Assigned the task of studying social conditions in Canadian cities, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology‘s Subcommittee on Cities chose to begin with people whose lives in those cities are marginalized by poverty, housing challenges and even homelessness. The most vulnerable among city-dwellers in Canada were our starting place. We set out to determine how governments, businesses and the voluntary sector were able to help people escape poverty. To our distress, we found that decades of social policy making at different levels of government have had two possibly devastating results.