What to Expect from Toronto’s Poverty Reduction Strategy: Lessons from the Global South

Abstract

Poverty reduction strategies (PRSs) have proliferated across Canada in recent years at different levels of government. In this article, we address the question of what may reasonably be expected of such strategies, in particular the city of Toronto’s PRS, drawing on the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper experience in the Global South. We argue that key limitations related to the tight fiscal environment in which these strategies have been implemented, their very heavy weighting on the social sectors, and the fact that they are often simple compilations of existing public programs and policies with minimal prioritisation make it highly unlikely that large-scale reductions in poverty will result. Their most important contribution is political, and their impacts on poverty are likely to be positive but modest.