Poverty in Ontario has a big price tag. Poverty costs the residents of Ontario a staggering $32 billion to $38 billion a year - the equivalent of 5.5 per cent to 6.6 per cent of provincial GDP. As one would expect, most of this cost is borne by the 1.9 million households with the lowest incomes.

But for every dollar that poverty takes from these low income households, the province as a whole loses an additional 50 cents. That is, for each and every household in Ontario, the cost of poverty works out to at least $2,300 a year. It shows up in extra costs to our health care system, the costs of crime, the cost of social assistance, the loss of tax revenue that accompanies low earnings and the intergenerational costs that flow from the likelihood that a significant number of children from poor families will also be poor when they grow up. In total, these social costs of poverty add up to $10.4 billion to $13.1 billion a year.

Excerpted from The Cost of Poverty : an Analysis of the Economic Cost of Poverty in Ontario published by the Ontario Association of Food Banks in November 2008. Adam Spence is the Executive Director of the Association. The entire report can be viewed at www.oafb.ca