Overview

For a country as wealthy as Canada, poverty is utterly unnecessary. In About Canada: Poverty, Jim Silver illustrates that poverty is about more than a shortage of money: it is complex and multifaceted and can profoundly damage the human spirit. At the centre of this analysis are Canada's neoliberal economic policies, which have created conditions that make a growing number of people vulnerable to low income, vanishing public services and poor physical health. Silver also highlights the ways in which poverty is intimately connected to colonialism and racial and gender discrimination, and finds that the political and economic policies enacted by the Canadian government serve only a powerful minority, while producing a range of negative outcomes for the rest of us, especially the poor. Silver points out that the costs of poverty - relating to health care, crime, education and unemployment - are higher than the costs of solving poverty, and he lays out an achievable strategy for its dramatic reduction in Canada. When poverty is understood as resulting from political choices, its elimination requires putting pressure on governments to ensure that different choices are made.

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9781552666814

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Reviews

Comprehensive and often provocative, this book represents a major contribution to our understanding of poverty in Canada. It explains the nature of poverty as variegated and complex, and acknowledges that poverty is gendered and racialized and that it has a spatial dimension. --Grace-Edward Galabuzi, Department of Politics and Public Administration, Ryerson University

Author Information

"Jim Silver is a professor in and chair of the Department of Urban and Inner-City Studies, University of Winnipeg. He is a long-time academic, researcher and activist in Manitoba and Canadian politics. He is the author, or co-author, of several books, including Building a Better World, In Their Own Voices and ""Indians Wear Red."""

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