Don’t It Always Seem To Go…

The memorable but ungrammatical bromide from Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi could be the loose theme of Shereen Ismael’s slim volume on how the Canadian welfare state has deteriorated since 1989, when the House of Commons adopted its guileless resolution to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. Ismael says as much in the opening line of the preface to Child Poverty and the Canadian Welfare State: From Entitlement to Charity: “I grew up as the Canadian welfare state matured, and ... I did not appreciate it until it was gone.”

Joni’s next line in the song was “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” But just as all of the planet’s Shangri-Las have not yet been flattened to asphalt, state funding aimed at alleviating child poverty has not ended. The reality is that our lack of progress measured against collective expectation makes it feel that way. We succumb to unequivocal language because we feel the sting of a lost...