Journalist must not even appear biased

Recently, a well respected local columnist wrote a column which appeared in the local paper. The local paper is owed by Post Media and many believe Post Media has a hate on for the federal Liberal party. Furthermore, many readers believe that this hatred results in biased reporting.

The column in question said that Finland’s poverty rate was of 0.1 per cent. To put this in perspective, the poverty rate in Canada was given as 7.4 per cent according to census figures.

Whoa! Can that be true? Can Finland actually have a poverty rate of 0.1 percent? A little research revealed the figure may be one reported by MacroTrends. Curious, I looked for the MacroTrends figure for Canada. It was 0.0 percent.

The MacroTrends figures are highly suspect. Heck, I heard from the columnist and even he admitted  "Any source that says Canada's poverty rate for 2022 was zero percent is laughable." And that is a quote.

The columnist went on to tell me, my "point was that Finland's poverty rate is significantly below that of Canada and the United States." That is another quote. But, is it also an assumption? The columnist compared a "laughable" poverty rate figure for Finland and a proper census figure for Canada. Is some bias against the ruling federal Liberals creeping in here? Has the columnist bent over backwards to put Canada's poverty rate in the poorest light?

I found a risk of poverty figure for Finland for 2022 published by Statista. It was 12.3 percent. This figure defined poverty as being below 60% of the median income. I could not find a comparable figure from the same source for Canada. But, I did find this figure from Statistics Canada: 9.9 percent of Canadians lived in poverty in 2022. But it is hard to compare this number to the Finnish number. It is not an apples to apples comparison.

I decided the Low-Income Measure (LIM) may be a better choice to use for the Canadian number. It considers household poverty to kick in when an adjusted income is below 50% of median household incomes. I found that themost recent data available has approximately 12.0% of Canadians living at or below the Low-Income Measure (LIM) calculated for 2022. This is the same year as used in the Finnish number.

I could continue this research but I believe I have made my point. The columnist used a laughable (his word) figure to make the point that Canada is lagging far behind Finland when it comes to solving the problem of poverty. Assumptions are not acceptable and his assumption may well be wrong. Period. Canadians should be able to expect more from their newspapers.