Anti-poverty lecture challenges hollow arguments

'Poverty affects us all': the sentiment and the phrase have been repeated time and again for decades, with seemingly no solutions and increasing numbers of Canadians living below the poverty line.

The last lecture in the Social Science in the City anti-poverty series will dispute complacent attitudes and offer some answers to poverty when guest lecturer Armine Yalnizyan comes to Hamilton on Tuesday April 20 to deliver her talk I'm alright Jack…and other hollow arguments for doing nothing about poverty.

Yalnizyan is a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and has participated in the Alternative Federal Budget since its launch in 1994. She has tracked trends in labour markets, income distribution, government budgets and access to services (particularly training and health care) for more than 20 years and has focussed on serving the community, particularly the most vulnerable among us.

Charlotte Yates, dean of social sciences, chose the speakers for the series with an eye to how each could increase the community's capacity to solve the problem of poverty. The intent of the anti-poverty series reflects and extends the core of the poverty research done in the faculty: to explore the fundamental questions about poverty and use this expertise to work with the community to identify and affect solutions.

Yalnizyan will talk about what is being done to reduce poverty and help the audience understand where the genuine barriers to progress lie. The Social Science in the City Anti-Poverty Lectures are part of the Science in the City Lecture series, a partnership between McMaster University and The Hamilton Spectator.