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January 07, 2008
Just tell me the truth
My friend EMG goes after the Star for some recent crimes against sobriety and concludes, on the topic of the 90,000 Torontonian families purportedly living in poverty, thusly: "I couldn't be less convinced by this figure—given my understanding of what poverty is—if they had said a million-gazillion families." They might as well. I deplore poverty as much as the next guy, but I'm hard-pressed to give statistics-fiddling doom-mongers the steam off my piss no matter how virtuous their goals.
The problem is beautifully illustrated by Campaign 2000, an organization whose stated goal is to belatedly realize the House of Commons' 1989 resolution to wipe out child poverty by the millennium. Ed Broadbent, who authored said resolution, referred then to "one in four" children living in poverty. In its latest report, Campaign 2000 says (a) that 11.7 per cent of children live in poverty, and (b) that "the child poverty rate is exactly the same as it was in 1989."
This is not an isolated discrepancy by a long shot, as Peter Shawn Taylor's darkly comical piece in the November 28 Maclean's illustrated. Note in particular the following, on UNICEF's recent child poverty report, which was equally portentous as Campaign 2000's despite using different methodology:
[A] line graph purports to show child poverty in Canada rising from 14.4 per cent in 1989 to 17.7 per cent in 2007. None of these numbers are right. The figure for 1989 was changed after Maclean's pointed out an error. And StatsCan has not yet published 2007 figures, so where did that come from? Lisa Wolff, UNICEF Canada's director of advocacy, explains that she inserted a 2005 figure for 2007 in order to make the graph appear up-to-date. But this too is wrong — 17.7 per cent is actually the 2003 number. Presented with the evidence, Wolff claims she'd rather not be "quibbling over numbers." The chart in question is designed to tell a story, she says. "The line is not a precise calibration. It is supposed to be a picture of intransigence . . . [in] child poverty rates. The story is valid."
Like fun it is. The numbers are the story. And it is an undeniable fact that the low-income cut-offs (LICO) are not measurements of poverty—Statistics Canada, those fascists, practically begs people not to use them as such—but of equality. They simply do not assess any Canadian's access to the necessities of life, the lack of which is… well, it's poverty. And what's more, as Taylor points out, UNICEF elected to use the before-tax LICO, which makes it even less useful. Why would they do such a thing? Again from Taylor's piece: "Wolff says she uses before-tax LICOs in spite of the warnings because StatsCan is comprised of statisticians, and not child development experts." Convenient, since "her story of growing child poverty in Canada depends entirely on before-tax figures. After-tax LICO rates reveal no increase at all in child poverty since 1989." Indeed, the rate is 11.7 per cent for both years. Or, as Broadbent put it, "one in four."
There is real poverty in Canada, and there absolutely shouldn't be. If anything makes us a "rogue state," with apologies to Michael Byers' righteous indignation over our performance in Bali, it's the unspeakably deplorable state of our worst-off native reserves. And that should be a highly instructive cautionary example for poverty organizations convinced that adopting whichever statistical measurement produces the direst looking outcome is the quickest path to public outcry and political action. We've been throwing money at the First Nations for generations, and appalling conditions persist. The result is apathy, enlivened only by brief outbursts of anguished disgust.
Nobody wants to hear that his society has been frantically pursuing a cause for two decades and has made negative progress. It's utterly demoralizing, and a pretty convincing argument to immediately halt efforts to ameliorate the situation in question, pending a wholesale rethink. If we've made progress on child poverty, Canadians need to hear about it. The least activists could do is pick a definition of poverty that's based on a family's ability to provide the necessities of life, and stick with it even if it shows improvement. Improvement is good. Remember? It motivates people to push for more.
Hauling every last Canadian child out of poverty would be worth a few white lies, but that's begging the question. I'm less worried about the ends justifying the means than whether the means will beget the ends. Generally speaking, human beings don't dig on wretched defeat. I just wish I could say the activist class was misreading the media and Canadians at large when it assumes we're fundamentally uninterested in the truth.
Posted by Chris Selley at January 7, 2008 06:33 PM
Comments
Chris, you have to get with the "post normal science" thing. Here's a hint about how to think right from Mark Hulme writing in the the guardian
But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.
Hulme was writing about climate change "science" but the point is the same. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Posted by: Jay Currie at January 8, 2008 03:15 PM
I take your general point, but it's an oversimplification to deny that being poorer than everyone around you doesn't mean your poor as long as you're not starving or homeless.
A good summary of the questions involved in defining poverty can be found here.
Also, the truth is Canada has made little progress on child poverty. A comparison to how we effectively tackled senior poverty is instructive.
Posted by: Declan at January 8, 2008 11:37 PM
"it's an oversimplification to deny that being poorer than everyone around you doesn't mean your poor as long as you're not starving or homeless"
Yeah, it is, though I don't think I said that. Children in Canada who are poorer than everyone around them but still adequately fed and clothed and housed are part of a philosophical debate. Some reasonable people will see them as evidence of a societal failure; some won't. Children who aren't properly fed or clothed or housed, on the other hand, represent a societal failure to just about everyone. I think we would all benefit, equality junkies included, from focusing on Canadians lacking the bare essentials before we debate whether we should care about the gap between the richest and poorest.
Posted by: Chris Selley at January 9, 2008 11:16 PM
If you ask my daughter, she'll tell you that we're poorer than her best friend in school. Her friend has a portable LeapPad video game and my daughter doesn't (we make her read books). Her friend gets all kinds of store bought snacks in her lunch and my daughter doesn't. Her friend wears expensive brand name clothing -- my daughter wears stuff from the second hand store and what we found in the bargain bin.
So my kid feels a bit hard done by.
What she's not seeing is... We own our modest home outright while her friend's parents don't. We aren't badly leveraged debt-wise, not so with her friend's parents (every single thing they own is on terms). Finally, at nearly seven years old our daughter has just shy of $20,000 in her RESP. We know that her friend's parents aren't saving for school for their kids as the big screen plasma was much more important.
In many cases, what looks like a "poorer" child could simply be the result of better parenting and more prudent money management.
Posted by: Sean McCormick at January 16, 2008 05:29 PM