I'll leave the critique of John Richards' piece to Richard.
The point you're making about the deserving and the undeserving poor is a long-standing theme certainly in Canadian or other Anglo countries. It's a long tradition dating back to the 16th century.
I agree with you, and this speaks to what Richard was saying, that we do tend to have very value-laden approaches to anti-poverty programming. Certainly the emphasis on labour market participation that's been evident in Canada and elsewhere since the late 1980s, I would argue, has tended to push, for instance, the design of the national child tax benefit. One of its explicit goals was to mobilize the labour market participation of parents. That is directly stated in the legislation. As a consequence, the characterization of people who are unable to participate in the labour market...I agree you can have consequences. That particular group of people with their needs can be overlooked or denigrated.
One of the things I would argue about this rigid idea that you're in the labour market or you're out of the labour market, you're a participating Canadian or you're a non-participating Canadian; you're a taxpayer or you're sludge, is that this kind of division is very unhelpful. For instance, when you look at someone in the disability community, they would tell you they are happy and want to actively participate in employment and in community life. They may not be able to be full-time members of the labour market, given the chronic nature of their disability, but we have rigid income security programs that make people have to fit square pegs into round holes. You're either all in or you're all out. Many of the programs, certainly in the social assistance design, force people into those boxes, and that's not helpful.
As for your global question about whether we have an envelope of money, and that the more we focused on making employables the less we focused on other groups that don't have the same potential for labour market participation, I see that a bit differently. I think groups have their own needs and we have to think about it differently, and it shouldn't be constructed as a zero-sum game. We need a range of supports to create a foundation and a base that addresses those needs.