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All programs hit targets; so why is the family still poor?
By Stan Chung
Op-Ed Commentary
Every election, we argue about poverty the same way. One side says government should spend more. The other says government already spends enough.
Both are asking the wrong question.
Governments budget by department. Poverty exists by household.
A family in poverty does not experience separate ministries. They experience one life: housing, childcare, debt, food, school, jobs, mental health. When these systems work apart, poverty survives even when every program succeeds.
Which households became less poor because of everything we spent last year?
Most communities cannot answer.
Not because people do not care, but because accountability follows funding, not families.
Each ministry reports its outcomes, each charity reports to its funder, each agency meets its contract. No one owns the household.
British Columbia has a poverty plan written into law, with 10-year targets and a report every October. It can tell you the provincial rate, not which households in this valley moved. Every program in that report can meet its target while the same family stays poor.
The East Kootenay is no exception. Dozens of organizations serve families in poverty between Cranbrook, Kimberley, Fernie, and the Columbia Valley. Each one works hard, and each one reports to someone else.
The only list we keep is the homeless count. In April 2025, it found 172 people in Cranbrook — up from 116 two years earlier. Forty per cent said eviction put them there.
The count tells us who has already lost housing, not who is one missed paycheque away. We count the emergency, but we do not track the household.
Yet we already know pieces of a better model.
Medicine Hat kept a list of names and organized services around the people still unhoused.
Finland treated housing as the starting point, not the prize.
Brazil and Mexico tied income supports to children’s schooling and health, and the Harlem Children’s Zone built schools and family supports around children instead of institutions.
Different politics. Different countries. The same lesson:
Identify the household.
Identify the barrier.
Coordinate the response.
Fund the gap.
Measure the outcome.
So here is a proposal. Every community should publish an Annual Household Poverty Plan — an operating plan, not another strategy.
It would answer five questions:
Which households are living in poverty?
What barriers keep them there?
Which services already support them?
Where are the gaps?
What changed this year?
Each household would have one lead coordinator connecting services that already exist.
Funding would be mapped across governments, Indigenous governments, charities, and businesses before any new money is spent.
The first question stops being “Who needs another program?” It becomes “What barrier remains unfunded?”
That one shift exposes duplication and turns competition into teamwork.
We need better teamwork.
Success would be measured by movement, not activity: families leaving poverty, stable housing, steady work, kids in school.
Programs would still report what they delivered. Communities would report what changed.
Who would publish the plan?
That is the revealing question. No office in the East Kootenay has the job — not the regional district, not any city hall, not any ministry.
The plan has no author because the household has no owner. That is the exact problem the plan would fix.
And poverty is not the exception. It is the template.
Housing. Ottawa funds, Victoria regulates, cities permit. No one owns the family paying 60 per cent of income in rent.
Health care. The province runs hospitals, Ottawa sends money, communities beg for doctors. No one owns the patient without one.
Mental health and addictions. Health authority, schools, police, courts — four systems. No one owns the person cycling through all four.
Same design. Same result. Spending rises, coordination doesn’t.
So here is a question for every candidate, at every level, in every election: Which households got better because of what you spent — and who was responsible for making the systems work together?
A program list is the problem restated.
If we cannot answer the question, we do not have strategies.
We have collections of programs — and elections about whose collection is bigger.
– Stan Chung, PhD lives in Cranbrook and is a writer, strategic advisor, and speaker. He is a 2026 Governor General’s laureate.
