Mel Hurtig, Council of Canadians founder, publisher, and author, was shocked by the extent of poverty he found during a two-year cross-country trek. Unfortunately, little of the suffering he observed emerges in this work marked by a dry, term paper structure.

Personal stories of poverty are overshadowed by endless charts, graphs, and quotations from other people’s studies and columns. There’s not much new here, and certainly nothing imaginative or challenging.

In the end, Hurtig does not have much to say, so he uses clichés to provide transitions between chunks of other people’s writings (“X sums it up nicely” and “Y bangs the nail on the head”) and the occasional self-righteous flourish (“these neanderthals!”).

His style is arrogant, marked by much name-dropping (“Alan Fotheringham and I”), self-reference (“But many, including myself, have reservations”), and an assumption that the reader is hanging on his every word (“I have said for years that…”).

Hurtig claims to have felt the pain of the poor, yet among his limited proposals is a regressive tax on cigarettes, which will only hurt those smokers on a limited income. He also suggests that if five million Canadians each put $100 into the political party of their choice, they would have a true voice in Ottawa. But this theory fails those on welfare who, in Ontario, for example, must scrape by with a monthly food budget of $90 or less. How will they attain a voice?

Information overload coupled with few channels for positive action may leave readers feeling despairing and powerless. Because Hurtig has chosen to ignore much of the grassroots work being done to end poverty, many readers are likely to be left with more questions than answers to this tragic problem.