Causes Of Poverty In Canada

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Poverty is an exceptionally complicated social phenomenon, and trying to discover its causes is equally complicated. According to the Statistical Profile of Poverty in Canada (2009), 9.2% of Canadians- some 2.95 million people- are living on a low income. These people are living under the low income cut-off (LICO), meaning that they spend 20 percent more of their after tax income than the average person on the necessities of life, such as food, clothing, and shelter (Witt & Hermiston, 2010, p. 226). These include children, families with single-parent mothers, aboriginals, the mentally ill, the physically handicapped, recent immigrants, and students. For me, as a student of ECE program, child poverty is very important. Statistics Canada…show more content…
Still other theorists have characterized the poor as fatalists, resigning themselves to a culture of poverty in which nothing can be done to change their economic outcomes. In this culture of poverty—which passes from generation to generation—the poor feel negative, inferior, passive, hopeless, and powerless. Feminist theories of poverty are naturally concerned with women’s poverty. They are new and old. Mostly they concentrate on who gets what and why through the lens of why women get what and who sets the agenda. The feminist theoretical perspective focuses on the differential treatment of men and women as well as other inequalities (Witt & Hermiston, 2010, p.14). This is quite evident in the discrepancy among the poverty rates between men and women. “Feminist theorists have attributed higher rates of female poverty to factors such as the lack of affordable child care and sex discrimination in the labour market (Witt & Hermiston, 2010, p. 228)”. Feminists also attribute the feminization of poverty to women's vulnerability brought about by the patriarchal, sexist, and gender-biased nature of Western society, which does not value protecting women's rights and…show more content…
CliffsNotes.com. Causes and Effects of Poverty. Retrieved Jul 11, 2012, from http://www.cliffsnotes.com/study_guide/topicArticleId-26957,articleId-26882.html 2. Poverty. (2012, July 2). In Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 19:48, July 10, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Poverty&oldid=500305998 3. Witt, J. & Hermiston, A.J. (2010). SOC: A matter of perspective (Canadian Ed.). New York, NY: McGraw- Hill

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