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.
