City can't 'afford' poverty

One of Hamilton's best known business leaders says poverty can be eradicated by refusing to accept arguments that helping poor people doesn't make economic sense.

Mark Chamberlain, chair of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction and former CEO of Wescam, says it's the same dilemma that would-be entrepreneurs face in funding their innovations.

There is never enough money to properly start a new business venture, he said. The successful startup happens because the business owner refuses to take no for answer from investors. He or she is essentially "unreasonable."

Chamberlain argued that anti-poverty advocates should invoke the same stubborn determination with government.

"Entrepreneurs by nature are unreasonable people. If they were reasonable, they would be failures as entrepreneurs."

He said the societal view that a living wage is economically impossible needs to be challenged in the same way that business owners challenge assumptions that their innovations are not commercially viable.

"We allow so much of our economics to drive our values as opposed to allowing our values to drive our economics."

He said a living minimum wage is the latest in a long list of societal problems that at one time were accepted as economically unfeasible to fix.