Driven by entrenched 18th century social attitudes which blamed the poor for their own poverty, efforts at poverty reduction since the 1960s have been uneven – contradictory at best and punitive at worst. In the past 10-15 years, however, there has been a coalescence of approaches from at least three disciplines – progressive social work practice, economics and human rights law – in seeing poverty elimination as the necessary way forward.

In this lecture, Vince Calderhead will demonstrate how human rights discourses have an important contribution to make in holding governments accountable to their commitments. Particularly in a wealthy country such as Canada, there is no reason not to eliminate poverty.