Aristotle Foundation: ‘Overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are white,’ report finds [misleading use of statistics]

2024/06/01 Leave a comment

Both the article and the report misrepresent the data as it looks at number living in poverty rather than the percentage of each group who are in poverty. For example, stating that 58 percent of white people living in poverty is less than their 74 percent of the Canadian population.

The table below provides a more accurate picture by contrasting the share of the population and poverty rates by group and generation, compared to the non visible minority population. Poverty rates remain higher across generations for Blacks, Latin American and West Asians.

It is one thing to argue against the degree that race affects poverty rates or the effectiveness of specific policy approaches, another to present the data in a tendentious manner or to argue that systemic racism has no impact on poverty rates:

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

Source: ‘Overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are white,’ report finds, Report link: https://aristotlefoundation.org/reality-check/poverty-and-race-in-canada-facts-about-race-discrimination-and-the-poor/#:~:text=In%20summary%2C%20poverty%20rates%20in,are%20truly%20living%20in%20destitution.

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A Novel Effort to See How Poverty Affects Young Brains

2021/04/08 Leave a comment

Interesting study and experiment:

New monthly payments in the pandemic relief package have the potential to lift millions of American children out of poverty. Some scientists believe the payments could change children’s lives even more fundamentally — via their brains.

It’s well established that growing up in poverty correlates with disparities in educational achievement, health and employment. But an emerging branch of neuroscience asks how poverty affects the developing brain.

Over the past 15 years, dozens of studies have found that children raised in meager circumstances have subtle brain differences compared with children from families of higher means. On average, the surface area of the brain’s outer layer of cells is smaller, especially in areas relating to language and impulse control, as is the volume of a structure called the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory.

These differences don’t reflect inherited or inborn traits, research suggests, but rather the circumstances in which the children grew up. Researchers have speculated that specific aspects of poverty — subpar nutrition, elevated stress levels, low-quality education — might influence brain and cognitive development. But almost all the work to date is correlational. And although those factors may be at play to various degrees for different families, poverty is their common root. A continuing study called Baby’s First Years, started in 2018, aims to determine whether reducing poverty can itself promote healthy brain development.

“None of us thinks income is the only answer,” said Dr. Kimberly Noble, a neuroscientist and pediatrician at Columbia University who is co-leading the work. “But with Baby’s First Years, we are moving past correlation to test whether reducing poverty directly causes changes in children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development.”

Dr. Noble and her collaborators are examining the effects of giving poor families cash payments in amounts that wound up being comparable to those the Biden administration will distribute as part of an expanded child tax credit.

The researchers randomly assigned 1,000 mothers with newborns living in poverty in New York City, New Orleans, the Twin Cities and Omaha to receive a debit card every month holding either $20 or $333 that the families could use as they wished. (The Biden plan will provide $300 monthly per child up to age 6, and $250 for children 6 through 17.) The study tracks cognitive development and brain activity in children over several years using a noninvasive tool called mobile EEG, which measures brain wave patterns using a wearable cap of 20 electrodes.

The study also tracks the mothers’ financial and employment status, maternal health measures such as stress hormone levels, and child care use. In qualitative interviews, the researchers probe how the money affects the family, and with the mothers’ consent, they follow how they spend it.

The study aimed to collect brain activity data from children at age 1 and age 3 in home visits, and researchers managed to obtain the first set of data for around two-thirds of the children before the pandemic struck. Because home visits are still untenable, they extended the study to age 4 and will be collecting the second set of brain data next year instead of this year.

The pandemic, as well as the two stimulus payments most Americans received this past year, undoubtedly affected participating families in different ways, as will this year’s stimulus checks and the new monthly payments. But because the study is randomized, the researchers nonetheless expect to be able to assess the impact of the cash gift, Dr. Noble said.

Baby’s First Years is seen as an audacious effort to prove, through a randomized trial, a causal link between poverty reduction and brain development. “It is definitely one of the first, if not the first” study in this developing field to have direct policy implications, said Martha Farah, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Center for Neuroscience and Society who studies poverty and the brain.

Professor Farah concedes, however, that social scientists and policymakers often discount the relevance of brain data. “Are there actionable insights we get by bringing neuroscience to bear, or are people just being snowed by pretty brain images and impressive-sounding words from neuroscience? It’s an important question,” she said.

Skeptics abound. James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago who studies inequality and social mobility, said he didn’t see “even a hint that a policy would come out of it, other than to say, yes, there’s an imprint of a better economic life.”

“And it still remains a question what the actual mechanism is” through which giving parents cash helps children’s brains, he said, adding that targeting such a mechanism directly might be both cheaper and more effective.

Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, who worked on a child allowance proposal by Senator Mitt Romney, agrees that tracking the source of any observed cognitive benefits is tricky. “I have trouble disentangling the interventions that actually help the most,” he said. For example, policy experts debate whether certain child care programs directly benefit a child’s brain or simply free up her caregiver to get a job and increase the family’s income, he said.

Yet that is exactly why providing disadvantaged families with cash might be the most potent way to test the link to brain development, Dr. Noble said. “It’s quite possible that the particular pathways to children’s outcomes differ across families,” she said. “So by empowering families to use the money as they see fit, it doesn’t presuppose a particular pathway or mechanism that leads to differences in child development.”

Neuroscience has a track record for transforming societal thinking and influencing policy. Research showing that the brain continues to mature past adolescence and into a person’s mid-20s has reshaped policies relating to juvenile justice.

In another example, research on brain and cognitive development in children who grew up in Romanian orphanages from the mid-1960s into the 1990s changed policy on institutionalization and foster care, in Romania and worldwide, said Charles Nelson, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Boston Children’s Hospital who co-led that work.

Those studies demonstrated that deprivation and neglect diminish IQ and hinder psychological development in children who remain institutionalized past age 2, and that institutionalization profoundly affects brain development, dampening electrical activity andreducing brain size.

But that work also underscores how consumers of research, policymakers among them, are prone to give more weight to brain data than to other findings, as other studies show. When Professor Nelson presents these findings to government or development agency officials, “I think they find it the strongest ammunition to implement policy changes,” he said. “It is a very powerful visual, more so than if we said, well, they have lower IQs, or their attachment isn’t as strong.” (He is an adviser for Baby’s First Years.)

The vividness of such data isn’t necessarily bad, Dr. Noble said. “If we find differences and the brain data make those differences more compelling to stakeholders, then that’s important to include,” she said. Moreover, brain data provides valuable information in its own right, particularly in infants and young children, for whom behavioral tests of cognition are often inaccurate or impossible to conduct, she said. Brain differences also tend to be detectable earlier than behavioral ones, she said.

The field may simply be too young to clock its contributions to policy, Professor Farah said. But increasing understanding of how specific brain circuits are affected by poverty, along with better tools for gauging such circuits, may yield science-based interventions that get taken up at a policy level, she said.

Meanwhile, Baby’s First Years hopes to address a broader question that is already relevant at the policy level: whether cash aid to parents helps their children’s brains develop in a way that helps them for a lifetime.

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Those who toil in low-wage jobs in the GTA more likely to be visible minorities

2019/11/27 Leave a comment

Of note:

The swelling ranks of Greater Toronto workers who pour coffee, clean offices and toil in other low-wage jobs are more likely to be visible minorities, according to a new report.

Although visible minorities make up just 46 per cent of the Toronto region’s workforce, they account for more than 63 per cent of the working poor, says the report being released Tuesday by the Metcalf Foundation.

Within each of the area’s four largest visible minority groups — Chinese, Black, South Asian and Filipino — the Black community has the highest percentage of working poor, at 10.5 per cent, says the report written by social policy expert John Stapleton, who used the latest census and Statistics Canada income data.

Second- and third-generation Black Canadians are especially vulnerable and often earn less than recent Black immigrants, according to the report.

Working poverty is lowest in the Filipino community, at 5.3 per cent, just above white residents at 4.8 per cent.

“It is striking and concerning that the Black population has the highest percentage of working poverty among both the immigrant population and those born in Canada,” says the report.

The growth in working poverty among and second- and third-generation Black Canadians is “particulary pronounced” among Black Canadian-born females, who saw an increase from 9.7 per cent in 2006 to 12.2 per cent in 2016, the report says.

As highlighted in a recent United Way report, the Toronto region is “coming to the uncomfortable realization that our increasing economic inequality is also highly racialized,” says University of Toronto professor David Hulchanski.

“We knew this, but now we have solid data and evidence,” says Hulchanski, who has been tracking disappearing middle-class neighbourhoods in the GTA and other Canadian cities for almost 50 years.

The report reflects “facts and trends that cannot continue if we want a productive, prosperous and harmonious Toronto region,” he adds.

The report is the second update of Stapleton’s groundbreaking 2012 analysis, which found working poverty in the Toronto region spiked by an alarming 46 per cent between 2001 and 2006, largely due to the demand for entry-level service workers to support the burgeoning high-paid knowledge sector. This includes lawyers, business and finance professionals.

Over the past decade, working poverty grew by another 27 per cent, Tuesday’s report shows.

“Although this slower growth is a welcome trend, the continued growth is troubling,” Stapleton says.

High rates of working poverty along with data that points to “the racialization” of working poverty is a serious public policy concern, he says.

“These trends ought to be considered unacceptable anywhere, and definitely in the wealthiest and most diverse metropolitan area of an affluent nation,” Stapleton says. “We all lose out when a significant part of our labour force cannot make ends meet.”

Black community scholars Carl James and Kofi Hope, who independently analyzed the report’s race-based data, say the findings have to be seen in the context of “the reality of anti-Black racism, and the reluctance of Canadians to acknowledge that this phenomenon has existed in our nation for hundreds of years.”

“This report shows why it is important to collect disaggregated data,” says James, who holds the Jean Augustine chair in education, community and diaspora at York University’s faculty of education. “And it also shows why it is important to disaggregate the visible minority category.”

Soha Mohamed, 29, a decent work project facilitator at the Victoria Park Hub in Scarborough, says the Metcalf report paints a “disappointing” portrait of the experience of Black workers.

“But it doesn’t come as a shock, especially for me, personally, and my own relationship to precarious work,” adds Mohamed, a Black woman whose part-time contract, with no benefits, expires next March.

“Even though my work is to promote stable employment and opportunities for job advancement, health and pension benefits, equality and rights at work for women, it’s also something that I aspire to achieve,” she says.

Mohamed, who has two young daughters, immigrated to Canada with her parents from Sudan when she was 5. Combined with child benefits and her partner’s meagre income as an upholsterer, their household income falls below Canada’s Low-Income Measure of about $47,000 after taxes for a family of four in 2017.

“I am already looking for work because I know my current contract won’t be extended,” she said. “There is always that level of uncertainty. What happens next? How will I pay the rent?”

The report defines the working poor as people between the ages of 18 and 64 who are not students, are living independently and have an annual after-tax income between $3,000 and the Low-Income Measure of $22,133 in 2015, the year the most recent census was taken.

By this measure, 7 per cent of Toronto workers — almost 170,000 — are “working poor.”

The working poor tend to be younger and less educated than the overall working population. And they are more likely to be men, a reflection of the loss of manufacturing jobs in the area that tended to be dominated by male workers.

Although the data doesn’t show why the growth in working poverty has slowed in the past decade, increases to the minimum wage and new and increased income supplements for people living in poverty likely helped, Stapleton says.

“These interventions, which continue to moderate the incidence of working poverty, illustrate that governments have a crucial role to play in assuring adequate incomes for residents,” says the report by the Metcalf Foundation, which is dedicated to equity, sustainability and the arts.

Strategies to reduce working poverty also need to address systemic and structural issues that continue to marginalize the Black community, the report adds.

Society needs to value work done by those in lower-paying jobs and find a way to turn them into full-time, less precarious employment.

“We believe that through higher wages, better job stability, anti-racism strategies, and more effective support programs, Toronto could reduce and even eradicate working poverty,” Stapleton says in the report.

Many of the factors driving working poverty among all GTA residents — including being a young worker, having no post-secondary education, and living outside the downtown core — are common among Black Canadians, say York University’s James and Hope, a senior policy adviser at the Wellesley Institute.

A February 2019 Statistics Canada report says 26.6 per cent of the Black population was under age 15, while only 16.7 per cent of the overall Canadian population was in that age group.

According to the Toronto District School Board, Black students — particularly males — are more likely than other students to be suspended or expelled from school and have a higher dropout rate.

And Black people in Toronto are also disproportionately watched, stopped and “carded” by police, leading to higher rates of criminalization, they add.

As far as intergenerational working poverty, James and Hope say it appears the longer Black families live in Canada and interact with Canadian institutions, “the more difficult it becomes for them to overcome entrenched barriers.”

“Further research is needed to look more closely at the ways anti-Black racism manifests to produce barriers to Black people’s success in the labour market,” they say. “This research is critical to moving forward if we are to get a full picture of what is happening within Black communities, and what policy and community responses are necessary to change this situation.”

Source: Those who toil in low-wage jobs in the GTA more likely to be visible minorities

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Child poverty linked to discrimination and systemic inequality, study suggests

2018/06/19 Leave a comment

Good use of Census data:

Federal ridings with the most child and family poverty in Canada are also home to the highest proportions of Indigenous, visible minority, immigrant and single-parent families, according to a new study.

These ridings are also more likely to have high unemployment, low rates of labour force participation, more renters and people paying more than 30 per cent of their income on housing, says the report released Monday by Campaign 2000, a national coalition of more than 120 organizations dedicated to ending child poverty.

The findings, based on the latest 2016 census and 2015 income tax data, suggest poverty is linked to persistent discrimination and systemic inequality, rather than luck, or poor individual choice, adds the report.

Area single mother Jane Syvret, 27, who is of Indigenous and Black heritage, says her family is the face of the Campaign 2000 report. She and her three young children live in Regent Park, part of Toronto Centre, the riding with the fourth highest child poverty rate in the country.

The analysis comes in advance of Ottawa’s long-awaited national poverty-reduction strategy, expected later this month, and urges the federal government to act decisively.

“After decades of waiting for federal action, the first poverty-reduction strategy must ensure Canada stops only tallying the number of children in poverty and starts to number poverty’s days instead,” said Anita Khanna, Campaign 2000’s national co-ordinator.

“Given Canada’s wealth, no child should go to bed hungry. No parent should be forced to choose between paying rent and buying medication or miss out on work or training for lack of quality affordable childcare,” she added.

The coalition, which has been documenting “the failure of good intentions” to end child poverty in Canada for almost 30 years, wants Ottawa to set aggressive poverty-busting goals and timelines and is calling for federal anti-poverty legislation before the 2019 election to hold future governments to account.

Twenty-six ridings with the highest child poverty rates are in Ontario and half are in the city of Toronto, according to the report.

Syvret’s riding of Toronto Centre includes a large social housing community as well as pricey Bay St. condos, is home to many visible minorities and recent immigrants. A troubling 40 per cent of children in the riding are growing up poor.

Although she grew up in poverty as one of nine siblings in a family with working parents, Syvret says she never “felt poor.”

“We were a big loving family and we never wanted for anything at home,” she said in an interview. “There were always programs available to local kids, with mentors and people who cared about us.”

But as the area redeveloped, community programs closed in favour of new facilities that draw kids from across the city, leaving many local families shut out, said Syvret, who pays market rent and is struggling to survive on welfare with a newborn and two other daughters ages 2 and 9.

Although she has worked since she was 15 in recreation and food preparation, she knows minimum-wage jobs won’t pull her young family out of poverty. But adult education and skills upgrading programs are difficult to access, she said.

“Why is everything always full?” she said. “These are supports that are put in place to help. But if they are always full, that means there is not a lot of help.”

As Campaign 2000 noted in its annual report card last fall, more than 1.2 million children — 17.4 per cent — were living in poverty in 2015, including a staggering 38 per cent of Indigenous children.

Children are considered to be poor if their families are living below the Low Income Measure, after taxes, or 50 per cent of the median Canadian income. In 2015, that was about $24,500 for a single parent with one child and about $36,400 for a couple with two kids.

The coalition’s latest analysis shows 162 of Canada’s 338 federal ridings have child poverty rates at or above the national average and include both rural and urban communities represented by MPs from all political parties.

In the 66 ridings with the highest rates of child poverty, an average of 30 per cent of children — or more than 400,000 — are growing up poor.

Ridings with the least child poverty are still home to more than 90,000 low-income families and nearly 150,000 low-income children, the report notes.

Churchill—Keewatinook Aski in northern Manitoba has the highest rate of child poverty at more than 64 per cent, while the Quebec ridings of Montarville, in the southwest end of the province and Levis-Lotbinière, near Quebec City, have the lowest, at just 4 per cent.

In ridings with the most child poverty, an average of 16 per cent of residents are recent immigrants and about 37 per cent are visible minorities. An average of 45 per cent are renters.

In ridings with the least child poverty, an average of 6 per cent are recent immigrants, 14 per cent are visible minorities and just 21 per cent are renters.

Khanna says fighting child poverty requires a combination of financial and social supports to help families like Syvret’s.

“Universal child care, drug and dental coverage, affordable housing, improved employment insurance and support for workers are all needed,” Khanna said. “With every riding affected by poverty, every riding will benefit from a strong federal strategy.”

Source: Child poverty linked to discrimination and systemic inequality, study suggests

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Toronto: The Downton Abbey of Canada?

2015/04/21 2 Comments

More on the working poor in Toronto (great media line):

“Canada’s two richest cities are becoming giant modern-day Downton Abbeys where a well-to-do knowledge class relies on a large cadre of working poor who pour their coffee, serve their food, clean their offices, and relay their messages from one office to another,” it says, referring to the popular British TV drama about an aristocratic family and their servants.

Knowledge workers include senior managers and professionals in business, finance, government, law, education, health care, media, arts, sports and entertainment.

The report is an update of Stapleton’s landmark 2012 research, which showed Toronto’s working poor grew by a staggering 42 per cent in the first five years of the millennium. (Although this earlier work was based on the long-form census, which no longer exists, Stapleton has used Statistics Canada tax filer data to replicate his 2012 findings and inform his latest report.)

He defines the working poor as non-students between the ages of 18 and 65, living independently, earning more than $3,000 but less than the low income measure (LIM), defined as 50 per cent of the median income.

By that measure, a single person in 2011 with annual earnings of less than $19,930, after taxes and government transfers, was considered working poor. In today’s dollars, it would be about $20,800. For a family of four, it would be just over $41,600.

The “good news,” Stapleton says, is that the rate of increase in working poverty in Toronto has slowed from a decade ago.

But despite an improving economy, increases to the minimum wage and new income supports such as the federal Working Income Tax Benefit, Universal Child Care Benefit and Ontario Child Benefit, working poverty in the city continues to climb.

In the city of Toronto, where almost 11 per cent, or 142,000 adults, are living in working poor households, working poverty is concentrated in the inner suburbs of North York (13 per cent) Scarborough (12 per cent) and York (10 per cent).

It has also begun to spill into York and Peel regions where the cities of Markham and Brampton lead with working poverty rates of 10.2 per cent and 9.6 per cent respectively, according to the report.

“For the first time, working poverty is growing faster in the outer suburbs like Markham, Brampton and Richmond Hill compared to south of Steeles Ave.,” Stapleton says. It grew in Markham by 26 per cent, in Brampton by 22 per cent and in Richmond Hill by 21 per cent, he notes.

Although more research is needed to fully explain this phenomenon, Stapleton suspects it is largely because housing in the city of Toronto is becoming too expensive for low-wage workers.

Needless to say, given Toronto’s diversity, this correlates with visible minorities (median incomes of first generation and many second generation immigrants are lower than non-visible minorities).

Toronto: The Downton Abbey of Canada? | Toronto Star.

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