Two decades of poverty reduction politics in Canada: Better for single parent families and single working age adults?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past two decades, poverty reduction entered and often stayed on the political agenda of Canada’s jurisdictions, generating a trail of government reports documenting many actions and spanning multiple election cycles. This paper investigates whether this social inclusion-oriented policy environment improved the position of single parent families and single working age adults, two groups at particularly high risk of experiencing poverty. They are also more likely to face multiple barriers making it harder for them to avoid or escape poverty. Using microdata from the Canadian Income Survey (CIS) and its predecessor (1999-2017), we analyze poverty changes in a relative sense (compared to the typical Canadian) and an absolute sense (purchasing power). Our model controls for changes in demographic and regional characteristics and uses households consisting of multiple working age adults as a reference. Against the backdrop of substantive declines in absolute poverty with little change in relative poverty levels for Canada as a whole, we find that the poverty disadvantage declined for both groups. However, although improvements for single parent families have been strong and widespread, improvements for single adults of working age have been smaller and were more concentrated in provinces experiencing stronger economic growth. These results support the claim that governments prioritize the inclusion of families with dependent children while the inclusion of single working age adults is largely left to the fortunes of the economy. Notwithstanding the progress documented here, poverty rates of these high poverty risk groups remain far above Canada’s average and single working age adults continue to experience deeper than average poverty gaps.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".