ABSTRACT
In recent years, Canadians have witnessed the implementation of neoliberal policies. These have led to dramatic increases in homelessness and food bank use, a gradual decline in social entitlements and a steady erosion of the value of minimum wages, as well as income security and other benefits. Canada’s corporate news media have supported this neoliberal program. On the one hand, news coverage promotes a highly ideological construction of poverty and features discourses that blame people living in poverty, vilify anti-poverty advocates and promote market-based solutions. On the other hand, progressive policy proposals — such as raising tax rates for wealthy individuals and corporations and increasing minimum wages and welfare rates — are routinely dismissed and derogated. Dominant discourses include Poverty is a naturally occurring phenomenon, like the weather or the force of gravity, over which we have little control, and it is best to let poverty run its “natural” course. In opinion pieces and editorials, newspapers offer a neoliberal prescription to poverty — Governments ought to cut programs for the poor and allow market forces to run their course — that targets politicians, policy makers and the general public.
