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Reviewed by:
  • Persistent Poverty: Voices from the Margins
  • Kirsten Francescone
Jamie Swift, Brice Balmer and Mira Dineen, Persistent Poverty: Voices from the Margins (Toronto: Between the Lines 2010)

PersistentPoverty: Voices from the Margins presents the reader with a prime example of the delicate balance between scholarship and activism and the ways in which academic scholarship can challenge traditional ways of investigating and reporting. Methodologically this work is valuable for minimizing researcher-researched power imbalances. It allows for a sharing and collaboration of knowledge between the “researchers” and the “community” or the “researchers” and “researching assistants.” This collaboration ultimately produces a work much more rich in qualitative knowledge and understanding, and allows for the reader to identify the ways in which her/his life is affected by poverty. This book is extremely important in situating the poverty that occurs “out there” and “outside of us” directly within our lives and our experiences with fellow Canadians. As stated by Dave Bindi, quoted in this text, “when you live in a big city, homeless people start to become like pigeons … because they’re so ubiquitous, they seem part of the city’s wallpaper, which the citizenry largely moves past, rarely pausing to consider how near we are to their condition.” (15) Jamie Swift, Mira Dineen and the dedicated folks at the Interfaith Social Assistance Reform Coalition (isarc) contribute to the production of a counter-hegemonic discourse of poverty that, more than ever, is desperately needed in Ontario.

Jamie Swif t’s nuanced historical political-economic analysis and the reflexivity of the people he worked with maintain a balance to be appreciated, one that all researchers in the social sciences should strive to achieve. The methodology appears to be a morphing Community-Based Research methods, where collaboration between the investigator and the community organization – in this case, isarc – occurs to produce a more rounded and grounded knowledge. It is also important to recognize the extremely important work isarc engaged in by collecting the data for the 2010 social audit. In a country where less and less attention is paid to understanding and improving the social welfare of Canadians, it is important that documents and research like this continue to exist in order to counter Canadians’ dominant understandings of povert y with not only quantitative but also qualitative data. With little popular resistance to the government’s recent slashing of funding for critical poverty organizations like Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, it is clear that not only policy needs to be changed, but also our communities’ understandings of it. As such this study provides the Canadian public, but also those interested in social policy, with a way of understanding the ways in which poverty has been actively maintained by our governments through intentional privileging of business and private interests. As the authors argue, “Two decades of stripping back income supports and putting more emphasis on market-based solutions repurposed the role of the state and left ordinary Canadians, suddenly faced with the most brutal recession since the Second World War, more exposed to the economic risks associated with joblessness than at any time since those earlier years.” (21)

In short, the statistics provided, for example that Canadian food banks serve [End Page 333] more than 700,000 Canadians/month (77), combined with statements like “I thought that garbage-picking was only needed in the Philippines, Africa or other third world countries” (76) contribute to the destruction of the myth that Canada is a resource-rich nation, a “first-world” nation.

The authors have collaborated with their colleagues to produce a piece of work that highlights the systemic and unrelenting economic violence imposed on those sectors “left behind” by Canadian social policy. The study does an excellent job of demystifying and de-individualizing constructions of poverty in Ontario, which, as the authors rightly point out, underpin the very hegemonic understandings of poverty that were constructed during the neo-liberal common sense revolution. Welfare bashing and criminalization of poverty are all direct results of the ways in which our understandings of a collective well-being were dismantled, justifying the slashing of public services (particularly during the Harris regime) and the deconstruction of the welfare...

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