Canada and the World Backgrounder articles from March 2005

Canada and the World Backgrounder archives from March 2005

The problem of inequality: some people argue that the most successful societies produce the highest quality of life for the greatest number of people, and the best way to achieve that is through government policies. Others say nay, nay, anything less than a free-market society interferes with freedom.(POVERTY--INTRODUCTION)
March 1, 2005... There are lots of different ways of defining poverty. Lots of statistics. But for the millions of Canadians who are poor, the statistics mean little. The reality of being poor presents daily challenges and tough decisions. A single mother...

Deciding where poverty starts: as with many countries, there is no official measure of poverty in Canada, but there are several different ways of measuring low income.(POVERTY--DEFINITION)
March 1, 2005... Canada's standard method of calculating the country's poverty rate since the 1970s has been Statistics Canada's Low-Income Cutoff (LICO). It comes out of complicated and sometimes baffling calculations that not everybody is pleased with. The...

Putting a face on poverty: many think it's a disgrace that there should be homeless and poverty-stricken people in a country as rich as Canada, but hundreds of thousands of us are struggling financially.(POVERTY--WHO)(Homeless people, youth, women, immigrants and Aboriginal peoples)
March 1, 2005... The obvious victims of poverty are the people living on the streets, and their numbers have been increasing steadily over the last 15 years. There's no accurate figure on the number of homeless people in Canada. The very nature of homelessness...

Worlds apart.(POVERTY--DIVISION)(Gap between poor and rich)
March 1, 2005... The expressed goal of a great many government programs in Canada is income redistribution--to lessen the gap between the rich and the poor. Naturally, many of the rich are not terribly keen on this social value and argue that it stifles energy,...

Cutting services not poverty.(POVERTY--WELFARE)
March 1, 2005... Some provinces and territories contend that welfare income is intended to provide only the bare necessities of life, while the Low-Income Cut-Offs are high enough to allow some discretionary spending as well. But, critics argue that the only...

Poor families equal poor children: given the extent of poverty in Canada, particularly among single-parent families, it follows that many of the victims are children.(POVERTY--CHILDREN)
March 1, 2005... By 1996, the child poverty rate in Canada reached a 17-year peak of 21 percent, affecting 1.5 million Canadian children. At the time, provincial child poverty averaged from a low of 18.5% in Prince Edward Island to a high of 26.2% in Manitoba....

Looking after everyone: social policy in Scandinavian countries, in particular, is far more progressive than North American models. The system is universal (dependent not on contribution but on need), and has earned a reputation for providing superior public services that reduce class and income differences.(POVERTY--MODELS)
March 1, 2005... In 1928, Sweden's Prime Minister Per Albin Hansson, described his vision of the future welfare state by saying it would be accomplished by "tearing down social and economic barriers, that separate the privileged from the poor, the rulers from...

Quote ... unquote.
March 1, 2005... "... no matter how successful the Nordic model may be in producing and expanding human welfare, it will always be subject to attack as long as human nature remains at its current stage of evolution." The Nordic News Network "My major...

A call to action.(Introduction)(Nelson Mandela gives a speech about a poverty in London, on February 2005)
March 1, 2005... Nelson Mandela went to Britain's capital, London, in February 2005 to give a speech about poverty in the developing world. On a raw, winter day he drew a crowd of 22,000 people to Trafalgar Square. The location is a place of great...

Setting targets.(Millennium Development Goals)(Global poverty and social decline)
March 1, 2005... There was an impressive display of power on display in September 2000; the heads of state and/or government from 191 nations. Just about everybody who mattered in politics was at this important United Nations meeting. They gathered at the start...

A rigged game.(World Trade)
March 1, 2005... Aid activists say the rules of world trade leave the globe's poorest people, "Robbed, ripped off, and ruined." The group Make Poverty History backs up this provocative claim. "You may not be aware of them, but trade rules control how...

Relief in sight?(Debt)
March 1, 2005... There's a club nobody wants to join. The club has 38 members and they are all in desperate straights financially. In the jargon of the aid community these are Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPCs). They owe debts, mostly to the rich,...

Promises, promises.(Official Development Aid)(Finding solutions for the global poverty)
March 1, 2005... Aid is not the solution to global poverty; it's part of the solution but not the whole solution. There are others who argue that aid is part of the problem. For more than three decades, the world's richest countries have been promising to...

Ranking the rich.(Commitment to Development Index)
March 1, 2005... Why should rich countries care about development in poor ones? In our increasingly interconnected world nobody can live in complete isolation. Social problems that occur in one country will, eventually, have an impact in other, far distant,...

Assessing global threats.(Copenhagen Consensus Project)
March 1, 2005... The idea behind the Copenhagen Consensus Project was to set a list of priorities for improving the lives of the world's poor people. The project was run by Denmark's Environmental Assessment Institute with help from the Danish government. ...