The Material Deprivation Index backs them up
In a recent edition of Macleans magazine, a woman, Jeni Gunn, writes about her life as a 51 year old single woman living in Canada. She says:
“I work hard, buy quality clothes and fake my way through dinner-party conversations. I’m also part of a fast-growing Canadian underclass.”
“ …nobody knows I’ve become one of Canada’s working poor: someone who works regularly but still falls below the poverty line.”
“ Currently, my monthly take-home pay averages $2,800, most of which goes to rent, insurance, gas, groceries and debt repayment.”
Her yearly take home pay is $33,600.
A 74 year old single woman writing anonymously in a US publication called the Moneyist recently reviewed her financial future saying:
“If I were to earn more than another $11,000 over a period of three months, I could go over the “benefit cliff” and lose my voucher. So the voucher has been more secure than a job, but it keeps me in poverty. I also get all of my medical co-pays paid for by financial assistance. My rent is about $1,500 per month, and Section 8 pays about $900 of it. My Social Security income is now $2,333 per month.”
Her yearly income in US dollars is $37,596
In the news related to the recent Air Canada strike, there was much publicity concerning poverty level wages here noted by a Union spokesperson:
“Within our working group, we have people who have very different realities. We do not want our junior flight attendants to work below the poverty wage…”
“It’s not something that’s sustainable. The cost of living is so high that the antiquated way we’re paid is not sufficient for people to meet their basic needs…”
I found wage rates available in another publication called Inside Halton.com:
“Junior Air Canada flight attendants working full time currently earn $1,952 per month before taxes, well below the federal minimum wage for a full-time worker of $2,840…”
The yearly income before tax of a junior flight attendant is $23,424.
According to Canada’s official poverty line, only the junior flight attendant is actually living in poverty as a member of the working poor. For example, the latest official Market Basket Measure (MBM) poverty line for a single person in Ontario is $27,624, 18% higher than the current junior flight attendant wage rate . The good news is that, with the expected pay hike, these flight attendants should emerge from poverty.
But what are we to make of claims of poverty from people making more money, yet not a lot more, but also making a claim of poverty?
Jeni Gunn has the answer – also noted by the Environics Institute:
“Officially, only 10 per cent of Canadians are considered poor. But if you measure poverty not just by income but by standard of living—whether a person can afford basics, like new shoes, small birthday gifts or going out for special occasions—the number rises to roughly 25 per cent. That’s about 10 million people. I never expected one of them would be me.”
I work on issues related to poverty among older adults and wrote about different measures of poverty with colleague Natalie Iciaszczyk. Another colleague, Peter Hicks has also written about different measures of poverty also calling for a broader approach
The purpose is not to judge which poverty is best or to establish who is right. The purpose is to show that differing measures of poverty all tell us something about an aspect of poverty and no one measure is right or wrong.
Yet what I am seeing lately is that the public, especially through the popular press and on social media, is unconsciously gravitating toward the Material Deprivation Index, the MDI, and moving away from the two stalwarts that scholars, advocates and activists have used for the past three decades and longer: the Market Basket Measure (MBM) and the Low Income Measure (LIM).
The MBM is likely the truest or closest to an absolute measure of poverty and is usually the lowest as it actually measures the cost of a basket of goods. The LIM which is higher (at this time of writing) is closer to being a measure of inequality as it is pegged at half the median Canadian income.
But the MDI measures to some degree what if feels like to be in poverty, to be restricted in one’s choices and to believe that one is left out.
Here is a definition of the Canadian MDI:
“An alternative approach to measuring a household’s standard of living is to look at outcomes rather than inputs – that is, assessing a household’s standard of living by looking at the goods and services it has, or has access to, and the activities in which it participates. This method of measuring poverty is called a material deprivation index (MDI).”
In many ways, this is what Jini Gunn and the unidentified woman in the Moneyist were talking about. They didn’t think they had ongoing access to many of the things life has to offer and what others see as reasonable attributes of community life. For them, that’s poverty.
Air Canada strikers were right about poverty wages according to all the three measures of poverty commonly used in Canada and this made their case compelling in their big win over corporate Canada and our government that got it wrong.
But for more and more Canadians, being routinely left out is more and more about being left out of the mainstream and we are fortunate to now have a measurement tool to take that into account.