Book Review: Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids: The Tragedy And Disgrace Of Poverty In Canada
Comments about people having trouble getting by are everywhere these days. People wonder how blue-collar TV characters like Married…With Children’s Al Bundy can afford two-story houses and multiple children on their incomes. Political leaders like Donald Trump and Pierre Poilievre have gained support off the widespread anger many people feel about being ‘left behind’ by the impacts of trade deals, neoliberalism and globalization as they’ve been practiced for the last 30+ years. Justin Trudeau became elected in part for recognizing how ‘middle class’ Canadians felt left behind by economic changes. Both left-wing and right-wing populism have risen in various parts of the world. There’s a lot of debate over whether Canada is ‘broken’, but many Canadians are arguably at their breaking points. The House of Commons’ own report indicates how much child poverty has risen in Canada. Young Canadians have an increasingly hard time finding homes they can afford. The International Monetary Fund, which is hardly known for its left-wing street cred, is sounding the alarm on income inequality.
In short, Mel Hurtig has been a prophet.
Reading Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids in 2023 is like reading the account of someone who visited the present day using a time machine and returned to 1999.
Hurtig, who died in 2016, was a passionate Canadian nationalist. He fiercely advocated against the neoliberal economic model Canada has pursued for the last few decades, which included signing ‘free trade’ and against further economic andpolitical integration with the United States. That neoliberal model entailed repeatedly cutting taxes and social spending, weakening governments’s ability to do things. It also surrendered a vast amount of power to private businesses and unregulated markets, as well as unelected, unaccountable trade bureaucrats, under the belief that they’d make things better for everyone.
He wrote several books illustrating what he considered the damage the agreements, integration and model did to Canadian society, including Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids: The Tragedy And Disgrace Of Poverty in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999). In some of his other books, Hurtig was notable for his fiery prose. He even called his political opponents ‘traitors’ and ‘sellouts’, sometimes undermining his message. Hurtig restrains himself in Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids, instead focusing on analyzing the statistics illustrating how bad things were at the end of the 20th century.
Reading Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids in 2023 is like reading the account of someone who visited the present day using a time machine and returned to 1999. Citing stats from reputable sources like Statistics Canada and The Economist magazine, Hurtig paints a damning picture of Canadian social policy and progress in the 1990s. He shows how poverty rates in Canada have risen; how social support programs that benefited poorer Canadians have been brutally cut; how many of the new jobs being created in the 1990s after the signing of the 1988 Free Trade Agreement were more precarious and lower-paying than the jobs created before the FTA; how governments and right-leaning think tanks moved the goalposts on poverty by changing the statistical definition of poverty; the large rise in income inequality as the richest Canadians and companies reaped most of the gains of the 1990s; lower-income Canadians being derided as lazy and unwilling to work, the implication being that they deserved what happened to them.
He summarizes his conversations with Canadians from all walks of life, from schoolteachers to the parents of lower-income families to social workers to wealthy entrepreneurs. Hurtig never names these people, but they all put into focus what the statistics he cites mean for everyday Canadians in the street.
Hurtig points out all the problems with the neoliberal model practiced by the United States, problems that emerged in Canada the more it followed the same model. As I noted in my review of Michael Adams’ Could It Happen Here? Canada In The Age Of Trump And Brexit, that model has led to a huge populist backlash both in the U.S. with the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom. It’s also one of the reasons for Pierre Poilievre’s rising support here at home.
The most powerful part of the book is how Hurtig puts all this in context. He summarizes his conversations with Canadians from all walks of life, from schoolteachers to the parents of lower-income families to social workers to wealthy entrepreneurs. Hurtig never names these people, but they all put into focus what the statistics he cites mean for everyday Canadians in the street.
The pandemic just aggravated things even further. In 2020, more than 4 million people applied for federal income support. It also prompted a major break from the neoliberal model. Serious questions about the quality of foreign-made medical equipment like masks, and other countries’ restrictions on equipment exports, led the federal government to hire Canadian companies to locally produce more of the materials Canada made locally, even though it totally went against the principles of ‘free trade’. The federal government drastically increased spending to help Canadians get through the pandemic, overturning nearly three decades of cuts to taxation and spending. In the process, the government sharply reduced poverty rates. Polls suggested that Canadians widely supported Ottawa’s actions. Cracks were already starting to show in the neoliberal model even before the pandemic, but COVID further accelerated them.
At the time, Hurtig might have been dismissed as an anti-trade, anti-American crank. His words take on an entirely different light in an era where conservative and liberal politicians are both making gains from criticizing the neoliberal model, populism’s on the rise and even international financial organizations are worried about the state of things.
Later in the book, Hurtig provides several ideas on how to address poverty in Canada. One of the most prominent is to create a series of ‘Canadian Child Care Community Centers’ that would help struggling families, parents and children. They’d be staffed with well-trained and paid educators and caregivers who’d help families with everything from childcare to accessing social services, community activities and employment aids to helping them improve school attendance, self-confidence and anger/stress management to identifying possible abuse situations where social services might be needed.
Hurtig suggests that helping families this way would pay dividends in everything from increased workforce participation to reduced social service costs, as people would be better able to participate in the workforce, put less strain on the public health system and have less need for police intervention. Quebec’s provincial daycare program is a good example of what Hurtig’s talking about, having improved women’s workforce participation and child development, all while effectively paying for itself.
He also discusses reforming other programs, such as youth employment and welfare, to make them clearer and more accessible to their users. He also criticizes the idea of ‘workfare’, where welfare recipients’ payments are reduced by how much they make in employment, for keeping people trapped in poverty, especially when they aren’t provided training or support to get better jobs. Hurtig shows that increasing peoples’ minimum wages and welfare rates, if accompanied by job training and access to education doesn’t dissuade them from working. It complements people’s own efforts, helping them help themselves.
Hurtig also touches on the appalling poverty in many Indigenous communities, particularly First Nations reserves. A lot of this comes from Ottawa underfunding social services and education for Native people compared to what the provinces spend on non-Native communities and services. It’s so bad that Canadian human rights tribunals have repeatedly ordered the government to provide equitable funding, and it continues to underfund these services despite the claims of federal Cabinet Ministers.
Obviously, the reforms Hurtig proposes would be really expensive. He ends the book with suggestions on how to fund his ideas. The most significant is his idea of reforming the tax system to close all kinds of loopholes, crack down on tax havens and cheating, review the tax breaks given to specific sectors of the economy, and cut taxes for lower-income citizens. Hurtig also proposes ways that the overall economy could function better in general, ranging from reducing foreign ownership of Canadian businesses to favouring exporting finished products over raw resources to more support for research and development in high-tech industries.
Hurtig’s proposals would represent a massive shift from the neoliberal model. For him, that change couldn’t come soon enough. Near the very end of the book, he writes about what he sees as a growing backlash against neoliberalism and globalization. At the time, Hurtig might have been dismissed as an anti-trade, anti-American crank. His words take on an entirely different light in an era where conservative and liberal politicians are both making gains from criticizing the neoliberal model, populism’s on the rise and even international financial organizations are worried about the state of things.
Hurtig ends the book with an impassioned plea that Canada could be better and do better. He compares the words of Canada’s leaders with the realities many of their citizens face. Some things may have changed for better, and Hurtig acknowledges the positive actions that were taken as he was writing the book. But the larger neoliberal framework still stands, and Canada still suffers from the larger problems it inflicts.
In Pay The Rent Or Feed The Kids, Hurtig reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way. He also offers us some ideas on how we could do things differently…
…and do them better.
