A homeless person sits on the sidewalk as holiday shoppers admire displays in the windows of a downtown department store in Toronto on Sunday, December 23, 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Frank Gunn

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A year after Liberal MP Scott Brison introduced a motion to have the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance undertake a study on income inequality in Canada, that study is finally getting underway this month.

The study is happening with little fanfare, but it’s one that Canadians ought to be watching closely. Income inequality in Canada is on the rise. The Conference Board of Canada has reported that we’re 12th out of 17 peer countries on income inequality, and that income inequality has been rising faster in Canada than in the United States since the mid-1990s.

Higher income inequality is correlated with all sorts of social ills: more high school dropouts, more violent crime, lower levels of trust among citizens. And it just feels wrong, in a country with Canada’s history of human rights leadership, to see the super-rich getting super-richer while those at the other end of the income scale face a housing crisis. You’d think that, given the amount of resource wealth we’re intent on pumping out of the ground, we could at least make sure every Canadian has access to basic shelter.

That the federal government has decided to take on this issue might seem to signal it’s planning something to reduce income inequality in Canada. Unfortunately, this study — only scheduled for four days’ worth of meetings before the committee — will be the most modest of stop-gaps. How could it be otherwise when the current government, in an apparent ongoing battle against evidence-based policy making, has gutted the infrastructure for data collection on income inequality?

The first volley came back in 2010, with the elimination of the mandatory long-form census. When the government replaced it with the voluntary National Household Survey, critics panned the move as one that would lead to less accurate data, particularly from marginalized segments of the population like new immigrants, aboriginal people and, crucially, the poor.

The information collected in the long-form census was critical to getting a full picture of income inequality in Canada. The long-form census included questions about immigration, citizenship, birthplace, ethnicity and work — all important questions, given that immigrants and racialized minorities in Canada are disproportionately represented among people living in poverty. Now that information is being collected in a way that is likely to under-represent those minorities, and it can’t be accurately compared to past census data because of methodological differences.

Brison’s motion likely was well-intentioned, but this study won’t even begin to scratch the surface of income inequality issues in Canada. Four days of meetings cannot replace decades of consistent data collection.

Then, in last year’s budget, the Conservative government eliminated the National Council of Welfare (NCW). Created in 1962 with a mandate of advising the government on issues relating to poverty and income assistance, the NCW had 50 years’ worth of institutional expertise on exactly the issues that the finance committee now wants to study.

At the time the NCW was cut, it operated on a mere $1.1 million per year. Eliminating it saved each Canadian about three cents annually.

Brison’s motion likely was well-intentioned, but this study won’t even begin to scratch the surface of income inequality issues in Canada. Four days of meetings cannot replace decades of consistent data collection; the idea that this study may be intended to fill that gap is laughable.

One of the last reports released by the NCW, entitled “The Dollars & Sense of Solving Poverty”, took a comprehensive look at the economic costs of how we cope with poverty in Canada. The report’s findings were damning: while it would have cost some $12.3 billion in 2007 to bring all Canadians above the poverty line, the most cautious estimates show that the status quo approach costs at least twice that much. Worse, our current spending doesn’t address the root causes of poverty. We’re spending money on emergency health care rather than preventative health care, on shelters rather than affordable permanent housing, on welfare rather than the childcare that would allow single parents to work.

Income inequality in Canada is a problem that is getting worse, and has been for some time. Rather than trying to collect as much data as possible in order to solve the problem, however, the Harper government has decided it would prefer to shove the problem under the rug in the hopes that it will go away.

This is not responsible policy making. It’s not even conservative policy making, in the sense of something pragmatic, practical and based on solid evidence. This is policy making that puts already-vulnerable Canadians at a further disadvantage in pursuit of a murky agenda for which most Canadians did not sign up.

Canada’s poor deserve more than four days in front of the finance committee. Unfortunately, for the foreseeable future, they aren’t likely to get much else.

Devon Black is studying law at the University of Victoria. In addition to writing for iPolitics, Devon has worked for the Canadian International Development Agency, Leadership Africa USA and RamRais & Partners.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.