Poverty in Canada Not Connected to Race, New Study Says

A homeless encampment in Toronto's Alexandra Park on March 20, 2021. The Canadian Press/Chris Young

Poverty in Canada is not connected to race, and government programs aimed at solving race-based poverty are failing, a new study shows.

The Aristotle Foundation’s study, Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor, found that 64 percent of Canadians considered low-income are neither from a visible minority nor indigenous.

“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 think tank said in a news release.

Report authors Matthew Lau and David Hunt said that based on data from Statistics Canada, the large majority of those living in poverty are from “white” backgrounds—or what Statistics Canada calls “not a visible minority nor Indigenous.”

Based on after-tax income, “white” Canadians make up 64.4 percent of those living in relative poverty, the report says, compared with the next highest groups: Chinese at 7.5 percent, black at 5.8 percent, and South Asian at 5.5 percent.

“Systemic racism is not the cause of poverty in Canada,” Mr. Lau said in the release.

“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,” he said.

In addition, governments that have an anti-poverty policy to help those of “marginalized” backgrounds fail to help Canadians who need it, the authors said, using Ontario’s Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) grant program as an example.

“This funding would be inaccessible to 64 percent of those who are low-income, and of those who do qualify for the funding based on race, only 11.9 percent are low-income. This is not a sensible way to design an anti-poverty program,” they wrote.

Steps to Success

The report notes that there is a formula to avoiding poverty, and it includes finishing high school, working full time, and getting married before having children.

“In Canada, 99 percent of adults who have followed the success sequence are not living in absolute poverty today,” the authors wrote. “Clearly, poverty in Canada is not a matter of one’s racial background.”

They conclude that public policy should strengthen the “success sequence” to help Canadians avoid poverty.

The authors also recommend that government programs and funding should help anyone living in poverty, regardless of race.

The report comes as the Parliamentary Budget Officer says that homelessness in the country continues to rise, despite the money that Ottawa spends to fight it.

The May 22 report said there has been a 20 percent increase in the number of homeless people since 2018, and a 38 percent increase in the number of “chronically homeless people.”

Food Banks Canada has given the federal government a D− grade for its efforts to reduce poverty, saying one in four people are experiencing food insecurity.

The organization’s CEO Kirstin Beardsley said it has seen a 50 percent increase in visits to food banks since 2021.

Doug Lett contributed to this report.