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In 2008, Nathan Laurie calculated the costs of poverty in Canada and Ontario for the first time. Since then, several researchers have used the approach he developed to calculate the costs of poverty for most of the Canadian provinces. This research has had a substantial impact on the thinking of the public and policy makers around poverty and poverty reduction in Canada. In this working paper, we distill the central tenants of Laurie’s approach and recommend several improvements that can be made to it. In effect, Laurie’s approach works with readily available data to answer the counterfactual question: what would the savings and gains be to individuals and society if we raised the standard of living of the poor to the modest level achieved by the second income quintile or higher? In several places, however, his approach results in estimates of costs that are insensitive to changes in widely recognized measures of poverty, including Canada’s new Official Poverty Line, otherwise known as the Market Basket Measure (MBM). In the latter sections of this paper, we reproduce Laurie’s original calculations and contrast these with results based on our own recommendations in the same year. Our recommendations generate comparable results.

Poverty reduction strategies (PRS) have become a popular instrument for addressing poverty globally. In Canada, all ten provinces have committed to adopting PRS. The province’s commonalities and differences provide an ideal testing ground for studying their effects. Do PRS actually reduce poverty? According to their detractors, governments use PRS as ‘window dressing’ to gloss over unsuccessful poverty reduction efforts. In this study, I identify the timing of the introduction of PRS action plans and explore whether they have coincided with changes in provincial poverty rates. I find that more often than not rates have dropped before rather than after the introduction of PRS. This suggests that governments have indeed used PRS as window dressing, but to showcase and claim credit for poverty reduction successes.

According to leading sociological thinking the mind is shaped by wider society; however, this is not reflected in fields that take the mind as their primary object of study. In this study, we administer a modified version of Tversky and Kahneman’s seminal framing experiment to a representative sample of Canadians. In the past, framing experiments have been administered to a far more homogenous group of people: current and former students at elite universities. Our design allows us to explore which groups of people actually exhibit different cognitive biases. We find that the majority of people in our experiment do not exhibit loss aversion bias and that several people exhibit an opposite bias we call “turtling.” Turtlers prefer smaller certain options when choices are framed as losses and larger uncertain options when they are framed as gains. We find that people that suffer low capability, measured by a person’s risk of experiencing low income based on their various socio-demographic characteristics, are far more likely to turtle than others.

Chronos politics refers to the political mobilization of age groups and/or cohorts. In the popular media, commentators accuse Baby Boomers of using their large relative cohort size to force welfare states to shortchange smaller generations. Ironically, Western society used to be afraid that their disproportionate size would cause the Baby Boomers to be shortchanged. Our paper uses population and expenditure data on 24 countries to explore how the relative size of age groups affects expenditures in five areas of social spending: active labour market policies (ALMP), family, health, old age, and unemployment. We find that contrary to popular perceptions, per capita spending tends to lag behind demographic changes, resulting in shortages and windfalls for larger and smaller generations, respectively.