Canadian Social Assistance & Poverty Trends

There is a lack of research on Canadian Social Assistance (SA) that focuses on education (through quantitative analysis), the working poor, and across economic regions. This dissertation builds upon previous research by addressing these important gaps in Canadian literature about Social Assistance (SA) and poverty. First, through logistic regression, we analyze SA caseloads across the ten provinces by including education, measures for capturing the working poor, and other demographic data to determine who is most likely to claim SA and in which provinces. Next, we use panel tax data to examine trends of exit from SA across industries by fitting a logistic regression measuring employment success rates of persons reliant on SA across ten Canadian provinces. Lastly, we employ a novel approach to studying poverty in Canada by employing a shift-share regression across economic regions to decompose the variation attributed to those living in the bottom decile of the income distribution. Taken together, the findings point to a shift in SA caseloads: SA caseloads are changing, and single men are no longer the main group of recipients. Next, some provinces, namely Quebec, have lower SA participation rates. We also provide evidence for factors that are conducive to employment success of SA recipients: increased SA benefit levels and unionization are protective factors against SA reliance. Lastly, we provide additional research that paints a vivid picture of poverty in Canada. Namely, that income inequality is increasing, and that students, women, immigrants, persons living or working on Reserve, and younger individuals continue to live in economically precarious situations. We further find evidence of slight attenuation of income inequality across gay and lesbian couples from 2000-2018