By Klaus Rohrich
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
Given the Toronto Star's recent hysterical foray into Canada's looming "poverty crisis", it's a good time to explore exactly what constitutes "poverty". I can't decide what end game the country's poverty activists have in mind when they claim ridiculously that one in six Canadians lives in poverty, particularly since there is no official definition of "poverty". The numbers cited by the Star and their "experts" are relative numbers that define income distribution and the one-in-six figure is achieved through reliance on the low-income cut-off (or LICO), a StatsCan figure that arbitrarily measures relative wealth among Canadian wage earners. So using the Star's analyses for determining poverty there will always be poverty, as the LICO only ever measures wealth in relative terms, meaning that if the mean annual income in Canada is a million dollars per year, there will still be about 15% of the population that falls under the classification of "low income" relative to the rest.
Professor Chris Sarlo, Director of Nipissing University's School of Business and Economics, advocates a more realistic definition of poverty, a basic needs measure. Under this definition, which includes items such as home insurance, incidental health care costs as well as a family's laundry needs, the percentage of the population living in poverty decreases by nearly 50%. Professor Sarlo points out that the essential weakness of the LICO measurement is that it results in a family of four earning $34,000 per year being classified as poor and that the measure bears no actual relation to the cost of purchasing necessities. But that won't deter the Star and its dogooder legions.
Canada's poverty industry is working overtime to paint a poverty picture that's much worse than reality, as it is in the interest of the Left to make the issue of poverty worse in order to gain support for the redistribution of income. If we were to acquiesce to the demands of poverty activists, then we would in effect admit that poverty is a permanent state, from which one can't escape.
I'd like to offer another view of poverty and it involves the distinction between being poor and being broke. When one considers one's self to be poor, what one is essentially saying is that this state is permanent and can't be helped without outside intervention. In other words, it's a life sentence. When one is broke, it's a temporary state of affairs that will improve in due time. My own life experience has taught me the difference between being poor and being out of money.
If poverty activists were truly interested in eliminating "poverty", then they would do all they can to permanently alleviate poverty by encouraging those who are poor to look at themselves as salvageable. Rather than making funds available to continue living a subsistence lifestyle, enabling them the power and dignity to better their lot in life will do a lot more toward solving the problems of poverty.
Granted, there are always going to be poor people and granted that today breaking out of the cycle of poverty requires more than a buoyant economy, as factors such as low self-esteem and substance abuse often play a role in keeping individuals poor. But the true solution to the problem of poverty lies in making the needy aware that all is not lost, that there is hope for a better life and that the realization of that life is within their power to achieve.
Taking from the wealthy and giving to the poor will not defeat poverty. The only way out of poverty is to realize that being poor is as much a state of mind as it is a fiscal state of being. If you're poor, you'll be poor forever. If you're broke, then there's hope in the future. And the choice between the two is in the hands of the individual, not the poverty advocates.
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