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Barriers to Improved Capability for Low-income Canadians

This article examines barriers to improved well-being for low-income Canadians. It uses the capability approach to explore how personal, institutional and banking factors interact to create obstacles to improved capability. It does this by relying on financial life histories from 15 low-income people living in inner-cities in Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg. The financial life histories are a qualitative method in which respondents were recruited using a snowball sampling method, and asked to share personal stories about their life and financial goals. Respondents are, by Canadian standards, acutely poor and several faced multiple personal barriers including mental illness and substance abuse. The results indicate that participants experienced many more periods of declining, as compared with improving, capability. Respondents identified a series of personal (e.g., illness and addiction), structural (e.g., poorly funded education and low-levels of social assistance support), and banking (e.g., high banking fees and limited appropriate services) obstacles to their improved capability. Most respondents noted that they faced several obstacles at once that created powerful unfreedoms to improved capability. Weak banking services in the neighbourhoods was an important factor in limiting the capability of the respondents.