Life stabilization and resiliency for disabled people? A critical discourse analysis of the Ontario poverty reduction strategy

Abstract

In 2020, the government of Ontario, Canada, introduced Building a Strong Foundation for Success: Reducing Poverty in Ontario (2020-2025), the province’s third poverty reduction strategy. This study employs Critical Discourse Analysis to explore the discourses that emerge in this strategy and examine instances of intertextuality between it and previous strategy iterations. Several discourses (re)emerge suggesting that people living in poverty, and disabled _people specifically, must ‘realize their potential’ by becoming more ‘resilient’ and work towards ‘life stabilization’. The ‘self-sufficiency’ discourse in prior poverty reduction strategies, recast as ‘independence’ in this newest rendition, anchors the strategy to problematic understandings of ‘dependency’. The systemic causes of poverty are negated, as is a rights-based framework for poverty alleviation. The Ontario government does not define the poverty reduction strategy’s success in terms of poverty reduction, but as mere social assistance caseload reductions, and as such, has built ‘a strong foundation for its lackluster success’.

Points of Interest

• In 2020, the government of Ontario, Canada released its third poverty strategy, entitled Building a Strong Foundation for Success: Reducing Poverty in Ontario (2020-2025).

• A way of doing research called Critical Discourse Analysis was adopted by the authors to explore how language was used in the poverty strategy to identify how people living in poverty, and disabled people specifically, should behave in order for them to be considered successful.

• We discuss several discourses (themes in the language of the poverty strategy) in our analysis related to the need for people on social assistance, including disabled people, to ‘realize their potential’ by becoming more ‘resilient’, ‘independent’, and work towards ‘life stabilization’

• Recent actions by the government to outsource its employment supports to private companies, and the hiring of fraud investigators to question the authenticity of people’s claims to disability income supports, are worrying trends.

Keywords:

• basic income
• Critical Disability Studies
• disabled people
• poverty
• poverty reduction strategy
• social assistance