This is the central lie of Canadian governance, a deep structural deceit whispered in the marble halls of power and shouted in the desperate soup kitchen lines, that poverty and hunger are natural phenomena, inevitable byproducts of complex global forces, regrettable but uncontrollable externalities of a thriving economy.
The narrative is a deliberate distortion designed to evade moral responsibility and commit grave political wrongdoing. Canada, a prosperous nation, is abandoning its most vulnerable citizens, leading to soaring poverty and starving children. This catastrophe is wrongly labelled a temporary economic headwind, not a policy failure. We must immediately reject this sanitised view.
The evidence is overwhelming and utterly damning. Canada’s official poverty rate, measured by the Market Basket Measure (MBM), is expected to have climbed significantly to 10.2% in 2023, reversing years of hard-won progress and signalling a structural breaking point.
This distressing climb follows a staggering 21.8% jump in the poverty rate just from 2021 to 2022, confirming that the economic floor supporting low-income Canadians is fragile, inadequate, and wholly dependent on temporary governmental goodwill, which is now receding.
Look around and watch the financial anxiety spread like a contagion through every province. One in six Canadian households now experiences food insecurity, representing a crushing 15.6% prevalence in 2022.
This rate of insecurity closely tracks peak inflation and the soaring costs of necessities like shelter and transportation, confirming the economic origins of hunger. When Food Banks Canada assesses the country’s performance, it returns a dismal D grade for meeting food security needs and a failing grade for food insecurity overall. This is not an evaluation of charitable success, but an indictment of a state that failed its most basic duty, which is to ensure its citizens do not go hungry.
The moral obscenity is most acute when we count the children. 2.5 million children in the ten provinces are now growing up in food-insecure households in 2024, representing a third of all Canadian children, condemned to the stress and lifelong stigma of going without because their government prioritised fiscal inertia over feeding its young.
The rapid collapse in basic material well-being, evidenced by the increase from 2.1 million children in 2023, shows economic growth is failing to benefit everyone, resulting in stark, widening inequality.
These failures are most clearly demonstrated when examining the key indicators of structural neglect, showing a distinct reversal of progress immediately following the temporary relief offered during the pandemic years.
How Ottawa hurt workers
The structural origins of this current catastrophe can be traced back to the deliberate economic restructuring that began decades ago, a political project rooted in the neoliberal dogma that crushed the manufacturing sector and enshrined labour precarity as the new normal, ensuring that wages would stagnate while the cost of living exploded.
We see this criminal neglect in the data on wages. Overall median household income increased by a paltry 14.6% over 41 years between 1976 and 2017 in constant dollars. This near-stagnation of pay, spanning generations, confirms that the rewards of national productivity have been systematically diverted away from the workers who generate them.
Income inequality has persisted at or near record highs over the past decade. It has been engineered through policy choices that systematically weakened collective bargaining power.
When policy analysts discuss precarious employment, they are talking about a quantifiable lack of security, low wages, income volatility, and little opportunity for career advancement. This is the changing nature of work dictated by economic policy, a deliberate erosion of worker protections.
Worse still, the Canadian state has actively constructed a system of legal exploitation through its Temporary Foreign Worker Programme, a scheme that privileges corporate access to cheap labour over the human rights of migrants.
The policy shift favouring temporary migration over permanent residency has created a vast, vulnerable underclass of workers who are denied access to federally funded settlement services and are often bound to single employers, subjecting them to abuse and limiting their mobility. The absence of systematic monitoring to ensure their rights are protected further cements their precarious status, making them highly vulnerable to mistreatment.
This structure is marketed as necessary for economic efficiency, but it functions as a wage suppressor, ensuring that low-wage firms retain talent without having to offer competitive wages or working conditions.
The expansion of the TFWP, as experts have shown, actively contributes to maintaining wider discrepancies in regional unemployment rates than would otherwise exist, preventing the structural adjustments necessary to raise wages for all low-income Canadians.
The system is creating a two-tier economy, which is precarious by design and ensuring that those who harvest our food and staff our services remain perpetually marginal.
The long-term wage stagnation, when directly contrasted with the explosive growth in housing prices, a phenomenon where home prices in major markets rose by as much as 460% over three decades, fundamentally proves that political decisions prioritised capital accumulation and speculative wealth over worker compensation, a moral betrayal that doomed millions to financial strain even while holding down jobs.
How US Power crippled Canada
Being a neighbour to the world’s richest country should be a blessing, at least on paper. But Canadians have, until very recently, held deep fear of being a satellite, or vassal state to the great American hegemon. The anxiety was so terrible that in 1957, the “Gordon Commission” rang the alarm bells about the US economic takeover. By the early 1960s, the US interests controlled roughly 60% of Canada’s manufacturing and 70% of its oil and gas.
It’s important to note that just 15 years prior, Great Britain was Canada’s number one customer. World War II had wrecked Britain, and the English population could no longer buy Canadian goods. The Arctic giant had come out of the Great War without any casualties to citizens or factories, but was losing to the economic imperialism of its exceptional neighbour. In 1955, Canada had the highest standard of living in the world. The US slowly and steadily captured the Canadian market. And Canadians embraced protectionism as a policy, much like how the US under Trump operates today. American companies had to manufacture in Canada if they had to sell in Canada. This made American goods in Canada slightly more expensive than in America, but it also meant Canadians had ownership, jobs and a robust economy.
All this came to an end in the late 60s when the “Clarence Decatur Howe” Strategy came into being under the Canadian Minister of Trade (C.D. Howe). He aggressively courted American investment. His view was, “Who cares if they own it, as long as the jobs are here?” This policy built modern Canada, but laid the foundation for the dependency that exists today.
In 1965, Canada took the first step towards the forfeiture of its economic servitude. A move that would enrich Canada temporarily at the expense of the future of working-class Canadians and children. The Auto Pact (1965) destroyed Canada’s automobile industry. Many domestic industries went bust and America brought its branch plants into Canada. Ottawa became an assembly line with no access to real R&D or innovation. Yet Canadians were happy to have jobs.
In 1989, a comprehensive free trade agreement was signed that included all sectors of the economy, not just automobiles. This led to factories shutting down and relocating to the United States, and later to Mexico. As a result, there was widespread unemployment, and poverty levels rose significantly. Social spending was also reduced, causing the standard of living to decline. This marked the beginning of the decline of the Canadian dream, sacrificed for the benefit of American businesses and facilitated by Canadian politicians working on behalf of American lobbyists.
Today, an astonishing 77% of Canada’s exports are sent to the United States. This dependency gives the US considerable leverage; if America alters its trade policies—such as imposing 10% tariffs on aluminium or enforcing “Buy American” provisions—the Canadian economy feels the impact. The Canadian people took a bad deal, and to top it all off, the Trudeau government started a massive migration campaign to protect the housing bubble. But Canada’s poor and working class are the ones who suffer at every turn. From a nation with the highest living standards to economic indenture, Canada has come a long way and might want to rethink its policies and allies.
The decades-long policy crime
Of all the policy decisions in Canadian history, none more clearly embodies political malice than the federal government’s calculated withdrawal from social housing in the mid-1990s. More than any other decision, it entrenched the structural divide between those who own property and those condemned to struggle without it.
The evidence is surgical in its precision. The federal government froze social housing investments in 1993, ended its co-operative housing programme in its 1992 budget, and by 1995, it ceased funding new affordable housing development entirely, ending a 50-year commitment to shelter the most vulnerable. This act of institutional cruelty was immediately followed by the devolution of existing social housing administration to provincial and municipal governments in 1999.
This devolution coincided with the replacement of the “Canada Assistance Plan”, which had provided open-ended, 50-50 cost-sharing for social programmes, with the fixed, inadequate block grants of the Canada Health and Social Transfer. This manoeuvre effectively starved the social housing sector of resources, ensuring that between 1995 and 2002 almost no new non-profit units were created, a historical failure that created the decades-long supply void and the affordability crisis we now face.
The gap created by the government’s withdrawal was eagerly filled by financial speculators, transforming housing from a fundamental human right into the primary means of wealth generation for the middle and upper classes. Policies that supported the securitisation of mortgages fuelled the financialization of the housing sector, completely disconnecting increases in housing prices from economic fundamentals and income levels.
The result is that in major urban centres like the Greater Toronto Area, home prices jumped over 436% between 1994 and 2024, while household incomes climbed only about 34.6% over the same period.
The tragic consequence of this policy crime is visible on every street corner across the country. Over 10% of Canadian households, equating to 1.5 million individuals, are currently in ‘core housing need,’ and Canada is experiencing the proliferation of unstructured encampments in large, medium, and smaller cities.
When vulnerable people are discharged from systems like hospitals, corrections facilities, or mental health facilities and find no exit housing, they are forced directly into homelessness, a system failure directly attributable to the decades-old policy of gutting affordable housing programmes.
This lack of non-profit and cooperative housing supply is a systemic factor, compounded by high inflation and rising interest rates, demonstrating that the market cannot be relied upon to solve the crisis created by the state’s retreat.
And let us not forget the green blunder. As per policy think tank Fraser Institute, the previous Justin Trudeau government introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives, and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the administration termed the “green” economy. However, the results were not encouraging.
Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects, banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia, proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.
“Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs. Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the ‘green sector,’ a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1%. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6% of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating,” the Fraser Institute remarked.
Ottawa’s initiatives failed to deliver the promised green jobs. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, which now represents less than 2% of total employment. Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation.
According to the Canadian living standards (measured by per-person GDP), lifestyle prosperity was recorded on the lower side as of Q2 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, Canadians are poorer today than they were six years ago. In contrast, the United States’ per-person GDP grew by 11.0% during the same period.
Cruel math of the safety net
The sheer, calculated cruelty of Canada’s current social safety net is evident in its outcomes. The system is fragmented, difficult to access, inefficient, outdated, inadequate, and is a bureaucratic maze meant to traumatise and deter those who seek aid.
The defining failure of this system is its persistence in keeping people in poverty. An annual report shows that 98% of household types receiving social assistance in Canada are below the country’s Official Poverty Line.
Furthermore, 73% of these households are trapped in deep poverty, defined as having less than 75% of the poverty threshold. This is clear evidence that social assistance is quite literally designed to be a poverty trap, normalising destitution rather than facilitating escape.
This calculated inadequacy is exacerbated by rapid economic erosion, particularly due to high inflation. Between 2023 and 2024, more than a third of welfare recipients, 36% of tracked households, saw their total incomes increase at a rate below inflation, meaning that in real dollars, they are becoming poorer every year, actively losing ground against the rising cost of living.
This real income decline occurred despite some provinces attempting to offer one-time cost-of-living supports, demonstrating that the underlying provincial social assistance benefit rates are simply too low and frequently stagnant. When provinces like Ontario fail to adjust basic social assistance benefits, it is a conscious decision to normalise destitution and push vulnerable citizens deeper into the deprivation abyss.
This systemic cruelty falls hardest on specific groups. The poverty rate among people with disabilities is drastically high, solely because the benefits provided are fundamentally detached from the actual, significantly higher costs of living with a disability. The increasing reliance on the “Ontario Disability Support Programme,” as shown in Ontario data, reflects the reality that people with disabilities are being failed by both the labour market and an inadequate social net, leading to their over-representation in the poverty statistics.
For new parents, the mandated drop in income resulting from “Employment Insurance” benefits during maternity and parental leave creates significant financial stress precisely when costs are highest, a structural contradiction that pushes middle-class families toward financial instability.
Furthermore, Canada remains the only G7 nation without a comprehensive national school food programme, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that such programmes are highly successful drivers of improved health, education, and economic growth internationally. International experience, notably programmes like the United States’ “National School Lunch Programme,” shows that school meals yield a massive return on investment. Yet Canadian policymakers prioritise corporate tax breaks and speculative wealth over ensuring that millions of children eat nutritious food. This is a policy of moral bankruptcy.
And what of the medical costs? The financial burden of necessary prescription drugs is a known structural driver of poverty, yet Canada maintains significant gaps in coverage, refusing to implement a national pharmacare plan that works like Medicare. This deliberate policy decision forces low-income families and workers to choose between medicine and food, increasing health disparities and driving up overall healthcare costs unnecessarily. The political resistance is rooted in fears over escalating costs, yet a national plan would save Canadian families money while expanding access.
Indictment of a nation
From the destruction of stable manufacturing jobs under free trade to the calculated withdrawal of social housing funding in the 1990s, from the institutionalisation of precarious migrant labour to the maintenance of a welfare system designed to keep people in deep poverty, every data point confirms this reality. The combination of various crises has increased the desperation of the population, resulting from these compounded policy failures.
The evidence presented by national bodies and academic experts is indisputable. The “Market Basket Measure” tells us that the working poor cannot afford a modest, basic standard of living. Statistics Canada confirms that food insecurity tracks peak inflation, and human rights advocates warn that the refusal to make the right to food justiciable is the ultimate mechanism of governmental evasion.
The “Poverty Reduction Strategy”, launched in 2018, while ambitious in its targets, has stalled dramatically, showing that good intentions without enforceable rights and structural economic correction are merely political rhetoric.
Canada must choose immediately between two futures, one where we continue this shameful path of structural neglect, managing poverty through ineffective charity and political platitudes, and one where we implement a rights-based, income-guaranteed system that recognises the dignity and inherent worth of every person.