October 2001

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The Toronto Star & Poverty

by Chris Sarlo

The Toronto Star is my daily newspaper— as it is for a great many people in Ontario. In fact, it is Canada’s largest circulation daily newspaper, which is why its editorial voice is so important.

I like a lot of things about the paper. It has a solid business section, great sports coverage, and I like the fact that over the years, the Star has taken risks to expose corruption, fraud, unsafe practices, and environmental degradation. The Star has frequently championed the “little guy”; the average man or woman trying to make a living in a tough and unfair world. I particularly love the work of Rosie Dimanno, arguably the best newspaper columnist in Canada.

All that said, I suggest that the Star has dropped the ball on the poverty issue. Indeed, its coverage of poverty-related stories is so ideologically charged and so one-sided that those who read only this paper will be unaware that there is any serious debate about what poverty means and how to measure it. That is unfortunate, as there is a debate going on—in the US, in Europe, in Australia, at the UN, and elsewhere. Researchers and policy experts are discussing and debating the two broad approaches to defining poverty: absolute and relative. The very existence of an active debate suggests that there is no consensus about what poverty should mean.

What I have tried to do in my work on poverty is argue in favour of an “absolute” or basic needs approach to defining and measuring poverty. (I must add, parenthetically, that there really is no such thing as a fully absolute poverty measure. All measures are, to some extent at least, “relative,” because the specific ways in which we satisfy our needs changes over time and between cultures.) I am persuaded that this approach is consistent with the common understanding of the term poverty and, indeed, is consistent with the meaning that the poor themselves have of poverty. I am also persuaded that “relative” poverty is no more than “inequality” by a different name.

Social scientists view the poverty line as a tool to measure the extent of poverty. It is not, nor should it be, a gauge of our compassion. It is not a standard of living we want for the poor. It is simply a device that we find useful and reasonable for estimating and tracking the extent of real deprivation. Those in the social welfare community who view the poverty line as some kind of a level or standard we want for the poor naturally find the basic needs line too stringent. I argue that they are confusing a poverty line with a goal for the poor. At the same time, however, I believe it is useful to track other forms of deprivation.

About a decade ago, for example, I suggested that Canada use two lines: a basic needs poverty line and what I called a “social comfort line,” which, I suggested, might be set at double the poverty line—considerably higher than Statscan’s Low-Income Cut-Offs (LICO) or other relative lines. I argued that there was a lot of interest in determining the degree of inadequacy with respect to a measure of deprivation of social amenities. However, I did stress that the social comfort line is not a substitute for a poverty line. We need to know, and we should all want to know, how many Canadians do not have enough income to afford all of life’s basic necessities. Over the years, I have consistently urged the authorities, Statistics Canada in particular, to incorporate this two-line system to give us more and better information than we have ever had before about those at the bottom of the income distribution.

In 1995, Denmark hosted a World Summit for Social Development sponsored by the United Nations. A hundred and seventeen countries, including Canada, were signatories to the Copenhagen declaration that committed these nations to the goal of eradicating poverty. The problem the nations faced is that there was no consensus about what poverty meant. Researchers had been in the habit of thinking about third-world poverty differently than poverty in advanced industrial nations. To achieve the goal of poverty eradication, two measures were recommended—absolute and overall (or relative) poverty. According to Peter Townsend, a leading poverty scholar, “The signatories said they believed that ‘by developing a two-level approach for use in all countries the problem of treating poverty differently in rich and poor countries could be resolved’” (p. 2).

The Toronto Star is apparently oblivious to all of this. The paper either ignores or ridicules any views contrary to its preferred perspective. For the Star, poverty in Canada is the plight of roughly one in five children, and about 5 million people in total. Any debate about this figure or the measures that lie behind it are met with scorn and accusations of attempting to “redefine” poverty. Skeptics are apparently engaged in bashing the poor and are to be dismissed. Subtle word changes are an important part of the pattern of ridicule. “Basic needs” becomes “subsistence” and “bare survival.” A poverty line becomes something that is “all the Fraser Institute thinks the poor should have.” This shameful exercise is inconsistent with modern standards of journalism.

After the release of my latest monograph, Measuring Poverty in Canada, the Star wrote: “To Christopher Sarlo, however, there is no hierarchy of needs. In his writings on poverty for the right-wing Fraser Institute, the Nippissing [sic] University professor puts the poor on a plane not all that much higher than the one on which most Canadians would put their pets” (July 26, 2001). The Star is not alone in confusing a poverty line with a desirable standard of living. But it should know better. It is the Star that has no conception of the hierarchy of needs. To the Star, TV, recreation, and a daily newspaper are on the same par as food and shelter. I disagree. You are poor if you lack the latter, but not necessarily poor if you lack the former.

Since the Star editorial specifically referred to me and my work, and since I believed that it misinterpreted my work (to say the least), I felt obliged to write a short response. In that response, I pointed out that the Star had essentially missed the point of my work and missed the boat on the active debate about poverty measurement around the world. The Star declined to print my response.

For a newspaper that prides itself on being fair, open, and balanced, its words and deeds point in the opposite direction, at least with respect to the poverty definition matter. The Star is tenaciously clinging to the status quo on this issue. Its readers are shielded from seeing any opposing views. The door is closed. This is a very unfortunate and short-sighted stand for such an influential newspaper to take.

References

Townsend, Peter and David Gordon, ed. (2000). Breadline Europe: The Measurement of Poverty, Bristol, UK: The Policy Press.

Toronto Star (2001). Editorial. “Degrees of Deprivation,” July 26.

Chris Sarlo teaches economics at Nipissing University in North Bay, ON. He is the author, most recently, of Measuring Poverty in Canada, published by The Fraser Institute.