Much talk on Monday about Tax Freedom Day in Canada; little or nothing about Destitution Day, June 7.

Heralded annually by the Fraser Institute, Tax Freedom Day purports to show how hard we work to put money in government coffers, whence it is presumably distributed to layabouts on welfare or otherwise wasted.

Theoretically, if we paid all our taxes up front, Tax Freedom Day — June 11 this year — would mark the point from which we’d start, finally, working for ourselves.

Some have criticized the methodology used by the conservative think tank, claiming it overstates the amount of taxes paid and understates Canadians’ income. But whether the institute is off by a month or two, its point is still the same. And the aggrieved will still cry “hands in my pocket.”

So one might assume these anti-tax crusaders are not in the least moved by the declaration of Destitution Day by the Alliance for a Poverty-Free Toronto.

The group says a person, living at the poverty line in Toronto ($18,759) and receiving all social assistance ($8,145.96), would run out of money on June 7 — using the same theoretical conditions of paying all your bills up front.

Working with Social Planning Toronto, the group wants city council to help develop a poverty-reduction strategy. It says many councillors support the idea. One can imagine the apocalyptic howls from the corner office should this get added to the council agenda in this term.

But recent statistics, prepared by Social Planning Toronto, provide another set of examples of huge disparities in Canada’s largest and richest city.

The picture is presented ward by ward — from Rexdale in Etobicoke to the far reaches of Scarborough and down to the lake. Of the 2,615,060 people living in Toronto, 604,050 — almost a quarter of them — are living in poverty.

Even in Ward 16 Eglinton-Lawrence — the one with the fewest number of poor folks — there are 5,420 at or below the poverty line.

Toronto’s poverty rates are higher than the provincial and national average. Overall, recent immigrants fare the worse with nearly half (46 per cent) in poverty. One in three children (under age 15) is living in poverty and 31 per cent of youths (15 to 24). Housing costs is the big driver, with almost 47 per cent of all tenants paying more than 30 per cent of their income on rent. Another 23 per cent pay an astonishing 50 per cent or more on rent.

Earlier ward-by-ward profiles have shown Ward 1 Etobicoke North to have the highest incidence of child poverty and persistent overall poverty levels. The new report, based on 2006 census figures, show that Ward 28 Toronto Centre-Rosedale has the highest levels of poverty of any single ward.

More than four in 10 (41 per cent) of Ward 28 residents live in poverty — that numbers 23,730, more than the population of many Ontario towns. In fact, no matter the overall state of the ward, every Toronto ward has significant pockets of poverty.

Ward 28, with Regent Park, Moss Park and parts of St. Jamestown, has numbers that leap off the page. Some 59 per cent of the kids are in poverty, 54 per cent of the youth, 52 per cent of racialized groups, 56 per cent of recent immigrants.

The ward with the most hopeful numbers? Ward 16 Eglinton-Lawrence, where only 10.5 per cent of the total are in poverty and less than 8 per cent of the kids.

One welcome feature of the report is an outline of specific measures that social agencies and individuals are using to combat poverty and improve the lives of citizens.

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More on that later.

Royson James usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Email: rjames@thestar.ca