This paper provides a first look at the dynamics of social assistance use among lone mothers in Ontario. We use an administrative caseload data set to analyse the relationship between the duration of spells, both on welfare and off welfare, and a series of factors including the clients’...

The principal qualifying condition for welfare in Canada, unlike the US, is financial need - there are no demographic criteria. We use a time-series of annual, national cross-sections for the period 1981 through 1993 to estimate a model of lone-female headship. Our findings do not support the...

The objective of this paper is to analyse changes in the welfare participation of Canadian lone mothers between 1973 and 1991. Lone mothers under age 35 do show an increasing reliance on SA income accompanied by stagnant wages and declining levels of market work and earnings. In contrast, lone...

A statistical association between poor child health and low family income has been well established by Lipman, Offord and Boyle (1994, 1995) and Dooley and Lipman (1995) in a series of papers using data from the Ontario Child Health Study (OCHS). The incidence of psychiatric disorders and poor...