"Stereotypes about welfare are certain to be inappropriate," the group says in a report entitled Profiles of Welfare: Myths and Realities. "The welfare rolls are made up of older people as well as younger people, people with disabilities as well as people who Every chapter of this report is testimony to the varied backgrounds and circumstances of people on welfare."

The report contains a gold mine of new statistical information about welfare in Canada. The information comes from a database of welfare statistics made available to the Council by Human Resources Development Canada with the approval of welfare officials from all ten provincial governments. Much of the information in the report has never appeared in print before.

"Every person who reads this report will learn something new,"the Council says. "And every person will be reminded that popular notions about welfare and welfare recipients are sometimes quite far removed from the truth."

Among other things, the report shows close to 1.1 million children on the welfare rolls as of March 1997 and a surprisingly large number of long-term welfare cases.

Given all the publicity about child poverty in recent months,it should come as no surprise that more than one million of the people on welfare as of March 1997 were children under the age of 18. They were on welfare for one simple reason: their parents or guardians were on welfare.

"Some readers may find this point too obvious to mention, but it is not always obvious in the development of welfare policies in all provinces," the report says. "Ontario, for example, did not exempt families with children when it arbitrarily slashed its welfare rates in October 1995. Other provinces talk of improving government benefits for children to `take children off welfare'without acknowledging that it is impossible to do so without taking their parents off welfare at the same time."

Perhaps the most disturbing data in the database was information about the length of current "spells" on welfare.As of March 1997, 54 percent of the welfare cases had been on welfare continuously for 25 months or more.

"Given the low levels of income provided by welfare, it seems unlikely that people would consciously choose to live on welfare year after year," the report says. "It is sad to think that governments have been unable to come up with better ways of managing the economy and creating more job opportunities for the people who are willing and able to take advantage of them."

The Council hopes that the report will help dispel many of the myths about welfare and people on welfare. It also hopes that the new data will prod social policy analysts both inside and outside government to step up their own research and develop new policy options.

"Among the most urgent options are dealing with the problem of long-term dependency on welfare, finding more and better jobs for people, improving financial support for single parents, and promoting government income supports for people with severe disabilities that are more appropriate than welfare."

Finally, the report says that better welfare policies are in the interest of all Canadians, because everyone is at risk of falling on welfare at some point in their lives.

"The numbers speak for themselves: the estimated 1,494,800 welfare cases as of March 1997 represented an estimated 2,774,900 individual children, women and men or nearly ten percent of Canada's population."

"Losing a job, losing a spouse, and losing good health are some of the reasons that people go on welfare. The biggest myth of all would be to assume that most of us are immune to any of these personal tragedies or the many other misfortunes that can lead to reliance on welfare."

The National Council of Welfare is a citizens' advisory group to the Minister of Human Resources Development.