Working poverty is pervasive, racialized, and until the pandemic, was increasing in Toronto and across Canada. Until the pandemic, this increase was counterintuitive, during 2006 to 2016, as most of this ten-year period had been characterized by one of the most prolonged economic recoveries in...

Building the Case provides evidence for the federal government to urgently step up to support single, working-age adults in Canada. This group experiences Canada’s highest and deepest rates of poverty and some of the country’s highest rates of food insecurity.  By analyzing publicly...

The federal government has indicated that it will expand WITB by approximately $250 million per year beginning in 2019 to “provide additional benefits that roughly offset incremental Canada Pension Plan (CPP) contributions for eligible low-income workers.”1 The changes to CPP will be phased in,...

This is a report on child poverty in British Columbia and connections to the working poor, employment insecurity, living on low incomes, and gives policy recommendations to respond to this...

In 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 46.7 million people, or 14.8 percent of the nation’s population, lived below the official poverty level. Although the poor were primarily children and adults who had not participated in the labor force during the year, according to data from the...

This is a case study of "The Johnsons," a family studied as part of the U.S. Financial Diaries project. The Johnsons have significant challenges keeping their family afloat. Despite multiple sources of income, which include education aid, their income is volatile and irregular. Their expenses also...

We have to consider the implications of working poverty in Canada’s richest city. The working poor cannot buy homes on their wages and many use food banks and other services to meet their basic needs. At the same time, shifts in the labour market suggest declining opportunities for a growing...

This paper introduces two new concepts to the debate on job quality: the low-wage gap and low-wage intensity. These two measures provide information on the depth and severity of low wages. Using Labour Force Survey microdata, we discuss trends in these two measures, along with trends in the...

A recent study published by the Metcalf Foundation found that Metro Vancouver had the second-highest rate of working poverty of any major city in Canada in 2012, with a rate only slightly lower than Greater Toronto. This report digs deeper into the data from the Metcalf Foundation study, maps the...

This is the Summer 2016 issue of OnPolicy, put out by the CCPA Ontario. This issue includes articles on working poverty by neighbourhood, food insecurity, academic work and employment precarity, and...

Simply doing away with payday loans will help some, but it will also hurt others. To truly improve the small dollar credit market, increased access to well-structured and more affordable small dollar credit (what this paper refers to as enabling small-dollar credit) is vital. Building an enabling...

The group we analyze throughout this paper is simply the poorest one-third of all families in the U.S. with an able-bodied head between the ages of 25 and 54 (hereafter struggling families or households). This group is larger than the population in poverty (although 83 percent of them fall below...