'Overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are white,' report finds (2024)

A new report by the Calgary-based think tank Aristotle Foundation suggests that Canada’s race-based approach to fighting poverty might be flawed, since it is based on an incorrect assumption that race, racial discrimination and poverty are tightly linked.

The paper, “Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor,” analyzed recent Statistics Canada data and also looked at public policy initiatives at both the provincial and federal levels that are designed to fight poverty.

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It found that between 7.4 and 10.6 per cent of Canadians are living in relative poverty, depending on how one defines the term.

At the low end, defined by low after-tax income, some 58 per cent or 1.6 million people living in poverty are white, or what StatsCan refers to as “not a visible minority nor Indigenous.” For the other figure, which measures poverty based on the cost of living, 2.5 million people or 64.4 per cent of the group living in poverty are white.

“In other words, the overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are ‘white,’ and thus cannot receive race-based allocations from governments if unchangeable characteristics such as skin colour or ethnicity are accounted for in policy,” the group said in a press release announcing the findings.

The paper points to government documents that use the link between race and poverty to justify race-based remedies that it says ignore many needy people.

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A federal document outlining Canada’s anti-racism strategy notes: “Anti-Black racism is manifested in the legacy of the current social, economic and political marginalization of African Canadians in society such as the lack of opportunities, lower socio-economic status, higher unemployment, significant poverty rates and over-representation in the criminal justice system.”

Ontario’s anti-racism strategic plan includes the same statement almost word for word.

What’s more, the report says, government anti-poverty programs with racial qualifiers can end up misdirecting resources to those who are not even poor.

It cites Ontario’s Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) grant program. Using the low-income-after-tax measure, eligibility for this race-based funding would apply not only to 1.4 million low-income earners in Canada (the total low-income visible minority and Indigenous population) but also to nearly 10.5 million minorities or Indigenous who are not low income, while excluding non-minority, non-Indigenous low-income earners.

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“Put another way,” the report says, “this funding would be inaccessible to 64 per cent of those who are low-income, and of those who do qualify for the funding based on race, only 11.9 per cent are low-income. This is not a sensible way to design an anti-poverty program.”

The study also found that some minority groups in Canada are as likely or in some cases less likely to be poor compared to white Canadians. These included Canadians of Japanese, Korean, South Asian and Chinese ancestry, all of whom have higher average weekly earnings that their white counterparts.

The study suggests delinking poverty from race, and says governments should strive to address the “root issues” of poverty by strengthening, or minimizing interference with, what it calls the “success sequence”: finish high school, work full time, and marry before having children. These markers, it says, predicate a non-poverty life for the vast majority of people in the U.S. and Canada.

“Systemic racism is not the cause of poverty in Canada,” says lead author and financial analyst Matthew Lau. “While some visible minority groups experience poverty in numbers disproportionate to the general population, it is also true that some visible minority groups are less likely to live in poverty, such as Canadians of Filipino, South Asian, and Latin American ancestry.”

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“Poverty is colour-blind, and thus poverty policy which excludes some Canadians and favours others based on colour or ethnicity omits a vast swath of the poor in Canada, in addition to being illiberal,” adds co-author and Aristotle Foundation research director David Hunt, “The focus of anti-poverty policy in Canada should instead be focused on the individuals in need and on creating widespread opportunity for all.”

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