Income gap between First Nations people and other Canadians is so huge it must be a priority
Aboriginals 'astoundingly poorer' than other ethnic minorities: Study
By Shanon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service - March 30, 2009
The income gap between aboriginals and other Canadians is so wide it should trump concerns about other ethnic disparities in this country, a Canadian economist says.
"My way of thinking about it is once you start thinking about ethnic disparity in Canada, you should really only be paying attention to aboriginal people," says Krishna Pendakur, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University. "They're an order of magnitude worse off than all other ethnic minorities."
He and his brother Ravi Pendakur, a sociologist at the University of Ottawa, recently completed the largest study of its kind quantifying the exact size of that gap, and the results are stark.
"Those of us who live in Canadian cities have an intuitive awareness that aboriginal people are on average kind of poor," Pendakur says. "The thing is that if you then push yourself and ask how poor, you don't really have any answers. We were lacking a quantitative assessment in this area."
Using an extensive database from the 2001 census, which includes 20 per cent of all Canadian households and 100 per cent of those on aboriginal reserves, the researchers traced the earnings gap of several segments of the aboriginal population, both on reserves and in cities.
They looked at aboriginals with registered status living on and off reserve, those without registered status who still identified themselves as Indian, Metis or Inuit on the census questionnaire, and people who didn't identify themselves as aboriginal but said their ancestors were.
The income of males with registered status living on a reserve is 50 per cent lower that of non-aboriginals, they found, while women in the same category have incomes 21 per cent lower than other women. Registered male and female aboriginals living off-reserve, meanwhile, have incomes 38 and 23 per cent lower than their peers — a disparity that's "less, but still gigantic," Pendakur says.
"Even comparing people who have the same age and the same education level, aboriginal people are even then astoundingly poorer," he says.
People who claimed aboriginal identity fared better than those with registered status but still much worse than their non-aboriginal counterparts, he found, and even those who simply claim aboriginal ancestry lag behind.
With the study taking into account age, education and even location, prejudice is the only explanation left for this gap, says Dan Wilson, senior director of strategic policy and planning with the Assembly of First Nations.
"The openness with which racism is expressed in some parts of Canada is still very shocking," he says. "What you're seeing is the fundamental elements of race playing out in the economy."
In some cases, that means aboriginals being told a job is not available or steered toward lower-level jobs, he says, while in others their qualifications are questioned because of a perception they didn't legitimately earn their previous experience.
"That's one of the offshoots of affirmative action — the suspicion that people got a job they didn't deserve," Wilson says. "There's a desperate need for an intelligent dialogue."
Pendakur has primarily studied other ethnic minority groups in Canada and says he's used to finding significant income disparity — but nothing like this.
"If you were looking at any other ethnic group, these numbers would all be essentially bound between 0 and 20," he says, referring to the percentage gaps in income. "You'd never see a minus 50."
Pendakur says this research is the first to calculate aboriginal income disparity across Canadian cities, and the results were unexpected. Generally, researchers find that ethnic minorities fare best in communities with large numbers of people from their own ethnicity, he says, but that pattern doesn't hold here.
In Winnipeg — home to the highest number of aboriginals in Canada, who account for 10 per cent of the city's population — men with registered status living off-reserve earn 47 per cent less than their peers, while women in the same situation earn 38 per cent less. In Toronto, however, where aboriginals make up only 0.5 per cent of the population, that gap was 18 and 23 per cent, respectively.
The researchers also found that there's more disparity at the bottom of the income scale than at the top, Pendakur says, meaning high-achieving aboriginals do reasonably well compared to their peers, but there are many more aboriginals clustered in the lowest income brackets.
"This is not a glass ceiling, it's a sticky floor," he says.
More facts:
Total income (includes wages, investment income and government benefits) compared to non-aboriginal Canadians:
Registered Indian living on a reserve:
50 per cent lower for men, 21 per cent lower for women
Registered Indian living off-reserve:
38 per cent lower for men, 23 per cent lower for women
Not registered, identify as a North American Indian (First Nations):
33 per cent lower for men, 19 per cent lower for women
Aboriginal ancestry:
18 per cent lower for men, 12 per cent lower for women
Earnings for registered Indians living off-reserve in Canadian cities compared to non-aboriginals:
Halifax: 38 per cent lower for men, 19 per cent lower for women
Montreal: 23 per cent lower for men, 20 per cent lower for women
Ottawa-Hull: 25 per cent lower for men, 4 per cent higher for women
Toronto: 18 per cent lower for men, 23 per cent lower for women
Winnipeg: 47 per cent lower for men, 38 per cent lower for women
Regina: 53 per cent lower for men, 44 per cent lower for women
Saskatoon: 63 per cent lower for men, 44 per cent lower for women
Calgary: 35 per cent lower for men, 33 per cent lower for women
Edmonton: 38 per cent lower for men, 26 per cent lower for women
Vancouver: 40 per cent lower for men, 40 per cent lower for women
Victoria: 35 per cent lower for men, 32 per cent lower for women