we have governments around the world committing to this in treaties, legally binding treaties, including the government of Canada in the ’70s. I can only say that states have abandoned those commitments and we’re seeing that in real-time elsewhere in the world as well.
Part of the problem, I’m going to say, is actually international human rights law itself, because we have very well articulated aspects of an adequate standard of living under international law. So the right to adequate housing, we know all about it, we know what adequacy looks like. The right to food also comes under an adequate standard of living, we know what that looks like. It’s been articulated in international law. The right to be free from poverty has not been well articulated in international human rights law. And I fear that governments like those throughout Canada may think that they are in fact meeting their international human rights obligations by simply being a welfare state, right? By simply offering welfare assistance. But of course, those of us who work with human rights know that they’re very practical and they’re actually kind of based in common sense. And I think your report has shown very clearly that the welfare system that’s in place in Canada right now is not adequate. It is not meeting human need, it is not ensuring human existence, and is certainly not ensuring human dignity.
And I’m just going to close with one observation, and I would be interested to know if other people think this way too. It seems to me that the welfare system in Canada operates outside other economic policy. And we have governments in this country that have built a runaway housing market, right? And the runaway housing market is one of the most significant drivers of income and wealth inequality in the country. And so, my sense is that we don’t have a sort of holistic view of the economy and we don’t put social assistance and receipt of social assistance in that view of the economy.
So, the way I like to think of how we should understand the economic realities in this country is that the people in receipt of social assistance living in deep poverty are part of the same system as the 20 per cent of Canadian households at the top income earning level who control 65 per cent of the country’s wealth. Right? They are all part of the one system. And we are currently living at a time when the welfare system is keeping people poor, and we have a system that is enabling billionaires to exist, and there’s an increasing number of billionaires in our country every year. So, that’s what I’m grappling with. How do we create a more holistic system so that we don’t have this huge gap between those who have and those who have less? I’ll leave it there.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
I don’t think you’re entirely done, but I’m going to invite back the panelists and the researchers to join the conversation. There’s already lots of questions in the Q&A box, and I would remind people that if they want their questions addressed or hopefully addressed, I also have a bunch of questions that people have sent in advance. So I’m going to try to group some of these as themes and engage each of you a little bit further.
Before I let you off the hook, Leilani, I want to start with you. And you’ve left off with the challenge of realizing the right to be free of poverty, the right to an adequate standard of living. Some people have asked, what are the litigation opportunities under the charter? And is litigation the only answer to this? Is it only in the courts that we’re going to see resolution to the realization of human rights, or are there other tactics approaches? What does the human rights space approach mean in terms of holding our governments, federal and provincial, to account on this? It’s a big question.
Leilani Farha:
It’s a big question. I mean, I do think litigation probably has a role here. Sadly, we don’t have a good record in this country of being able to convince courts that governments have positive obligations. In other words, governments have to do more than just do no harm. Although in this case, they’re clearly doing harm.
But if you look at the series of cases that have been successful challenging the eviction of homeless people from homeless encampments, the main charter provision that’s used is Article 7, which is the right to life, liberty and security of the person. And these cases have met with success in that municipal governments have been told, no, you can’t evict people if they have no other reasonable place to go. But what they haven’t been successful at is getting a single drop of water or bottle of water to the people living in those homeless encampments, right?
So it’s like, governments have to refrain from evicting but they don’t actually have to do something like house the folks who are living in encampments. And so, one worries about whether we can actually get what we need through Section 7 litigation, given the reluctance of courts to tell politicians to do anything positive. There’s also, one hopes that we can through advocacy, get government officials to understand the dire circumstances that some people are living in and the threat to existence that extremely low welfare rates pose.
I don’t know, right now we’re staring at a national level government that’s dealing with tariffs, that is increasing spending on defense. And how do we centre this as a priority? My sense is that we need more movements from the ground up, and how do we support those movements? How do we make sure those movements can grow when the very people who must be at the front of those movements are struggling so much? Right? But it’s those, I am convinced that that’s where change comes from, is the ground up. And so, how we can support those movements to, I mean, there are existing movements, but how can we support them to be even more effective? I think is a live issue.
Jennefer Laidley:
Yeah, I would just add, sorry, I just want to leap in here a little bit. I completely agree with you. I mean, I think that there’s a lot of pieces, there’s a lot of tools in the toolbox, and a really important tool is organizing with people who are living this reality. Welfare In Canada — it’s a big report, it’s a database report, it’s a research report, and there’s a lot of information in it, but to really make that data useful and to give it life, we need to operationalize that data through public education, which we see this webinar as a part of that obviously, right? Getting that information out there, but also through organizing with people on the ground. It’s critically important I think, in my experience, for advocacy efforts to have any, to get any traction, people who are living this reality need to be deeply involved.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Agreed. A number of people have asked questions before in advance of our session today and also in the chat room, but asking about, how does equity layer into this? And this is really, I think, speaking to the actual data set that we’ve created, which doesn’t actually look at a particular equity lens, per se. It looks at four model families, but it doesn’t get into, how are different groups of people experiencing this differently, whether it’s by gender, racialized identity or Indigenous ability, disability. So, there’s a question to the researchers in the methodology, what can we do around that or is this data set one thing and we have other research and other questions that we pursue in other ways? How do we get at that? Because it’s so important. Tania?
Tania Oliveira:
I think I’m going to start with this one, and yeah, my colleagues can complement what I say. So without disaggregated data, it’s hard to know who’s being left out and to know whether social assistance programs are really protecting people from poverty. And we also know that for governments, it’s really, they have challenges to collect this kind of data. So it takes time, resources, and coordination. That’s not an excuse, but it’s something that we need to keep in mind.
And on this topic, I want to flag that Maytree Social Assistance Summaries brings some of the disaggregated data that some jurisdictions already collect. So we have things like recipients by age, by gender, by family type. And in the work that we do at Maytree, when we are engaging with the governments, working for Welfare in Canada, or Social Assistance Summaries, we are always emphasizing how important is to have access to disaggregated data, and we keep pushing for a more stronger and consistent data collection.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Thank you, Tania. Oh, I want to delve a bit deeper into some of the stuff around the disability benefit and where that has left us, because I think that’s a very hot policy issue in Canada. We got to a certain place with the last government, there’s a question mark about where for next, and it was brought up a little bit, and Alexi, I know you’ve done some work on this. So, how do we move this forward? Where do we stand now that it’s launched, that we have the benefit in place? There’s a lot of moving parts to this. Can you take us through a little bit of that and how can we hope to see that change in this data set going forward?
Alexi White:
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think we’ve laid out already, I won’t recap the disappointment that the first iteration of the Canada Disability Benefit has been. If history can give us some optimism, it’s that this is often how eventually transformative benefits do start their life in Canada.
There are very few examples of really big changes to the income security system that overnight lifted thousands of people out of poverty. Something like the Canada Child Benefit that we now talk about as an example of one of the better elements of the income security system in Canada, started out as a much smaller benefit, a series of benefits. It took many, many different governments of different political stripes and different iterations to eventually get to the Canada Child Benefit that we have today. And so, I think the lesson there is that we never get to let up on these things. If you see this as the door has been opened a crack, we now have a new tool in our arsenal. We need to keep pushing on it. We need to keep pushing not just on the amount, but on the access to the benefit, the ways that the eligibility is overly restrictive that is keeping a lot of people away, the way that it interacts with other programs in a negative way.
And so there is some hope, for example, in the federal platform from the recent government, there was an election promise to look at the disability tax credit and the eligibility for that, which is the gateway into getting the Canada Disability Benefit. So, maybe there’s something there. Again, this idea of relentless incrementalism, it’s not going to be enough. It’s not necessarily in keeping with our human rights obligations, but the work continues and we have to take every opportunity and every crack that opens and try to push through as much change as we can.
And I think it’s worth also just continuing not just to talk about these things individually. I think we’re getting to a point in disability policy in Canada where the system has become so complex that we need some kind of national conversation about simplifying and reorienting it toward the needs of the people who use it, rather than the needs of the governments that are administering these benefits. I mean, the patchwork of supports that exist in every different province is even more complicated than what we’ve looked at here for just for the income security side. And it shouldn’t be the case where you’re born or where you live dictates whether or not you can get help with certain aspects of your disability. It’s not a way to run a country. And so at some point, we need a national conversation about this and I’m hopeful that we can get there.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Thank you. Jennefer, I’m going to turn to you. There was a question partly, you’ve been doing this report for a long time and you’ve been following it since Caledon did it and you’ve been following it since the National Welfare of Canada was doing it. So, I’m going to consider you the elder statesperson on this.
We’re using MBM as a line of adequacy actually, or theoretically or in an abstract sense. Someone did ask the question, is that the line we’re trying to achieve? And if so, is that a solid line? Does that tell us that we’ve achieved dignity for someone? Is it that simple? Can you get into that a little bit about how we, are we just using that as a helpful proxy so we can see where we’re moving, or… If you could talk a bit about that?
Jennefer Laidley:
Right, and I think it’s a really important and valuable question. I mean, is living at the poverty line the goal? And unequivocally we can say no, of course it’s not.
The Market Basket Measure serves a really important and useful role, in that it allows government to track its progress, governments across the country to track their progress. It gives us some kind of a benchmark, but it doesn’t allow us to… I was thinking about this in terms of international human rights commitments, and maybe Leilani can help me with this a little bit, but I mean, the right to adequacy, adequacy as a concept is a bit nebulous and I don’t know that it’s really been defined. But certainly in the Welfare in Canada context, we’re using the poverty line, as you said, Elizabeth, as a proxy for at least some basic standard of living. But does that allow people to live with dignity? I don’t know that it does. Does it allow people to not have to worry about whether they’re going to be able to pay their rent and feed themselves and feed their kids and get to where they need to be and have communication with others? I don’t know that the poverty line is sufficient for that.
Leilani, in the international context, what does adequacy mean?
Leilani Farha:
Well, the main body that’s responsible for defining terms like what an adequate standard of living means, hasn’t really done that kind of deep, legal analysis. That’s what I meant when I said there’s this gap. So they haven’t said this is what adequate income would look like. And so, what they’ve said is there are constituent elements of an adequate standard of living, and it includes income, but it also includes food and housing, and they’ve articulated food and housing but not income.
In other bodies within the UN, there is a, for example, UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty. And those rapporteurs have tried to define what would be violative of the right to an adequate standard of living in terms of poverty. They talk about social protection floors that have to meet certain levels, and dignity being the real driver and a real recognition that particular groups will fall victim to poverty and victim to an undignified life or a life without dignity. So, it’s like that. It’s very difficult, of course, to come up with universal standards in light of the different economic development in different countries around the world. That’s part of the problem.
But I mean, it’s just obvious. That’s what I love about human rights. This is obvious that the rates in Canada are not adequate. You can’t have rates that deny people, where people have to count calories, skip meals, go without heat, go without cooling, or can’t even live anywhere or are living in tent encampments. We have the tent largest economy in the world and we may cry poor with US tariffs on our back, etc. We may cry poor, but if we can increase our defense spending by X, whatever amount it is through NATO in a short period of time, I think we can ensure that we have higher social assistance rates.
I mean, part of the problem, though, and this is not to take us too far afield and into housing, but you can’t just keep raising social assistance rates so that people can afford unaffordable apartments. Right? There has to be pressure on bringing the cost of housing and the cost of food down. I mean, when I go to the No Frills near me. $5.99 for a pound of butter. $6.99, sometimes it’s up at $8.99. Right? I mean, the stranglehold on food is as bad as it is on housing. And we need more social housing, that’s obvious. We need more deeply affordable housing, but I think we also need to bring down existing housing prices in the private market. The whole thing has to come down just like we need to bring down the cost of bread and butter and milk, etc.
Jennefer Laidley:
Yeah, just to close that up, I mean, I guess just to agree with you. When 71 per cent of the households that we looked at are living in deep poverty, the question becomes a little bit moot, right? Like all of these folks, when 98 per cent of the households we look at are living in poverty. Any movement towards the poverty line is helpful movement in this instance.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
So, we are at two minutes. I had in advance promised everyone to have a final word. I don’t think you can really say anything meaningful in 30 seconds, to be quite honest. In fact, I think even trying to talk about the layers and layers of what’s contained in this report within an hour is a disservice to the problem that we are wrestling with. But I’m going to give Leilani and Jennefer the last word. I’m not going to give you a question, I’m going to give you the last word. But, where do we go? The point of this is, how do we address it? We’ve talked about a whole bunch of policy challenges, human rights frameworks. You got the final word, you’ve got a minute each. I’m sorry, this is just wrong.
Jennefer Laidley:
Well, I would just say that, I mean, I’ve been doing this kind of work for a very long time, and it always seems as though nothing really changes, and it can be very disheartening and very depressing. And I think that in my lifetime we’ve seen a significant shift away from standards of adequacy, away from thinking about the needs, the real day-to-day needs of people, and towards thinking about the needs of folks who supposedly drive the economy and are the 1 per cent.
I think that one of the things, and we talked about this earlier a couple of days ago, I think one of the things that’s really important is that we need to, all of us need to do our part in changing the narrative around social assistance and around who folks on social assistance are, around social assistance and the relationship to work, around the value of individual human beings as individual human beings and their right to live a life of dignity. So when you see the person who’s obviously struggling, not to think of them as having something wrong with them, but to realize that what we’re seeing in the tent and cabins across this country is a failure of government policy. It’s a failure of our social programs. It’s a failure of our governments to do what they need to do in order to support people. And the more that we talk about it in that way, the less we’re demonizing the individuals.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
Yes. Leilani?
Leilani Farha:
I see we’re at the top of the hour. I liked everything Jennefer said, I’ll just add, in 1948, there was this notion of the human family. That’s what was really being talked about, that we are all part of the human family with inalienable rights that attach to us because we are human beings. Not because we earned them, worked for them, whatever, but because we are human beings and we need to breathe life into that idea.
Elizabeth McIsaac:
And that is the final word on this. For now, we all have a lot of work to do. I know that in the audience, we have people who are working really hard every day to organize around this, to shift policy, to shift how we do this work and to create space, to engage people with lived experience to help guide the way on this work. So, I thank everyone that has joined us today. I thank our panelists, I thank the researchers who have done the work. And I wish we didn’t have to, but we will continue the conversation. For all the questions that are in the chat, we will try to follow up with you and that will inform our work going forward. Thank you for being here.