Toronto's poor: working but not getting any richer

The Globe and Mail:

Across Canada, a job is no longer a ticket out of poverty, or a safeguard against it. And the number of people working but unable to make ends meet is growing in the country’s most populous urban hub – far faster than in Ontario or Canada as a whole. A study by Toronto researchers provided exclusively to The Globe and Mail provides a granular glimpse of working poverty at the census-tract level.

The Metcalf Foundation study, the first of its kind in Canada, documents the changing face of the Toronto area’s workforce.

And it isn’t pretty: Even during times of economic prosperity, from 2000 to 2005, the number of working people unable to make ends meet grew by 42 per cent in the Toronto area.

The exacerbation was especially pronounced in the city’s transit-starved east end. But rates grew fastest in the suburbs: Cities like Mississauga, Brampton, Markham and Vaughan are dealing with working poverty they’ve never faced before.

A deep recession and sluggish recovery haven’t helped.

“We’ve got a lot of people who are working very hard, and they’re still poor. So what’s up with that?” says Sandy Houston, Metcalf’s president.

“Maybe if we can better understand … we can start to better address the implications of that situation.”

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