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New Food Banks Canada Report Highlights Hidden Poverty in Canada · Kvetch & Release

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  Interesting story here, not a great one. Canada's official poverty rate isn't apparently
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  telling the full story of hunger and food insecurity, according to a new report
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  measuring poverty with a material Deprivation Index. What does it mean? Well,
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  it was just published today by Food Banks Canada and experts are estimating twenty five
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  percent of Canadians are living at a poverty level living standard, which is compared
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  to the official poverty rate of ten percent. Bit of a difference there between
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  those two numbers. Joining me to discuss is Richard Materne, who is the
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  research director at Food Banks Canada as well as a co author of this report.
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  Richard, how are you? I'm good, How are you doing well?
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  Thank you? So what does this mean with us looking at these numbers
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  here? So, it means the way this measure was developed is it's looking
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  at eleven items which the majority of Canadians feel are necessary for an acceptable standard
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  of living in Canada and what we found and these items include everything from being
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  able to afford to buy a gift for a small child, being able to
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  get around your community for transportation around your community, being able to afford adequate
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  clothes for a job, interview. So items like that, and out of
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  those eleven items, twenty five percent of people in the country cannot afford to
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  or more of them. And what that's showing us is that they're likely,
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  there's a strong likelihood that they're living in poverty. That's pretty significant then,
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  because if we're taking a look at the official poverty rate, then of that
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  ten percent, I mean a fifteen percent variation that that's huge. It certainly
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  is I think one of the key things. So the current poverty rate is
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  measured by something called the market basket measure, and that looks at the amount
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  of income a household has an income threshold cut off, so if you're over
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  that threshold, you're not, if you're under it, you are, And
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  that was an important step in poverty measurement. What this study is looking at
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  is the standard of living people actually have with the money that they have,
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  So what can they actually afford? What goods and services can they actually afford?
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  And because there's other things that impact people's ability to afford things aside from
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  just how much income they have, it includes how much debt they have.
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  It includes whether they have been living in a particular apartment for a long time,
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  or if they've just moved and they're paying like above market above average market
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  rent. Could include if they have a disability and they need extra costs to
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  support their disability and the extra healthcare needs and so forth. So there's such
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  a range of issues. And then you consider what's been happening in the last
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  couple of years with inflation eating into people's purchasing power. So that's also harder
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  to capture with our current income based measure. So this is something that when
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  you look at all those factors that are impacting people's standard of living, income
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  just tells part of the story. And we'll talk about why assessing things differently
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  is important. But I mean, just to get to go back to these
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  numbers here, we're talking six million more people than reflected and stats can most
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  recent poverty rate data that Again, it's just it's a huge number that our
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  if our policy makers are looking at things through one lens and you're saying,
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  you know, look at it through another ones again, it just it goes
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  back to the fact that the discrepancy is just huge. Well, it's definitely
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  a challenges how we look at poverty and how we design programs to address poverty.
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  So for instance, yeah, I was just gonna say, why,
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  why is it important? Do you think to assess it through different lenses?
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  And I'm sure sure you're going to go there with what you were just saying.
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  Sorry, I think so, Yeah, it's it's important because you can
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  see, you know, if if there's other things aside looking looking at other
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  factors aside from a particular income threshold. When let's say, if you're designing
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  poverty reduction programs. So for instance, under in the MDI and the Material
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  Deprivation d X, the large majority of those who are living at a poverty
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  level standard of living are working. And so if you trying to adjust poverty
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  and if you're not supporting people who are working, and that could include you
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  know, expanding your income thresholds of eligibility, expanding benefits of like dental and
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  drug insurance type of thing, if you're not capturing this group of people,
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  then you're missing the mark of pottery reduction. So I think that's one of
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  the key things. And it's also important because then you can see other aspects
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  that are contributing to higher rates of poverty that that go beyond you know,
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  just what an income threshold can describe do other countries use this material deprivation index?
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  So it's been used in Europe for decades. Part of yeah, it's
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  it's been part of what Europe has been using. And then the EU has
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  been using for decades. In Ireland in particular how to very developed model of
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  about deprivation indecks for a while and they use that an addition to income based
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  measures to help design some of their income security programs. So there's but in
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  Europe across the board, it's been used to monitor rates of poverty and standard
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  of living in conjunction a complementary to income measures, and that's what we're looking
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  for as well. Well. You know, being able to gather as much
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  data as possible is really important. I was actually looking at from Daily Bread
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  Toronto a tweet that they put out yesterday talking about their food bank visits,
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  and it was showing in January of twenty twenty on a monthly basis, in
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  January there it was about eighty thousand in twenty twenty and this year the same
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  month two hundred and eighty thousand. But if we look to May, it
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  was still that eighty thousand figure in twenty twenty. This year it's up to
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  three hundred and fifty thousand. It looks like I mean visits. This is
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  a huge number of people that are using you know, food banks. Yeah,
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  food banks are often, as we say, the Canary and the coal
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  mine with a lot of these issues. And that's why we instigated this.
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  This study was to look at how can we capture a fuller extent of poverty
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  that seems to be occurring on the ground based on what we're seeing across the
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  network in terms of bank demand. And also it kind of reflects what we
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  saw recently with the recent Statistics Canada results showing twenty four percent of Canadians experiencing
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  certain levels a range of food insecurity. So you look at the most recent
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  results of other studies compared to what we're seeing, and then you see these
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  results from the Material Deprivation indexs and you think, okay, things are trending
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  upward here in terms of people struggling to make ends meet. So what can
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  be a complementary poverty measure that can capture that difference. Well, that's obviously
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  something that is needed. I want to thank you for joining us to break
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  down some of this here. Last thing, I guess I would want to
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  ask, is you know, when it comes to higher rates of poverty standards,
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  who's most likely to be dealing with it? But I mean at twenty
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  five percent, you're talking such a cross swath of the population here, I
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  got to imagine it's abroad. Oh, it's definitely just about across the demographic
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  groups for sure. But you're seeing, of course, the renters of forty
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  two percent, people of disabilities thirty seven percent, single parent households I believe
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  of forty three percent, forty four percent, and then those between eighteen and
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  thirty are our thirty percent, and that's that's all higher than the average.
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  So those are all reflected and what we're seeing at the food banks and with
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  higher food and security rates, so those that we're seeing that here as well.
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  Well. I want to thank you so much for breaking down the material
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  deprivation index. Why looking at using it to assess poverty is a better way
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  to you know, add to the scope of data that we have. Richard,
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  I appreciate your time this afternoon. Thank you. Richard Matterne is a
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  research director with Food Banks Canada as well as the co author of this new
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  report by Food Banks Canada highlighting hidden poverty in the country,