Through its responses to poverty, the legislator breaks with the rights guaranteed in the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedom, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that it has itself ratified. The analysis of welfare programs adopted successively for more than 50 years attest to this. By moving from an approach initially premised on the principle of a right to welfare to that of social assistance “activation,” which is based on employability, sanctions and conditionality, welfare programs seem more anchored in neoliberal values than in the rights of people living in poverty. This large gap between welfare and rights was, however, validated by the Supreme Court of Canada in 2002, in the Gosselin case. On this occasion, the Court refrained from setting parameters and therefore left the field open to the legislator. These respective positions of the legislative and judicial powers, analyzed here through the prism of a shared responsibility with respect to the protection and promotion of constitutional rights, have the effect of confining people living in poverty in a space outside rights, revealing a flaw in constitutionalism. This situation brings to light the stark reality that refuse to recognize those who continue to believe that it is the sole responsibility of the legislator to implement social rights, such as the right to an adequate standard of living : the legislative power is not a vector for the effectiveness of the rights of people living in poverty.