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2015 will be remembered as the Year of the Middle Class. Middle class tax breaks. Middle class child benefits. Middle class job prospects. And, of course, middle class votes.

In the federal election, all parties wooed the middle class demographic. The Liberals promised a tax cut and new child benefits. The Conservatives stuck to their income-splitting plan. Even the NDP, the traditional champion of low-income Canadians, got in on the act by proposing to cut small business taxes.

Since the election, the new Liberal government has continued to beat the middle class drum. The upper class need to redistribute their income … to the middle class. The government needs to dampen housing prices, because the middle class cannot afford to buy a home. If you earn between $45,000 and $89,000, the government has a Christmas present with your name on it.

But what if you’re among the 66 per cent of tax filers earning less than $45,000 a year? What if you’re among those scraping by on a minimum wage salary of $22,000? What if you’re among the 13.5 per cent of Canadians considered “low-income” by Statistics Canada?

Well, you’re out of luck. You’re also likely to be a a single mother, keeping the wolf from the door all on your own.

According to StatsCan data released earlier this year, a whopping 42.6 per cent of people in single-parent families headed by women are low-income. That’s the largest single category of poverty — larger than the percentage of seniors (11.1 per cent) or singles (28 per cent) living in poverty.

Seniors tend not to have children at home, are less likely to have mortgage payments and aren’t saving for retirement. Single people tend to be younger, often earn less because they’re just starting in the workforce and tend to have no dependants. A single mom has kids who need a roof, food and clothes, not to mention extra-curricular activities and higher education. She needs to worry about her own retirement down the road.

The Liberals’ new tax and benefit plans do nothing to create what low-income Canadians, specifically women, need to break out of the poverty trap: opportunity, and the ability to access it. The Liberals’ new tax and benefit plans do nothing to create what low-income Canadians, specifically women, need to break out of the poverty trap: opportunity, and the ability to access it.

In other words, single mother poverty is child poverty. And child poverty tends to beget adult poverty. Breaking that cycle is key to — guess what? — entering the middle class.

In the Liberal throne speech, Trudeau did pledge to help some low-income Canadians, “those working hard to join (the middle class)”. This presumably references his campaign promise to bring in a new income-tested child benefit to replace the Conservatives’ Universal Child Care Benefit. The UCCB paid $1,920 per year for children under age six, $720 a year for children aged 6 to 17. The Liberals’ plan would pay $6,400 per year and $5,400 a year, respectively, to families earning less than $30,000 a year. (For every dollar earned above that, benefits would decrease.) The government claims this will lift over 300,000 children out of poverty.

But the plan has hit a snag. By increasing the incomes of these families through federal transfers, the federal government renders some of them ineligible for provincial assistance that is also means-tested. The result is the same impact low-income families feel when parents transition from welfare to work, and suddenly find themselves earning “too much” to qualify for government benefits such as housing or child care assistance. Unless these benefits are gradually “stepped down”, their loss creates a disincentive to earning more income because the family actually ends up worse off than before. So the introduction of the new benefit has been delayed to July 2016.

The Liberals’ new tax and benefit plans also do nothing to create what low-income Canadians, specifically women, need to break out of the poverty trap: opportunity, and the ability to access it.

The best anti-poverty program, for parents and their children, remains a well-paying job. Tax increases designed to redistribute income from the wealthy to the middle class will not create such jobs, while tax cuts to the middle class will cost the treasury billions more than predicted.

That, in turn, will reduce the government’s ability to provide transfers to low-income Canadians to provide that access to opportunity — by, for example, providing money for childcare or training. Racking up $25 billion deficits, which over time will consume more than the 11 per cent of federal revenues currently required to service Canada’s $600 billion debt, will further decrease Ottawa’s ability to support any such initiatives.

If governments are to intervene to lift Canadians out of poverty, let them focus on those who actually need the help. For all the love lavished on the middle class, this Christmas, the truly needy remain out in the cold.

Tasha Kheiriddin is a political writer and broadcaster who frequently comments in both English and French. After practising law and a stint in the government of Mike Harris, Tasha became the Ontario director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and co-wrote the 2005 bestseller, Rescuing Canada’s Right: Blueprint for a Conservative Revolution. Tasha moved back to Montreal in 2006 and served as vice-president of the Montreal Economic Institute, and later director for Quebec of the Fraser Institute, while also lecturing on conservative politics at McGill University. Tasha now lives in Whitby, Ontario with her daughter Zara, born in 2009.

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