1. Lessons from the Motherland
Learning from poverty in Canada and the UK
My aunt lives in a little council house in a small town north of Norwich, England. Actual-
ly, it’s more of a cottage. “The difference between America and England,” she explains,
while we’re winding up the country roads to her cottage (driving, by my estimation too
fast and on the wrong side of the road), “is that in America poverty is a disease. In Eng-
land,” she continues, “if you’re poor you’re still a person. You’re still respected.”
My aunt has never lived outside of social housing, has never worked, and has never
paid a food bill without the help of government assistance. Partly this is because she
was married at 17, before she had the opportunity to pursue secondary education. Part-
ly this is because the man she married was a drunk and left her with 3 children to raise
as a sole parent. But compounding those two things is the unfortunate fact that when
her children hit their teens, she was diagnosed with lupus which left her energy levels
so depleted that working became an impossibility.
When she was diagnosed with lupus, my aunt moved to Ottawa to be closer to her sis-
ter, my mother. She claimed her Canadian birthright and entered the welfare system.
She confided in me the isolation of living beneath the poverty line in Canada, and the
loss of dignity she felt moving from the English system to the Canadian one.
It’s a complicated subject, how my aunt perceived her own poverty differently in Eng-
land in Canada. As a subject, the self-perception of poverty is generally under-studied.
My professor at the Development Planning Unit at University College London, Jorge
Fiori, stresses that poverty is “understood as a multidimensional situation, affected by
cultural, local and social conditions, interpreted subjectively by the people living in
poverty, lived differently by people according to their gender, age, ethnic origin and abili-
ties, and including many forms of income and consumption that escape the concept of
poverty lines.”
Cultural and subjective constructions of poverty play a crucial role in how institutional
systems are formed but not how they are measured. My aunt’s observations on the dif-
ferences between Canadian and English approaches to the poor warrants further con-
sideration, as it points to something deeply rooted.
At it’s most basic, England is a little tiny island concentrated with money and power,
split by extreme class divisions, complicated by multiple histories of prejudice, slavery,
heroism, liberators, monarchs, murderers, and capitalists. In our imaginations, London
was a city of cobbled stone, wet with fog, connected by bridges and tunnels illuminated
by gas lamps. In the 17th century, filthy slums stretched from King’s Cross to
Whitechapel. London is fictionalised through detectives, rippers and orphans and other
people living in extreme conditions of overcrowding.
To the contrary, Canada was, as remains, a land of incredible bounty. Canada is a cool
10 million square kilometers of virtually uninhabited wilderness teeming with salmon,
wild game, timber, fresh water. For centuries, beavers were the dominant currency. Ear-
ly Canadian pioneers transformed enormous plots of land through agriculture and con-
structed their forts and settlements separated, at their closest, by a couple of hundred of
kilometers.
In the time of Dickens’ filthy, slum-ridden, choleric London, Canada was confederating.
Secondary to the exploitation of natural resources, the expansion of the empire to the

2. New World was a convenient pressure release valve for overcrowded Britain. Thou-
sands of the poorest Britons from London and elsewhere moved west to build Canadian
cities. But Canada is not now, nor has it ever been, carved in the image of it’s father.
There is a deep, gaping chasm between these two societies: one built on scarcity and
the other built on plenty.
Uneven distribution of wealth is more evident in societies of scarcity. In England, wealth
was largely inherited through lineages of nobility. Later, entrepreneurs made fortunes
through the spoils of colonial expansion. The poor existed in opposition to the wealthy
but all part of the same system, two groups within a single society.
As pioneers of the New World, with enough of everything to go around poverty had little
justification. Consider the American dream: if you work hard, you can achieve anything.
The poorest people in society don’t work hard enough, or maybe they don’t value suc-
cess to the extent of the wealthiest people do.
It’s easy to see the fallacy in this logic: often the people who work the hardest are also
the ones who suffer the most. Unfortunately all men are not created equal. Some are
more intelligent, some are born wealthy, others are physically disabled. The logic is
flawed further when these men start building cities. Pioneering societies began with a
complicated task: to turn America’s vast natural resources into prosperous households
and industries. The added complexities of civilization and modernization should have
evolved the American dream in kind. However, the dream, with all it’s requisite assump-
tion about the capacity of the individual, persists to now.
It’s through these two differing lenses that welfare, and it’s core output, housing provi-
sion can be compared from London to a city like Toronto. Generally, it’s a question of
comparing the cultural and subjective constructions of poverty through which housing
policy is written.
The connection between economic growth and housing provision can be conceived in
two ways. The first is that increased economic growth will have an output of improved
housing conditions. The second sets this on its head to say improved housing condi-
tions will lead to economic growth.
Certainly Toronto maintains the former. Primary on the agenda of social well-being in
Toronto is attracting foreign investment (evidenced by the proliferation of large scale,
branded architectural projects and formation of city-led FDI task groups).
London recognizes its position as a global financial hub and puts primacy on social in-
clusion through the mechanisms of housing, sustainability, and transport (see the Lon-
don Plan, 2004-08). Critiques of the approach that housing is improved as a result of
overall economic growth are easy enough to find. Economic growth is often polarizing
and rarely synonymous with equality. Further, housing is not one piece of a livelihood
strategy, but the fulcrum on which livelihoods pivot. Housing encompasses health, safe-
ty, travel, family and neighbourhood cohesion, to name a few. But maybe most impor-
tant critique is that economic growth and stagnation are less often structural causes of
poverty so as much as they exacerbate the structural causes of poverty.
My aunt’s experience was emotional by relevant. The Canada Act of 1982 severed all
remaining dependance of Canada on the British Parliament, but we still often look to the
motherland for guidance if not for governance. Into the future London and Toronto will
face similar issues: dwindling resources for social welfare, population growth accelerat-

3. ing at a rate which exceeds urban capacity, and a need to find balance between policy
and private sector provision. All these could conceivably be addressed with identical
strategies to opposite outcomes if Canada can’t reconcile its visions for prosperity with
the experiences of its poorest people.
Amy Leaman is the Art Director of Corporate Knights Magazine and is currently study-
ing Building and Urban Design in Development at the Development Planning Unit at
UCL in London.