The recent controversy about Statistics Canada’s plans to collect a range of detailed financial data has, understandably, focused on questions of privacy. But the role of a country’s national statistical agency has always been to balance the privacy concerns associated with collecting sensitive individual data with the many public goods produced from the statistical analysis […]
The federal government is to be congratulated on its just-released Poverty Reduction Strategy. The strategy itself, running to over 100 pages, endorses the idea of an official poverty line, relieving Statistics Canada from the impossible task of finding a purely statistical basis for defining and measuring poverty. It further endorses the idea that poverty has […]
Poverty is hard to measure. There are many aspects beside living on low income, including having disabilities or costly health problems, not being able to find decent housing, not being able to understand and communicate in an environment with increasing technological and legal complexity and being unable to find nutritious food at reasonable prices. Still, […]
UNICEF’S most recent report on child well-being in rich countries ranked Canada 17 out of 29 countries assessed. Sadly, this isn’t news. The House of Commons resolved to eradicate child poverty in 1989, but in late 2013, Statistics Canada reported that 967,000 children in this country still lived in low-income homes.
