Tag Archives: StatCan

Things are moving quite fast, even too fast, since the federal government’s first poverty reduction strategy was published in August, at least for the aspects of this strategy which are problematic. The unilateral decision to consider the Market Basket Measure (MBM) as “Canada’s Official Poverty Line” is one of those. It ignores some useful expertise developed about the MBM over the years, notably by the Centre d’étude sur la pauvreté et l’exclusion (CÉPE), the institution meant to provide...

The federal government has promised to launch a Canadian Poverty Reduction Strategy in the coming weeks or months on the basis of now completed consultations with Canadians and the still ongoing deliberations of an advisory committee. As part of this process, there has been discussion about which poverty or low income measure or measures should be used for the purpose of monitoring levels and trends in the incidence of poverty and gauging the impact of poverty reduction policies. At various...

For a new CCPA blog post on housing (un)affordability, I dove into the latest Census data for Metro Vancouver. I used two series on shelter cost and shelter-to-income ratio, and found that 32% of households were paying more than 30% of income on shelter (all households, owners and renters) and 16% of households more than 50% of income on shelter. The latter number is pretty alarming: one in six households in Vancouver paying more than half their income just to keep a roof over their heads;...

In this second of a series of housing-related posts I analyze the income and geographic distribution of renter-occupied households in the City of Toronto. My first post focussed on affordability and inequality trends by analyzing time series (2001-16) data for Ontario by household income quintiles. As a complement, this blog studies the income and geographic distribution of low-income and other renter households in Toronto based on census-tract (CT) data for 1996 and 2006. I expect to update...