Matthew Lau: Race and ethnicity are lousy predictors of poverty in Canada – Financial Post

Jun 07, 2024

Most poor Canadians aren’t either Black or Indigenous. Programs targeting poor people by their identity will miss most of the problem

Milton Friedman’s first rule for government programs to alleviate poverty was: “If the objective is to alleviate poverty, we should have a program directed at helping the poor … There is every reason to help the poor man who happens to be a farmer, not because he is a farmer, but because he is poor.”

It seems obvious, does it not? And yet many government programs today, supposedly aimed at alleviating poverty, do not follow this rule. It is common today for government anti-poverty programs to be directed at people on the basis of something other than their financial status — including their race.

Thus the federal government’s poverty reduction strategy includes programs that target funds toward visible minority groups: for example, community supports targeted at Black Canadians and employment and skills training exclusively for Indigenous populations. But, as Friedman said, if the goal is to alleviate poverty, the program should be directed at the poor. Such programs should help poor Black Canadians and poor Indigenous Canadians because they are poor, not because they are Black or Indigenous.

Read More: https://financialpost.com/opinion/race-ethnicity-lousy-predictors-poverty-canada