Most poor people aren’t visible minorities and most visible minorities aren’t poor: Federal policy should stop pretending otherwise

Matthew Lau and David Hunt, Financial Post, July 26, 2024

You know you’ve hit a political nerve when a federal department feels the need to prepare a memorandum for parliamentarians to explain away its many public policies that are illiberal, anti-individual and ultimately anti-poor.

Exhibit A: Our recent report for the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy became the subject of a Question Period Note supplied to federal cabinet minister Randy Boissonnault, responsible for Employment and Social Development Canada. The note was an attempt to explain away our recent report, “Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor,” which critiques race-based government anti-poverty programs.

A refresher: Such programs are ineffective at reducing poverty when they use race instead of actual poverty status as their target. They are also counterproductive: even when aimed at racial groups that disproportionately experience poverty, they tend to help the top segments of those groups while people who are actually poor fall farther behind.

We are of course delighted that the federal government found our report worth reading, though less delighted that its response, presumably prepared by a federal employee at public expense, repeats tired nostrums such as how racism (which Ottawa always assumes, even now in Woke 2024, is “systemic” rather than periodic and personal) explains much in terms of outcomes.

In addressing our report, the anonymous federal note-writer argues we should have focused on the proportion of an identity group that is poor rather than on absolute numbers of poor Canadians. As the note says: “The authors provide statistics on the number of people who are experiencing poverty by racialized groups. They show that, of the people experiencing poverty in Canada, 58.1 per cent of them (sic) are white. A more representative statistic would be the proportion of a racialized group experiencing poverty compared to the proportion of that group among the population.”

That is a commonly calculated statistic. It does show that some groups are more present among poor Canadians than they are in the population at large. But exactly the same point can be made by confirming that poverty rates are higher in some groups than others, which is exactly the data our table presents a mere two paragraphs from the previously cited “58.1 per cent” statistic. Did the note-taker miss the table?

The Question Period Note does not actually refute the main points in our report. It mentions, using data similar to ours, that although on average white Canadians are less likely to experience poverty than visible minority Canadians are, most poor Canadians are in fact white. Why? Because the overall white population is large. Using Statistics Canada’s “market basket measure,” the poverty rate among white Canadians is just 6.3 per cent, which is lower than the population average of 7.4 per cent. But because Canada’s white population is so large, that 6.3 per cent represents 1.6 million people.

The fact remains that an anti-poverty program that provides funding or support to people because they are Black (to take one example) is badly targeted. Black Canadians do experience poverty at higher rates than white Canadians, but about 85 per cent of the Black population is not poor, while about 95 per cent of Canada’s poor population is not Black.

The Question Period Note says that although the federal government’s poverty reduction strategy does draw a link between race and poverty, “the key pillars of Canada’s social protection system” rely on income tests or other eligibility requirements, such as age, disability and family status. Yes, it’s good that most of the federal government’s income redistribution and social programs are not race-based. But that is not a defence of the portion that are.

Although the best anti-poverty program is still, as the old cliché goes, a job, federal programs are rife with discrimination based on race and gender, as is much corporate and university hiring, which means millions of Canadians are disenfranchised from important parts of the job market solely on the basis of their race or gender. That’s illiberal and anti-individual.

Here are two modest policy proposals: First, scrap race-based programs that do not actually help poor or disadvantaged Canadians, even if aimed at those from racial backgrounds that disproportionately experience poverty. Second, end all programs that discriminate against millions of Canadians of any colour or ancestry as such policies are divisive and may not even help, studies suggest, those who get the reserved jobs. Instead, focus on genuine opportunity-based policy for all Canadians.

Matthew Lau is a senior fellow and David Hunt research director at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy. They are co-authors of Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor.