Welfare reforms in Canada

Abstract

This study examines the development of impoverished pre-school children before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives in Canada. Using data from the 1994/95 and 1998/99 cycles of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, we explore the relationships that impoverished families’ income source and family income status have with pre-school children's school readiness. Findings indicate that both before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives, children in working poor families had higher school readiness scores than their peers whose families receive social assisntance, independent of family environment characteristics that differentiated working poor and social assistance poor families. In addition, both before and after the implementation of mandatory welfare-to-work initiatives, school readiness scores of poor children were lower than scores for non-poor children, with children living in families that had incomes at least 200 percent of the low-income cut-offs being the only group with scores above the expected standard of 100. In sum, our study fails to provide evidence that by the end of the 1990s welfare reforms supported the concurrent policy goal of improving the well-being of Canadian children in poverty.

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge funding for this project from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the support of Statistics Canada through the Research Data Centre Program. In addition, we would like to thank Diane Dennis for her assistance with some of the preliminary data analyses and Joelle Fawcett for her assistance with the preparation of the manuscript. In addition, we appreciate the valuable feedback that Janet Fast, Jerry Kachur, Norah Keating, and anonymous reviewers provided about early drafts of this paper. The opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors only. This manuscript is an expanded version of a presentation at the 95th Annual Conference of the Canadian Public Health Association, St. Johns, Newfoundland, June 2004.

Notes

Deanna Williamson, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research interests focus broadly on the well-being of families in poverty within the context of social, economic, and political environments. In particular, she is interested in the implications that policy has for impoverished families and their members. She is the principal investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's (SSHRCC) multidisciplinary research program examining the influences of welfare-to-work policies on the health and development of pre-school children in poverty.

Fiona Salkie, M.Sc., was the Project Manager of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's (SSHRCC) research program examining the influences of welfare-to-work policies on impoverished pre-school children from 2000 to 2003, during which time she and Deanna Williamson conducted the study discussed in this paper. As the Project Manager of this welfare-to-work research program, Fiona was responsible for the management and coordination of the studies comprising the research program, in addition to her research activities. She has an M.Sc. in applied economics from the University of Alberta.

We use “well-being” in this paper as a broad term that encompasses children's health and development. The terms “poverty,” “low-income,” and “impoverished” are used interchangeably to refer to the relative deprivation of the level of income that is necessary to meet basic needs and a standard of living that is consistent with the norms of the society within which one lives (Reitsma-Street and Townsend 1996; Ross, Scott, and Smith 2000).

The provision of social assistance in Canada is a provincial/territorial responsibility, with financial contributions coming from the federal government through a block fund, the Canada Social Transfer. Program features, such as eligibility criteria and the amount of income support and in-kind benefits provided to recipients, vary to some extent across Canada's 10 provinces and three territories. Despite these variations, all social assistance programs share the common purpose of providing short-term income support to individuals and families whose resources are inadequate to meet their basic needs and who have no other sources of public or private support. In other words, social assistance in Canada is a program of last resort (Clark 1998; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 1999b).

The Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) was a research and demonstration project conducted in two Canadian provinces—British Columbia and New Brunswick—in the early 1990s. It was managed by the Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) and is being evaluated by the Manpower Demonstration Corporation (MRDC). Similar to U.S. welfare-to-work experiments (Zaslow et al. 2002), the SSP used a random assignment research design and offered lone parents who had been receiving social assistance for more than one year the opportunity to receive an income supplement if they obtained full-time employment (30 hours per week) (Michalopoulos et al. 2002).

NLSCY 2001–2 released micro data.

Households located in the Territories and on Indian reserves are excluded from the NLSCY. The NLSCY collects data from economic families, which include all people living in a household who are related by blood, marriage, common-law relationship, or adoption, and includes foster children (Statistics Canada 1999).

Statistics Canada collects NLSCY data every two years. Thus, the fourth cycle of data was collected in 2000/01, and the fifth cycle in 2002/03. The full set of micro data from the fourth cycle was not available when we conducted our analyses in 2003.

All provinces and territories in Canada provide publicly funded kindergarten to 5-year-old children. Although kindergarten is mandatory in only three provinces (British Columbia, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia) and the territories, almost all children in Canada attend kindergarten prior to Grade 1 (Friendly, Beach, and Turiano 2002). Thus, it is likely that most 5-year-old children in the NLSCY sample who were not attending kindergarten when data were collected for the 1994/95 and 1998/99 cycles were too young to meet school board age criteria, but had since turned 5. In sum, given that kindergarten is publicly funded in Canada and that almost all children attend, it is very unlikely that non-attendance of kindergarten is associated with income status or income source.

The Statistics Canada low-income cut-offs (LICOs) are income levels at which families, differentiated by family size and the population of the community within which they live, spend 20 percent more of their pre-tax income on basic needs (food, shelter, clothing) than the percentage spent by Canadian families on average. The average proportion of income currently spent on basic needs has been estimated by Statistics Canada to be 34.7 percent. Thus, families whose expenditures on necessities exceed 54.7 percent of their pre-tax income are living below the LICOs (Ross, Scott, and Smith 2000). Statistics Canada does not describe the LICOs as poverty lines, but social policy observers and anti-poverty advocates generally regard them as such. Our decision to use the LICOs to identify families living in poverty was informed primarily by the inclusion of the LICOs in the NLSCY.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Deanna L. Williamson

Deanna Williamson, Ph.D., is an associate professor in the Department of Human Ecology, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research interests focus broadly on the well-being of families in poverty within the context of social, economic, and political environments. In particular, she is interested in the implications that policy has for impoverished families and their members. She is the principal investigator of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's (SSHRCC) multidisciplinary research program examining the influences of welfare-to-work policies on the health and development of pre-school children in poverty. Fiona Salkie, M.Sc., was the Project Manager of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's (SSHRCC) research program examining the influences of welfare-to-work policies on impoverished pre-school children from 2000 to 2003, during which time she and Deanna Williamson conducted the study discussed in this paper. As the Project Manager of this welfare-to-work research program, Fiona was responsible for the management and coordination of the studies comprising the research program, in addition to her research activities. She has an M.Sc. in applied economics from the University of Alberta.