June 2000 Fraser Forum: Polls and Poverty

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Chris Sarlo

If you want to find out what poverty means, ask people. But which people?

Most of those in the social welfare community (a loose-knit coalition of social activists and some educators, writers, religious adherents and feminists) insist on a relative definition of poverty. Poverty is, in their view, a matter of inequality. It means being less well off than others in society. This perspective is explained by their ideology. They are socialists of one variety or another, and, being socialist, they believe that everyone is entitled to part of the wealth and income that is produced by "society." If everyone is entitled, then a person is poor if he or she does not somehow receive a "fair share" of the rewards.

For those of us who do not believe in the idea of an automatic entitlement to the wealth and income produced by others, relative poverty is of far less interest. Our interest is in the actual standard of living of those who endure some measure of real deprivation, independent of their relative position in society. For us, poverty means what it has always meant: a state of lacking any of the basic necessities of life.

Clearly, those operating from a social welfare perspective do not use a blatant ideological rationale for their choice of poverty measures. Rather, there will typically be references to concepts such as "social inclusion" or "full participation." The implication we must draw is that money is the all-important determinant of a person's ability to participate fully in modern society. It is as if command over goods and resources equals social inclusion. We need only think of low-income post-secondary students, vocal seniors, and social activists themselves to find ample evidence to the contrary. It is ironic that people with a social welfare ethic would reduce "social participation" to one's role as a consumer in the market economy.

One of the most frequently-cited claims in support of the relative approach to defining poverty is that poverty lines so determined end up being "a good indication of the public's perception of poverty." What is meant by this is that our dominant relative indicator of poverty, the Low-Income Cut-Offs (LICOs) produced by Statistics Canada, is apparently consistently close to the amount that Canadians assign, on average, in response to the Gallup poll question: "What is the least amount of money a family of four needs each week to get along in this community?" (See table 1.)

Let's take a close look at this so-called "public perception of poverty." Currently, only 15 percent of households are composed of four people. It is not clear how households of other sizes, especially smaller households, would even know what the costs of a family of four would be. Most households are much smaller than that (the average size of a household in Canada was 2.4 persons in 1996). They would be especially hard-pressed to determine "the least" amount of money because, indeed, most Canadians do not have to economize to any extent. And what exactly do people understand by the word "get along"? I would suggest that it might mean different things to different people but that many people would be thinking about how much they would need roughly to cover their current living standard. (See table 2.) Now for the coup de grace: "weekly." Does anyone reading this article have an accurate idea of how much they themselves spend in an average week, not to mention the amount that a typical family of four needs (at least) to "get along." I study living standards and household expenditures in great detail and I would have difficulty with a response to that question on the spur of the moment.

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