Social crises in Canada usually spawn a bumper crop of books by policy experts, academics, and journalists, but few of these scribes write from first-hand experience. Jean Swanson’s take on poverty is a well-documented study that doubles as a personal cry from the heart. Her own experience of poverty fuels the anger that drives her main thesis: the poor of Canada are the targets of a well-planned, systematic campaign of discrimination and exploitation.

Swanson traces this campaign of “poor-bashing” back to the French Poor Laws of the 1500s and then draws a beeline straight to the policies of Ralph Klein, Mike Harris, and Jean Chrétien. The comparisons are frighteningly close for comfort. While exploring how low-income people are marginalized and abused by government, media and corporate policies, Swanson still manages to poke some fun, illustrating how the language used to describe people on welfare is perhaps better suited to pegging the behaviour of the idle rich.

The book also features many other genuine voices of the poor, such as single mothers struggling to feed, clothe, and shelter their kids in an unforgiving economic system. Swanson ably shows, both on a structural and personal level, how these real people are increasingly excluded from the opportunity to make decisions concerning their daily lives.

Swanson’s arguments are strong ones, but she often doesn’t allow readers to draw their own conclusions. Instead, she relies on rants about the need to address issues of classism, racism and sexism which, while valid, feel out of focus here. And the continuous use of the “poor-bashing” moniker to describe obvious cases of the phenomenon leaves one with a sense of reader-bashing. Readers who can forgive such drawbacks will be rewarded with a highly accessible overview of the policies creating Canada’s rapidly increasing population of have-nots.