Government policies ignore impoverished white Canadians: report

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

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The article, titled “Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts on Race, Discrimination and the Poor,” analyzed the latest data from Statistics Canada and looked at provincial and federal public policy initiatives aimed at fighting poverty.

It has been found that between 7.4 and 10.6 per cent of Canadians live in relative poverty, depending on how you define the term.

At the lowest level, defined by low after-tax income, about 58 percent, or 1.6 million, of people living in poverty are white, or “not a visible minority or indigenous person,” according to StatsCan. On the other side, which measures poverty based on the cost of living, 2.5 million people, or 64.4 percent of the group living in poverty, are white.

“In other words, the overwhelming majority of Canada’s poor are ‘white’ and therefore cannot receive allocations from governments on the basis of race if policies take into account immutable characteristics such as skin color or ethnicity,” the group said in a statement press release announcing the findings.

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The article points to government documents that use the link between race and poverty to justify race-based remedies, which it argues ignore many people in need.

The federal document outlining Canada’s anti-racism strategy noted: “Anti-racism is manifested in the legacy of the current social, economic and political marginalization of African Canadians in society, such as lack of opportunity, lower socio-economic status, higher unemployment, significant rates of poverty and over-representation in the system criminal justice system.” Ontario’s Strategic Plan to Combat Racism makes the same statement almost verbatim.

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What’s more, the report found, government anti-poverty programs that take into account racial criteria may result in inappropriate targeting of resources to people who are not even poor.

He cites Ontario’s Racialized and Indigenous Supports for Entrepreneurs (RAISE) grant program. Using the low-income after-tax measure, race-based eligibility for this funding would apply not only to 1.4 million low-income people in Canada (all low-income visible minority and indigenous peoples), but also to almost 10.5 million minorities or Native people who are not low-income, excluding non-minority and non-Indigenous low-income people.

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

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

The study suggests separating poverty from race and says governments should aim to address the “underlying problems” of poverty by enhancing or minimizing disruption of what it calls the “sequence of success”: graduating from high school, working full-time and getting married before the wedding. Have children. They say these indicators show that the vast majority of people in the U.S. and Canada do not live in poverty.

“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 at rates disproportionate to the overall 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 descent.”

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“Poverty causes colorblindness, so poverty policies that exclude some Canadians and favor others based on skin color or ethnicity leave out a huge portion of Canada’s poor and are illiberal,” adds co-author and Aristotle Foundation research director David Hunta : “Canada’s anti-poverty policy should instead focus on those in need and on creating broad opportunities for all.”

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