Poverty in Canada Not Connected to Race, New Study Says

A new study says that poverty in Canada is not connected to race, and government programs aimed at solving race-based poverty are failing. The Aristotle Foundation’s study, Poverty and Race in Canada: Facts about Race, Discrimination, and the Poor, found that 64 percent of Canadians considered low-income are not from a visible minority or indigenous. “The overwhelming majority of the Canadian poor are ‘white’, and thus cannot receive race-based allocations from governments if unchangeable characteristics such as skin colour or ethnicity are accounted for in policy,” authors Matthew Lau and David Hunt wrote in a news release. Based on data from Statistics Canada, Mr. Lau and Mr. Hunt say the large majority of those living in poverty in Canada are from “white” backgrounds—or what Statistics Canada calls “not a visible minority nor Indigenous.”...