Some interesting trends in poverty in Canada

I was introduced to a rather surprising factoid by an article in this weekend's Globe and Mail. It claimed that "the Chinese Canadian community experiences higher than average poverty rates, including higher than Black and South Asian Canadians".

Now, I am accustomed to thinking of Chinese Canadians as relatively successful immigrants, partly, I suppose, because you see all those smartly dressed young men and women walking around the Financial District downtown. So, of course, I checked into it.

And, lo and behold, according to StatsCan, 15.3% of Chinese Canadians lived in poverty in 2020, compared to 12.4% of Blacks and 10.8% of South Asians. Well, go figure.

Some of the other poverty factoids from that web page are also illuminating, not to say shocking (and not all in a bad way). For example, the overall poverty rate in Canada was 8.1% in 2020, but that compares to 14.5% just five years earlier, in 2015. Just as an aside, that was the year Justin Trudeau and the Liberals took over the country after ten years of Tory administrations. Coincidence? I think not.

In fact, the poverty rates of immigrants in general more than halved between 2015 and 2020, from 18.8% to 9.1%, not much above the national average. Child poverty was less than half of its 2015 levels. The poverty rate for one-person families headed by women with a small child - always the poorest family type - fell from 62.7% to 31.3% (although still five times the rate of couple-families with a small child). Transgender men (12.9%) and women (12.0%) face much more poverty than cisgender men (7.9%) and women (8.2%), but non-binary people face the highest of all at 20.6%, more than twice the national average.

Interesting stuff, even if all the rates are still shockingly high. And, although 2020 may have been an unrepresentative year, coinciding as it did with the high government transfers and temporary pandemic relief benefits resulting from the unprecedented COVID-19 outbreak, the reduction in poverty under the Liberals is quite startling.