Juno News - June 22, 2024


Data shows “overwhelming majority” of poor Canadians are white

Topics
race and poverty in Canada
Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Show David Hunt Matthew Lau Christopher Sarlo
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Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

177.31

Word count

1,762

Sentence count

111

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss a new study from the Aristotle Foundation, which argues that the majority of poor people in Canada are white. Why is there a disproportionate number of poor white people? And why is this the case? And what role does race play in poverty?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 We are packing a lot into the show today, but bear with me. We're going to move right on here
00:00:12.840 because this is a fascinating one. And I actually had a conversation about this with someone the
00:00:17.840 other day. We were talking about this idea of wokeness, which is, I think, increasingly become
00:00:22.780 only a term used by people who are criticizing wokeness. But the idea itself is one that's
00:00:27.860 certainly championed by a number of institutions, incredibly by governments, by academic institutions
00:00:33.940 and many others. And the problem with it is that it is ingrained in it as this idea of identity
00:00:40.600 politics and pitting groups against each other. We start to define people by their group identity
00:00:47.000 rather than by their individual identity. And when you look at diversity, equity and inclusion
00:00:51.960 policies, you see they're trying to solve one problem and are ignoring or in some cases creating
00:00:57.380 another. Our friends over at the Aristotle Foundation did what I found to be a fascinating
00:01:02.500 study looking at poverty and race in Canada. And they found that most of the poor in Canada
00:01:08.200 are white. So how are these people being helped by so many of the pro-inclusivity measures? The 0.93
00:01:14.720 fact remains they really aren't. This study was done by Matthew Lau and David Hunt, the latter
00:01:19.520 of whom is the research director for the Aristotle Foundation and joins us now. David, good to talk
00:01:25.160 to you. Thanks for coming on today. Hey, thanks for having me, Andrew.
00:01:29.020 So let me ask you first and foremost about why you decided to look into this, because race is
00:01:33.940 obviously a bit of a landmine issue, especially when your thesis is, as it ultimately came out to be,
00:01:39.380 that we have this problem facing white Canadians that's not really being explored.
00:01:45.100 Hey, thanks for that question, Andrew. I think actually this is in part why the Aristotle Foundation
00:01:49.480 exists is, as you said, this is a topic that perhaps others don't want to cover. And I think
00:01:56.160 we're a brand new think tank and there are issues we need to talk about because they impact everyday
00:02:02.400 Canadians. And in the case of this study, it's impacting the most disadvantaged Canadians. And
00:02:07.160 it's a topic that others don't want to talk about, but we got to talk about it. And the reality is,
00:02:10.800 hey, who actually are the poor in Canada? And why do we have funding in this country that is based on
00:02:20.720 the color of your skin? And that, in this case, leaves out the overwhelming majority of those who
00:02:25.720 are poor in Canada. So we have different programs. I mean, there are anti-racism initiatives,
00:02:31.860 there are anti-Islamophobia initiatives, anti-Semitism initiatives, there are anti-poverty initiatives.
00:02:36.140 Are the anti-poverty initiatives specifically targeting diverse groups instead of the poor
00:02:43.080 whites that you're talking about? Yeah, no, no, there will be, there will be programs that are
00:02:47.600 available to many, but there are, there, the fact that there are any, and frankly, there are a number
00:02:52.300 of programs that are under the guise of anti-poverty reduction, but whether or not you qualify is not
00:03:00.980 based on a financial criterion or criteria, it's based on the color of your skin. Do you fall under
00:03:08.080 one of the minority categories? Or in some cases, it's very specific where it's, where it's for
00:03:12.380 perhaps Indigenous only, or for that matter, Black only funding. This study, frankly, we should 0.99
00:03:20.200 probably do a follow-up study where we actually go through and identify like, what are all the
00:03:23.940 programs? That was beyond the scope of the study. What we were looking at here was simply,
00:03:27.280 okay, here's the Statistics Canada data of who is poor in Canada. And the fact that so many are being
00:03:35.480 left out. Why, frankly, is there any programming that is judging people based on the color of their
00:03:42.340 skin and providing poverty relief based on skin color? We think that's, that's illiberal. And frankly, 0.96
00:03:50.060 I'm Canadian. Look, if you looked at raw numbers, Canada is a 70% white country. So if every group
00:03:56.620 was affected by poverty equally, you'd have more impoverished white Canadians than minority
00:04:02.440 Canadians. How is it proportionally though? Are minority communities more disproportionately
00:04:08.060 affected by poverty? Is that how the government justifies this imbalance?
00:04:12.200 I would assume so. Because, because yes, like, let's be real. Both, especially let's take two
00:04:17.920 groups, Indigenous Canadians and Black Canadians. They are more likely to be in poverty. And that is an
00:04:23.140 issue. But what's the root cause? What's the reason for that? Is race the reason why they're in 0.95
00:04:28.560 poverty? And we would argue just by looking at the data, we would say, no, race is not the primary
00:04:34.540 factor. Another study that we did back in October with Matthew Lau looks at income in the country. And
00:04:40.960 when it comes to income, white Canadians are actually not even in the middle. There are many 0.92
00:04:45.760 different ethnic groups or what Statistics Canada calls cohorts. There are many that make more income
00:04:51.340 than white Canadians. And what's interesting is when you control for education, for example,
00:04:57.980 just one of many things you can control for, and just compare your Indigenous Canadians with 0.53
00:05:02.960 non-Indigenous Canadians. Once education is plugged in, there's almost no differences in some areas.
00:05:09.880 Like, for example, if you have a medical degree and you're Indigenous, you're going to be making more 1.00
00:05:13.860 money on average than those who are not Indigenous. Same as if you have a PhD or a Master's. 1.00
00:05:17.720 So the causes of poverty, at least in Canada, are not based on race. Where do you live? Are you living
00:05:25.480 in a metropolitan area or do you live out in the country? That's going to affect whether or not
00:05:30.540 you're in poverty and your income. Again, what's your level of education? Are you religious or not
00:05:35.860 religious? There's so many different factors. What we're saying here is even though, yes, there are
00:05:40.760 particular groups that may be disproportionately in poverty, race is not the cause for that. So if
00:05:49.320 we're going to solve these problems, let's not be allocating resources based on race because we're
00:05:54.340 not going to get to the root issue. Yeah. And it's interesting because the left uses the term
00:05:59.280 intersectionality to talk about the way that if you're a Black, trans, Indigenous person in a
00:06:07.300 wheelchair, your experience is going to be different than if you're just a Black woman who's able-bodied 0.99
00:06:14.120 and all of this. And I think there's truth to that. I mean, life is full of disadvantages and
00:06:18.340 advantages and no person has, you know, well, few people have, you know, the best optimal thing in
00:06:25.560 every way of their life. You know, I'm a white male, but I'm also overweight. And, you know, like for
00:06:30.240 example, so it's stuff like that. And I think that what's interesting is that they don't actually look
00:06:34.760 at all of these different categories and all of these different groups. One area that's often
00:06:39.420 missing is urban rural, which as you mentioned, is hugely, hugely influential. And I think even
00:06:44.760 Indigenous, if you were to take the where they live in the country factor into that, I think you'd see 0.96
00:06:50.940 a lot of variety within Indigenous populations. And also education level, as you mentioned, is key
00:06:57.340 as well. I mean, if you're, to use the old like show that, you know, people of my age are familiar
00:07:01.600 with Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Well, you know, that experience of that Black family in, I think,
00:07:07.040 well, in Beverly Hills, in Bel-Air is going to be a heck of a lot different than some, you know,
00:07:11.720 rural white working class family from, you know, Northern Alberta, say. And that's why it's critical
00:07:17.960 we have these conversations. And although this study is particularly provocative, right, because
00:07:22.020 we're saying, hey, there's more white people in poverty than every other ethnicity combined.
00:07:26.700 But to open up this proverbial can of worms to have these conversations in terms of, hey,
00:07:33.120 if we're seeing Canadians that are falling behind, that are disadvantaged, well, of course,
00:07:37.980 we want to do something about that. And that's right. But let's get at the root. So towards the
00:07:42.520 end of this short study, we point to what's called the success sequence. And this was not introduced,
00:07:50.360 but popularized by the Brookings Institution down in the States. And they're by no means a conservative
00:07:55.620 think tank. But they popularized this concept. And what they found is in the United States,
00:08:00.840 roughly 97% of Americans who finish high school, get a full-time job, get married, have kids,
00:08:09.380 do it in that order, 97% by the time they get to their 30s, they're not going to experience poverty
00:08:15.080 and poverty defined in the absolute sense, lacking the bare necessities of life. So that study was then
00:08:23.060 replicated by scholars at the University of Virginia, only a few years ago, looking at millennials.
00:08:27.680 So our age cohort, and same thing, they replicated the study found 97% of millennials that finished high
00:08:34.920 school, then got a full-time job and got married, had kids did it in that order. 97% in their 30s are
00:08:41.500 not in poverty. So that was then replicated in Canada. And Christopher Sarlo with the Fraser Institute
00:08:46.220 replicated the study in Canada just a few years ago and found it's not 97% in Canada,
00:08:50.900 it's over 99% that follow the success sequence are not in absolute poverty as adults. So is everyone
00:08:58.760 going to get married? No. Is everyone going to finish high school? No. Is everyone going to have
00:09:01.720 a full-time job? No. But the big takeaway there is there's certain cultural norms that are tried and
00:09:10.080 true, frankly, over the centuries. And if we put these things into practice, and from a policy
00:09:15.020 perspective, if we make it easier for more people to get on that yellow brick road, so to speak,
00:09:20.880 to get on that success sequence, we're going to alleviate much of the worst effects of poverty.
00:09:27.880 And frankly, there'll be much fewer people in Canada in poverty, if we follow things like the
00:09:32.200 success sequence, and whatever those norms are that feed into that.
00:09:35.620 Well, we had an op-ed from you over at True North about this, and people can read the study for
00:09:40.200 themselves at the Aristotle Foundation's website, aristotlefoundation.org. David Hunt, good to talk
00:09:45.900 to you. Thanks for coming on today. Hey, thank you, Andrew. Thanks for listening to the Andrew Lawton
00:09:49.980 Show. Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.