by David P. Ross, Richard Shillington and Clarence Lochhead

Today, there are over two million Canadian households living in poverty, an increase of 700,000 over the last ten years. But what does this mean, exactly? Who are they and what else do we know about composition of the poor in Canada?

The Canadian Fact Book on Poverty - 1994 identifies many disturbing patterns:

• One of the common misconceptions about poor people is that they are not "really bad off" because: most of them are students, or they have subsidized child care or shelter allowances , or they have their homes outright. Wrong! Only 5% of all poor people are students; only 5% of the poor receive a child care subsidy and 19% receive some form of rental subsidy; only 12% of the working-age poor own their own homes.

• Poverty endures. Over 40% of those who are poor in a given year will continue to be poor for at least five years.

• Common sense might suggest that holding a job protects a family against poverty. Not so. Almost one-third of Canada's working-age poor families had a full year of employment.

• In 1991, 172,000 two-parent families worked a full year and were still poor. These families had, on average, 70 weeks of employment, but less than $14,000 in earnings.

• A single income earner simply isn't enough. Families that rely on a single earner have a poverty rate more than three times that of families with two earners.

• Children's earnings make a difference. The poverty rate was only 4% in two-parent families where the child (aged 16-24) had earnings, but 22% where none of the children held jobs.

• Minimum wage work is not always temporary career phenomenon. During a three-year period, 60% of minimum wage workers remained stuck in this situation.

• In 1991, there were 1.2 million poor children in Canada.

• Although there is a popular perception that most poor children live in single-parent families, that is not the case: over half (54%) live with both parents.

• Children from poor families are more than twice as likely to drop out of school as other children.

• The number of well-educated families in poverty is increasing rapidly: 29% of all poor families had some post-secondary credentials, more than double what it was 10 years ago.

• Six out of 10 lone-parent mothers live below the poverty line. Among young lone-mothers (under 25), 86% were poor.

• In just ten years, the poverty rate among all young families (under 25 years) nearly doubled, to 40 per cent.

• The distribution of Canada's income is becoming more unequal. In 1991, Canada's 10.7 million households had an average income just over $43,000 for a total pie of $463 billion. How was this pie divided? Not very evenly: the slice going to the richest 20 per cent of Canadian households was nearly twice as large as that shared by the bottom 50% combined!

• If only 7 of every dollar of the income pie were shifted from richest 20% to Canada's poor, there would be enough money redistributed to completely eliminate poverty and still leave the rich with a significantly larger share than the bottom 50% of Canadian households.

• Among Canadian families with children, the poorest 40% actually received a smaller share of Canada's total income pie in 1991 than they did in 1981: from an already small 21%, their share dropped to 19%. The top 40% of Canadian families, however, increased their share from 61 to 63%, an amount equivalent to several billions of dollars!

• This picture has become even worse if the effects of government support programs and income transfers are removed, leaving only "market income" (employment earnings plus investment income). Then the share of the poorest 40% of families with children falls to 14%, while the share of the richest 40% of families climbs to over 67 per cent.

• Does it make a difference where you live? Yes. The household poverty rate varies considerably among the provinces, from a high 25% in Quebec to a low of 18% in New Brunswick and Ontario.

• The family poverty in Alberta jumped 82% between 1981 and 1991.

• Poverty is increasingly becoming an urban problem. Two-thirds of all poor families and three-quarters of all poor single people live in cities with populations of 100,000 or more. In fact, there are 386,000 poor households in Montreal - more than twice as many as in all the Atlantic provinces combined!

• And the household poverty rates vary dramatically among major Canadian cities: from 29 or 30 per cent in Winnipeg and Montreal, to 16% in Victoria and only 7% in Kitchener-Waterloo.

• How does Canada fare internationally? Not very well. The poverty rate among working-age families in Canada is three times the rate found in Belgium and the Netherlands, and almost twice that of Germany and France.

Canadian Fact Book on Poverty 1994 - Related Material

Canadian Council on Social Development, 309 Cooper Street, 5th Floor, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 0G5
Tel: (613) 236-8977, Fax: (613) 236-2750, Web: www.ccsd.ca, Email: council@ccsd.ca