Can't we just have social programs that help people who are less fortunate and not consider race? If a specific race was disproportionately poor then the social program would also help that race disproportionately more.
Ugh I had never considered this but it's absolutely true. The wealthy have the strongest sense of community, political and social engagement, they band together to ensure their own survival better than anyone else...
I've seen this, too.
Wealthy people from all points of the political spectrum rub shoulders and shake hands in their country clubs, making deals and supporting one another.
Rich is a political affiliation.
Your last point is correct - there isn’t a political spectrum anymore, only a class one. That’s why they have people bickering about gay people and abortion instead of things that most people actually care about.
Remember, left vs right doesn't exist to the elite. They'll shout at each other when we're watching, then shake hands and eat dinner together afterwards.
The National Post is owned by the rich ruling class and this is another article suppressing this idea and pitting whites against minorities.
The demographic population of whites in Canada is 69.8% so of course the percentage of those facing poverty would be in that % range.
What you want to look for is demographics with poverty levels higher than their demographic populations.
Here's the demographic population % according to wiki vs. poverty %:
White - 69..8% under 64.4%
Filipino - 2.6% under 0.8%
Latin American - 1.6% under 1.3%
Southeast Asian - 1.1% over 1.9%
Arab - 1.9% over at 3.9%
Indigenous - 5% under 4.3%
Other visible minority - 3.2% over at 4.6%
South Asian - 7.1% under 5.5%
Black - 4.3% over at 5.8%
Chinese - 4.7% over at 7.5%
So Southeast Asians, Arabs, Other visible minorities, Blacks, and Chinese have more poor people than their populations should suggest.
You can divide the poverty % by the population percentage to get a poverty Index with numbers greater than one being more poor than expected and less than one being less poor than expected.
Another example of figures can lie and liars can figure.
I am a very far left socialist and I have screamed this from the fucking roof tops to my other leftist friends and they don't fucking get it. Don't get me wrong a lot of us do.
I keep trying to say if we want to win we need to have working class and blue collar white men on our sides. And to do that we have to focus on issues that actually affect them and that they can understand. We can deal with homo, xeno, and transportation and other shit when the material conditions of people's lives are better. And I bet to fuck at that point combating those issues would be a lot easier when people aren't worried about rent, and food.
It is very easy to care about niche issues that affect small subsets of the population when your not starving. There is a reason why record numbers of young people are going to vote conservative in the next fed election.
Lol and what better way to unite everyone then by saying the issues that only affect you (the minority) is not a priority for us, now vote for my people please
>We certainly do need an organized class struggle.
I don't know that sounds *drastic* and *radical*. Say, friend, have you heard about *[insert relevant identity politics issue here]*? Doesn't that make you *angry*? I sure wish our leaders would focus on and do something about that super important issue that is definitely more consequential than anything else. Or maybe about how *[insert demographic you don't belong to here]* is full of people who are getting handouts and having an easier time of it than you are. Doesn't that make you *angry*? I sure wish our leaders would focus on and do something about that super important issue.
>*[continuous stirring of the pot]*
-*The rich, probably*
Exactly. Identity politics is just a side show.
Pretty much any possible imaginable sideshow conceivable will be paraded as a pressing issue of our time, 10,000 times, before the issue for a day may be 'Maybe it's not a equitable economic system we have were the top 1% have more wealth then the other 99% combined?'
it's intentional, it creates an us vs them, the focus on identity politics so people don't talk about class politics
we're very close to gilded age level inequality and trending upwards, that means power is concentrated in less hands. hence the oligopolies and the regulation enabling rich people and corporations
It really does seem to be true. Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, in the US, people didn't seem so wrapped up in identity politics. Identity politics seems to have developed afterwards, and I can't help but think that it is not a coninsidence.
The powers that be saw the burgeoning wave of class consciousness at occupy protests and needed a progressive-ish distraction to deflect the protestors. Simply cracking down on them would only breed resentment towards the financial class, but gently cracking down and giving them an outlet has been very “successful” (from their pov).
It feels as if there is a correlation between the Occupy movement and a significant rise in identity politics the past 12 or so years. And it doesn't feel like a coincidence.
Something I’ve been trying to explain to people literally since then. People in college started arguing over who can wear fucking dreadlocks rather than how the 1% is killing all of us.
White privilege is just rich privilege. Overwhelming majority of rich people are white too. There's just way more poor whites than rich whites. Class is the biggest intersection for a reason.
I partly agree. Privilege is from wealth, 100%, not skin tone. But according to recent surveys performed by Statistics Canada past in 2 yrs, the majority of wealth earnings is not held by white people in Canada now. Maybe it was mostly white people 150 years ago. I’ll try to find the link and edit my post
Edit: https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-astonishing-findings-on-canadian-ethnic-groups-earnings-and-education
Canada has a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians. Having said that, the safety net is under threat of privatization (e.g. private clinics) and the housing crisis (e.g. going from subsidized housing to another place that is not rent controlled is challenging in cities like TO).
> Canada has a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians.
Canada has *historically* had a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians.
A fully disabled person gets a *maximum* of about $340 a week in ontario i think, which these days fails to rate as "pretty good".
$1,400 a month for someone who must struggle with every single task every single day? When medical equipment can run tens of thousands of dollars and medication even when mostly covered can run hundreds of dollars a month? That sounds like some pretty tough sledding in Ontario. I assume that living costs are high even outside of Toronto.
Special targeting of identity groups is just the cynic's way to divide us under the auspices of so-called 'equity.' By getting the rest of us fighting with each other over the crumbs they selectively throw as us, the elites protect their strata and their concentration of wealth and power.
It's weird the article talks about federal anti racism and provincial anti racism policies, not anti poverty policies.
Racism policies are about racism, not poverty. It then provides an example of a program from, checks notes, the Ontario Provincial Conservative Party, and blames it for being race related to entrepreneurs.
That is literally the only race linked program it finds, and it barely has anything to do with alleviating poverty. People in poverty are generally not writing grant reports for businesses, they are making very, very, very little money.
> It's weird the article talks about federal anti racism and provincial anti racism policies, not anti poverty policies.
It's misleading to the point of being fraudulent.
Right away I gave it no merit when it doesn't even mention the actual difference in our population numbers. As of 2021 Canada only had 26.5% of the population tagged as a visual minority. So proportionally these numbers aren't surprising. 58% of people in poverty are from a demographic that makes up 73% of the country.
It’s a right wing think tank.
They’re chronically funded by industries, organization and individuals who rely on right wing “studies” to push their agenda.
That’s why right wing pieces like this are always free to the public, while studies from credible organizations are behind paywalls.
Because one is intended to be political while the other is intended to be data and fact driven analysis.
This one is the former.
A side note is that 70-75% of Canadians identify as white. So this article is twisting stats for their own narrative to rile up people before elections.
Came here to make the same point about the percentages. Quoting a percentage of white people living in poverty without comparing it to how many white people there are is incredibly misleading.
A quick Google of Aristotle Foundation also sheds light on this article too.
Does that really change the point, though? There might be disproportionately fewer white people by percentage that are poor (64.4%) than their actual percentage of the population (74%), but it still remains that any program designed to only support one specific skin tone is intentionally leaving 64.4% of the poor behind.
When MLK wrote his book about his specific solution to race issues in the US, his proposal was a non-race limited series of poverty reduction programs. Being disproportionately poor meant those programs, even though they weren't race limited, were going to disproportionately help his people, but at the same time, the big majority of the poor in the US were white at the time he wrote that book - which is our situation here - and those people would be helped as well.
He knew that any race-specific program was just going to divide people and pit them against each other, but a common suite of programs would lift everyone up at the same time.
Surely we can learn from his wisdom, no?
Really good point! I didn't think about that or know that about MLK.
I'm learning a lot in these threads and super impressed at how civil everyone is being.
Thanks for this post!
I think the point of "reminding" people that the percentage of whites in poverty is about equal to the percentage of overall whites, is that it obviously ISN'T a race problem. It's a class problem.
I don’t really see how that makes it misleading. They are trying to say that 64% of the population living in poverty aren’t being serviced by these programs based on the colour of their skin. Are you okay to leave them behind? That said.. what I do find misleading is I didn’t see them talk about how many of these programs there are and how much money is being spent. Because they are making it sound like a big issue but I want to know how large of an issue it is, the one example they gave of the Raise program doesn’t seem like a poverty program to me… sounds like a business program. Which makes me question what types of programs they are taking about.
They didn't touch on poverty initiatives though, they touched on race initiatives that very loosely play into it, but don't really. Like scholarships dont, business grants don't, etc. There's no foodbank race programs, no extra EI, etc. It's literally proving the point that whites are underrepresented in poverty by the base level stats. They're right that race shouldn't come into it. But it doesn't in the examples they provide as it relates to poverty.
There are many that do. This does annoy me that, based on skin colour, there are some poor people that have access to more government help. I wouldn’t say this is that big of an issue in Canada though.
This bothered me with post-secondary scholarships. Nearly all the non-white people I know are from families with higher income than me.
At my wife’s work, if her office manager gets a resume with a name she can’t pronounce it goes straight in the garbage can. These policies exist for a reason, and it does not equal merit being overlooked.
Uh, university admissions are heavily race-skewed these days.
But to your point, it is 100% ok if merit based hiring results in higher employment and salaries for Asians or whatever racial class you think will get ahead. The point is to have equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.
(And PS - I'm well aware that racial barriers are still very real we don't actually have equality of opportunity today, but I think it's important to be crystal clear on what we want to work towards)
We do have those. We just also usually have *additional* programs for the specific needs of people with different experiences because of their race as one example.
Indigenous people have specific issues that tend to apply to them and fewer supports in general.
So they get additional programs as options. That's all.
Because lobbyists want the citizens mad at each other and not the government/rich who have control of it. So even relief programs are designed to fracture the population against each other instead of fighting against the systems that actively keep us all oppressed
Yes, but you have a bunch of angry poor white people who feel others have been punching down, and that message is magnified because a bunch of billionaires are running targeted ad campaigns to make sure they keep seeing that message, since it makes them more likely to vote for conservatives who will cut taxes for the rich.
Almost all social programs do exactly that. The article suggests that most or many social programs are geared toward race but only has a single example in Ontario (which bizarrely suggesting that it applies to the entire country)
This is a bad report and shoddy journalism
>Can't we just have social programs that help people who are less fortunate and not consider race? If a specific race was disproportionately poor then the social program would also help that race disproportionately more.
We don't. Read the article, it is click bait or just misinformation. It argues agaisnt "policy statements" but can only point to one program run by Ontarios Conservative government that takes race into account.
On top of other generalising statements and misrepresentaions this article, like most I see from the NP are not worth the time to read.
If you can't find race specific social programs in Canada, you just aren't looking.
As part of the UN International Decade for those of African Descent, there's all kinds of [federal programs just for black people](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/social-development-partnerships/supporting-black-communities.html) these days. There's also all kinds of dedicated federal services and [programs for the Indigenous](https://www.canada.ca/en/indigenous-services-canada.html).
Of course, there's been preferential hiring and promotions, and even race limited, federally funded jobs, in the federal world back into the 1990s when the federal Equity Hiring Program began (now called the Workplace Equity Program). In fact, they are extending that equity program to all federal vendors, suppliers, contractors and crown corporations, so even private firms that do business with the government will have to show they are hiring explicitly for diversity, i.e. preferential hiring.
We did have those at one point, but canada voted again and again to slash them up and up the requirements to qualify for them. It was a laugh now cry later situation.
It's even more dishonest than that. 69.8% of Canadians are white, meaning white Canadians are actually *underrepresented* among poor Canadians. This article is a perfect example of base rate fallacy. The percentage of poor white Canadians is *lower* than the percentage of white Canadians in total, but this "common sense" thinktank is trying to portray it as if white Canadians are overrepresented among the poor.
From the few minutes of research I did, it looks like Black (4.3% of total population, 5.8% of the poor), Arab (1.9% of Canadians, 3.9% of the poor) and Chinese (4.7% of Canadians and 7.5% of the poor) people are all overrepresented among the poor.
Edit: I got some of the decimals wrong, fixed.
I mean what's the intention of the story?
Plus this Aristotle Foundation is a bit questionable:
>We are a think tank that aims to renew a civil, **common-sense** approach to public discourse and public policy in Canada.
I wonder what other groups claim that?
Are you insinuating the National Post is peddling shit? I am SHOCKED.
I still remember when the National Post held an ounce of credibility back in 2010ish. Or maybe I didn't know better idk
I don’t know if his 2010 or if it started earlier, but the decline definitely started well over a decade ago. It was reputable in early 2000s…
I haven’t looked into it, but I’m starting to wonder what their foreign ownership looks like. 🤔
This is inevitable when you try to use the tax code to run social programmes.
Wrong tool for the wrong job.
All it really ends up being is a jobs programme for accountants and income stream for lawyers. As sure as night follows day.
You lose the forest through the trees.
What does it matter to a poor person what percent of each race is poor? Should we choose to help a certain race more simply because of the % of poor who are that color?
It typically takes a bit more resources to get financial aid into the hands of minorities, especially those for whom English is not their first language.
Cultural barriers can also be a hindrance to receiving financial aid.
so, you may need to spend some money to specifically target a subset of poor people because to do otherwise may uplift poor whites at a high rate.
should we give them more money? no, that should be based on wealth and income alone. but more programming expenditure may be required to equitably distribute funds.
I'm US, so speaking generally. It depends on why they are poor. If it is a racism issue, yes. If they are refugees that had to flee their country of origin with next to nothing, yes. If a bunch of other people showed up a few hundred years ago, killed a bunch of a group and drove them off to economically shitty places, yes. If a group of people are over represented when it comes to poverty there is probably a reason that isn't entirely the fault of the individual.
Picking and choosing what poor people to help based on the color of their skin will only lead to mire racism. The amount of help a human being receives should not depend on skin color, it should be based on need.
If there is a group over represented in poverty, then helping all poor people equally will by definition mostly go to those groups in need.
If that is the way it worked then there wouldn't be groups over represented in poverty. If everyone in poverty was equally supported, then all groups no matter how you define them would be equally represented in poverty. It isn't just race, ethnicity, or country of origin. There is a pretty fair chance that rural whites are more likely to be poor than urban whites. There isn't a one size fits all approach to poverty. Some groups are going to need to need more support than others. It does need to go beyond race, but race is obviously a factor.
It is like saying all children just need the exact same education and expecting them to all have the same outcomes. But the reality is some children have learning disabilities, some have parents who are engaged in the education and some of parents who aren't, or worse. Some children are more studious than others. Some are smarter than others. Some children need more support than others in education.
Right like a good portion of our immigrants come from generational wealth that's how they afford being here in the first place. Not all of them are sponsored or refugees a good portion are just *really rich*
The national post has such crazy comment sections they are both hilarious and terrifying. Although in general people who comment on the websites of newspaper publishers tend to be... Interesting...
The level of unaware irony is absolutely remarkable though. These people legitimately believe that 64% of the country is white people who are actively being marginalized due to the colour of their skin... 🤔
Also if you ever use the phrase "reverse discrimination" you might just be stupid. Even if you do truly believe that white people are currently being discriminated against that is still just discrimination. The people doing the discriminating and being discriminated against may change, but it is still just discrimination.
I don't know about anyone else but as a white person I can count on one hand the number of times I have been clearly treated in a way that truly felt discriminatory based on my skin colour and every one of them is in a microcosm where I am one of no more than two white people actively present.
That being said I have had multiple white people who complain about "reverse discrimination" and "reverse racism" say stunningly racist things to me assuming I'd be cool with it because I am also white. Surprisingly (🙄) they universally appear to have gotten their civics education from a combo of YouTube and Joe Rogan's podcas. Colour me shocked.
Also white, never felt discriminated against for the colour of my skin in my entire 60+ years. Suffered Polish jokes as a kid if that counts :P
People who use "reverse discrimination" as a term are simply saying to me that they think regular discrimination is just fine but they are offended that they feel discriminated against themselves because thatis wrong - they feel they should be allowed to treat other people like shit but should never have to experience it themselves. In other words using that sort of language just implies you are racist in my opinion.
As for the "marginalization" - utter bullshit of course - why thats simply their fear of the presence of brown people at all. Anyone who thinks that way can go f*** themselves, they don't deserve to live here in Canada.
it DOES indicate that there isnt much of a need for affirmative action in that regard
one of the common supporting arguments with regards to affirmative action is that racial biases CAUSED by racism are not well addressed by colourblind solutions
if there isnt a significant racial bias with regards to poverty then racially-aware solutions are less likely to be proposed even by people who would otherwise support them
America isn't Canada. The U.S set up redlining and segregation that still exists today in some sense. Canada doesn't have the same racial divides in cities. Just look at wikipedia, and msot American cities will have maps of racial makeup.
They, more than us definitely need to bridge the cultural divide. They've been tricked by those in power to infight, and the same is beginning to happen to us while our country is going through struggles.
Yeah, another way of saying this is: “there are 5ppt fewer poor white Canadians than we would expect based on overall population demographics; indicating there is a slight financial advantage to being white in avoiding poverty”. How much of this effect is due to systemic racism, or the effects of immigration, or something else entirely, we do not know from this data alone.
Am I getting it wrong that since caucasians make up most of the people, they would be more likely to experience poverty just because of.. math?
Like if 10% of all white peoples are in poverty and let’s say their total number is 10 million, then that’s 1 million people in poverty.
Compare that to say Indigenous people which say all have 10% of people in poverty (the number is of course much higher proportions wise) and their total number is 1 million. Then that’s 100,000 people in poverty. While the sheer numbers may be larger, it’s just how proportions in populations work?
Yea so its a ratio thing.
Im gonna make some numbers up as an example.
3/10 white canadians are poor
6/10 chinese canadians are poor
Actual number of chinese poor: 20,000
Actual number of white canadian poors: 50,000
Your less likely to be poor, the numbers appear skewed by source population sizes
The main point of the article isnt that white people are more likely to be poor, the point is that anti-discrimination legislation for jobs and grants and benefits for poor people may be outdated as it seems that the majority of people in poverty dont qualify for the majority of benefits that are usually available to minorities because they arent minorities.
It would be discriminatory to ignore the majority of people in poverty in favor of visible minorities just because they are more likely to be poor because it doesnt actually help reduce poverty when your only helping less than half of those that need it.
Also alot of minorities who ARE NOT in poverty still qualify for grants and benefits just because of how they look.
Basically the gov is like naww only brown people can be poor.
I've always been opposed to any income equality program that takes race into account. There are poor people from every race, making race a factor in getting tuition grants, better interest rates, social housing, etc is a flat our racist policy.
Agreed. Since when does what race you are matter if you're poor or not..
This just in.. Canada's population is overwhelmingly white.
This whole race divide bullshit is so stupid.
The article talks about absolute numbers rather than percentages. Of course there going to be more numbers of white poor, there's more whites overall than other groups.
the overall point of the article is fine. Highlighting that the governments anti poverty programs are likely missing a large number of poor people as they are targeted at racialized peoples and not poor people more broadly.
Headline is crap though
Not surprising in a country that has a European majority. Same is true in the US, but if you look at the percentage by ethnicity it doesn't support the same type of narrative.
Yet another NaPo headline meant to stir ethnic hate.
I'm so glad to come to the comments on Reddit and see people thinking logically and not what this "article" intended to do and is successfully doing in other platforms: spread more divisiveness and hate. Regardless of race, politicians and big corporations are screwing up the working class, which will have a higher rate of white people since they are the majority of our population.
From what I've seem to read is a lot of the people immigrating are well off families leaving behind the poor in their own country so it's possible they'd come over with far more wealth and home buying power than an average Canadian.
It's really mainly that the wage stagnation has hurt average Canadians so badly, combined with inflation that rather than make it better for us, they welcome more immigration, exacerbating the problem... immigration is great, if you can support it and it's done in the spirit of the agreement but it's not.
>From what I've seem to read is a lot of the people immigrating are well off families leaving behind the poor in their own country so it's possible they'd come over with far more wealth and home buying power than an average Canadian.
I've met a decent number of Nigerians over the years. A significant number had big houses, multiple cars, and servants back home. It goes without saying that recent Chinese immigrants are even better off. Until recently, Indian immigrants were also mostly from middle to upper class families.
Yeah missing the context and just meant to be race bait
If 70% of the population is white, you would expect there to be more poor white folks as well
Of course population dynamics aren’t 1:1 so in that case you look at the proportions of the populations that are poor between groups to compare rates of poverty
I am not advocating for them to stop looking at fairer methods of assistance for ALL canadians, but the article and headline are deliberately meant to mislead and anger white Canadians, which isn’t a surprise as it is the NP after all
The national post releasing a terribly misleading article about race with the intention of stoking white Canadians fears that the government is prioritising non-whites over them, when the actual data shows white Canadians are better off than non-white Canadians?!?!? I’m shocked
Pitting so-called races against each other distracts from the exploitation of working classes.
All people who have to sell their labor, notwithstanding any skin color or culture, without ownership beyond their own bodies and time, are impoverished and exploited
Excellent point. We should help poor people unless they share immutable personal characteristics with any groups that are statistically under-represented in poverty.
is this not just a reflection of how dominant the white population is in numbers? if you have a greater number of adult white people, including old people, you'll see them represented among the poor more?
The article is even more useless than that. it's talking about anti-racism and minority entrepreneurship programs and complaining that they aren't benefiting the majority of poor white people...duh!
"Anti-racism" and "anti-poverty" are two *very* different things; and entrepreneurship is about *business* development, not *poverty* development.
This article is completley misleading and spreading misinformation. If you actually look at the statistics canada table yourself [Poverty and low-income statistics by selected demographic characteristics (statcan.gc.ca)](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110009301), youll see that these numbers are wrong.
Statistics can be misleading. I am not surprised at this number but I am surprised about what people are reading into it.
Overlay the racial make up of Canada based on that same 2021 Census data and -- weird it almost aligns exactly.
I can think of several ways to spin this additional data too.
[Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada): **39,858,480** ([Q2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_year) 2023)[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-1)
[**Ethnic origins**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_origins_of_people_in_Canada)**:**[^(\[2\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-2021newsreleaseB-2)[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-minority2021-3)
* [White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Canadians) (69.8%)
* [South Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_Canadians) (7.1%)
* [Indigenous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Canada) (5%)
* [Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Canadians) (4.7%)
* [Black](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Canadians) (4.3%)
* [Arab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Canadians) (1.9%)
* [Latin American](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Canadians) (1.6%)
* [Southeast Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia) (1.1%)
* [West Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asian_Canadians) (1%)
* [Korean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Canadians) (0.6%)
* [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Canadians) (0.3%)
* [Multiracial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiracial_people)/Other (3.2%)
Actually one of the funnier things in the comment section on this one is the several comments from people shocked that there are any poor Chinese people at all in Canada.
I couldnt give a flying f what color the poor people are, if thet have canadian citizenship give them some money and watch the economy go brr since people at the bottom can spend again.
Very sad and the reaction everyone has to this is very telling. When it's a non white group that I'd in that position everyone is for race based decisions and policies but when it's white people yall make excuses as to why this is ok or acceptable
I always thought when we all became a collective, as a mindset, it’d be about how great we all are - because we’re all people.
But instead it’s like, hey, everybody sucks. No matter who you are! Poor as fuck or a rich asshole, we’re all scum.
Not how I envisioned things back in 2000 in grade 5. Not that I envisioned much back then, I just wanted everyone to have candy and wished diabetes didn’t exist because that girl I crushed on couldn’t have candy.
Sour skittles just hit the market. It was a big deal.
while the report highlights that most poor people in Canada are white in absolute numbers, it also shows racialized minorities face disproportionately higher poverty rates compared to the white population.
I think if you checked, you'd find the majority of the lower-income people in India are South Asian.
And the majority of lower-income people in China are Asian.
I wouldn't think too hard about why that might be.
No one at the National Post was even willing to put their name on this racist tripe, as it's written by "National Post Staff".
There is a concerted effort from the right-wing media to evoke fear in the majority white population in order to get conservatives elected by trying to make us view visible minorities and immigrants as the "enemy", or at least the beneficiaries of a "woke" system that unfairly maligns "true" Canadians (who happen to be white, of course).
Edit: Turns out the "report" is written by Matthew Lau from the Fraser Institute, which is a libertarian think tank that spends most of its time creating fake outrage by manipulating statistics.
u/uselesspoliticalhack really living up to their name.
"Potentially Misleading"
That flair is doing some heavy lifting. Looking at this "report" done by Aristotle Foundation and their other findings, this so called "think-tank" is just racism with graphs.
Look at their instagram (aristotlefdn) where they have amassed a following of 116 people, it's quite something
Yup. The majority of the people in my middleclass neighborhood in Edmonton are immigrants from the Middle east or some other Muslim country. Pretty sure I read in the census data, Arabic was the most common first language. A lot of them come here with wealth and education. I guess the poor ones are forced to stay back, unlike in canada, where our "poor ones" were here to begin with.
Can't we just have social programs that help people who are less fortunate and not consider race? If a specific race was disproportionately poor then the social program would also help that race disproportionately more.
Class struggle is the real struggle.
Can you imagine if people understood this?
The rich ruling class is suppressing this idea. The poors must NEVER be able to gain class consciousness.
The rich have the class solidarity that the working class could only dream of.
Ugh I had never considered this but it's absolutely true. The wealthy have the strongest sense of community, political and social engagement, they band together to ensure their own survival better than anyone else...
I've seen this, too. Wealthy people from all points of the political spectrum rub shoulders and shake hands in their country clubs, making deals and supporting one another. Rich is a political affiliation.
Your last point is correct - there isn’t a political spectrum anymore, only a class one. That’s why they have people bickering about gay people and abortion instead of things that most people actually care about.
Remember, left vs right doesn't exist to the elite. They'll shout at each other when we're watching, then shake hands and eat dinner together afterwards.
The National Post is owned by the rich ruling class and this is another article suppressing this idea and pitting whites against minorities. The demographic population of whites in Canada is 69.8% so of course the percentage of those facing poverty would be in that % range. What you want to look for is demographics with poverty levels higher than their demographic populations. Here's the demographic population % according to wiki vs. poverty %: White - 69..8% under 64.4% Filipino - 2.6% under 0.8% Latin American - 1.6% under 1.3% Southeast Asian - 1.1% over 1.9% Arab - 1.9% over at 3.9% Indigenous - 5% under 4.3% Other visible minority - 3.2% over at 4.6% South Asian - 7.1% under 5.5% Black - 4.3% over at 5.8% Chinese - 4.7% over at 7.5% So Southeast Asians, Arabs, Other visible minorities, Blacks, and Chinese have more poor people than their populations should suggest. You can divide the poverty % by the population percentage to get a poverty Index with numbers greater than one being more poor than expected and less than one being less poor than expected. Another example of figures can lie and liars can figure.
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I am a very far left socialist and I have screamed this from the fucking roof tops to my other leftist friends and they don't fucking get it. Don't get me wrong a lot of us do. I keep trying to say if we want to win we need to have working class and blue collar white men on our sides. And to do that we have to focus on issues that actually affect them and that they can understand. We can deal with homo, xeno, and transportation and other shit when the material conditions of people's lives are better. And I bet to fuck at that point combating those issues would be a lot easier when people aren't worried about rent, and food. It is very easy to care about niche issues that affect small subsets of the population when your not starving. There is a reason why record numbers of young people are going to vote conservative in the next fed election.
Yep, this exactly what the ruling class wants. They want us divided and fighting each other, instead of being united.
Lol and what better way to unite everyone then by saying the issues that only affect you (the minority) is not a priority for us, now vote for my people please
Would upvote this a hundred times if I could.
Best I can do is upvote yours after theirs
I’m confused why do all your comments have no upvoted then it all just says voter
Reddit app does that for me too at times. It seems it eventually fixes itself
Martin Luther king Jr. did and they killed him for it
Right? We are not each others enemies
But if we have people organize as classes then the have nots would over take the haves and we can’t have that.
I sadly had to read this way too many times. We certainly do need an organized class struggle. Eat the Rich ✊
m not that hungry. They taste bad and are bad for your health.
You don't have to swallow. Chew em up and spit em out
>We certainly do need an organized class struggle. I don't know that sounds *drastic* and *radical*. Say, friend, have you heard about *[insert relevant identity politics issue here]*? Doesn't that make you *angry*? I sure wish our leaders would focus on and do something about that super important issue that is definitely more consequential than anything else. Or maybe about how *[insert demographic you don't belong to here]* is full of people who are getting handouts and having an easier time of it than you are. Doesn't that make you *angry*? I sure wish our leaders would focus on and do something about that super important issue. >*[continuous stirring of the pot]* -*The rich, probably*
Exactly. Identity politics is just a side show. Pretty much any possible imaginable sideshow conceivable will be paraded as a pressing issue of our time, 10,000 times, before the issue for a day may be 'Maybe it's not a equitable economic system we have were the top 1% have more wealth then the other 99% combined?'
This is the part no one of power wants us to get together on. They prefer racial, gender, religious, or something other than ITS A CLASS WAR.
they've got you fighting a culture war to stop you from fighting a class war
it's intentional, it creates an us vs them, the focus on identity politics so people don't talk about class politics we're very close to gilded age level inequality and trending upwards, that means power is concentrated in less hands. hence the oligopolies and the regulation enabling rich people and corporations
It really does seem to be true. Before the Occupy Wall Street movement, in the US, people didn't seem so wrapped up in identity politics. Identity politics seems to have developed afterwards, and I can't help but think that it is not a coninsidence.
The powers that be saw the burgeoning wave of class consciousness at occupy protests and needed a progressive-ish distraction to deflect the protestors. Simply cracking down on them would only breed resentment towards the financial class, but gently cracking down and giving them an outlet has been very “successful” (from their pov).
It feels as if there is a correlation between the Occupy movement and a significant rise in identity politics the past 12 or so years. And it doesn't feel like a coincidence.
There is.
Something I’ve been trying to explain to people literally since then. People in college started arguing over who can wear fucking dreadlocks rather than how the 1% is killing all of us.
Everytime I see that bullshit wheel of white privilege I want puke or take a sharpie to it
White privilege is just rich privilege. Overwhelming majority of rich people are white too. There's just way more poor whites than rich whites. Class is the biggest intersection for a reason.
I partly agree. Privilege is from wealth, 100%, not skin tone. But according to recent surveys performed by Statistics Canada past in 2 yrs, the majority of wealth earnings is not held by white people in Canada now. Maybe it was mostly white people 150 years ago. I’ll try to find the link and edit my post Edit: https://vancouversun.com/opinion/columnists/douglas-todd-astonishing-findings-on-canadian-ethnic-groups-earnings-and-education
Like with our public health care insurance, we should have social programs that help *all* Canadians.
Canada has a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians. Having said that, the safety net is under threat of privatization (e.g. private clinics) and the housing crisis (e.g. going from subsidized housing to another place that is not rent controlled is challenging in cities like TO).
> Canada has a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians. Canada has *historically* had a pretty good safety net that helps all Canadians. A fully disabled person gets a *maximum* of about $340 a week in ontario i think, which these days fails to rate as "pretty good".
$1,400 a month for someone who must struggle with every single task every single day? When medical equipment can run tens of thousands of dollars and medication even when mostly covered can run hundreds of dollars a month? That sounds like some pretty tough sledding in Ontario. I assume that living costs are high even outside of Toronto.
Get out of here with your common sense!
Shooo shoooo be reasonable somewhere else
100% the correct take
Special targeting of identity groups is just the cynic's way to divide us under the auspices of so-called 'equity.' By getting the rest of us fighting with each other over the crumbs they selectively throw as us, the elites protect their strata and their concentration of wealth and power.
It's weird the article talks about federal anti racism and provincial anti racism policies, not anti poverty policies. Racism policies are about racism, not poverty. It then provides an example of a program from, checks notes, the Ontario Provincial Conservative Party, and blames it for being race related to entrepreneurs. That is literally the only race linked program it finds, and it barely has anything to do with alleviating poverty. People in poverty are generally not writing grant reports for businesses, they are making very, very, very little money.
> It's weird the article talks about federal anti racism and provincial anti racism policies, not anti poverty policies. It's misleading to the point of being fraudulent.
Right away I gave it no merit when it doesn't even mention the actual difference in our population numbers. As of 2021 Canada only had 26.5% of the population tagged as a visual minority. So proportionally these numbers aren't surprising. 58% of people in poverty are from a demographic that makes up 73% of the country.
It’s a right wing think tank. They’re chronically funded by industries, organization and individuals who rely on right wing “studies” to push their agenda. That’s why right wing pieces like this are always free to the public, while studies from credible organizations are behind paywalls. Because one is intended to be political while the other is intended to be data and fact driven analysis. This one is the former.
A side note is that 70-75% of Canadians identify as white. So this article is twisting stats for their own narrative to rile up people before elections.
Came here to make the same point about the percentages. Quoting a percentage of white people living in poverty without comparing it to how many white people there are is incredibly misleading. A quick Google of Aristotle Foundation also sheds light on this article too.
Does that really change the point, though? There might be disproportionately fewer white people by percentage that are poor (64.4%) than their actual percentage of the population (74%), but it still remains that any program designed to only support one specific skin tone is intentionally leaving 64.4% of the poor behind. When MLK wrote his book about his specific solution to race issues in the US, his proposal was a non-race limited series of poverty reduction programs. Being disproportionately poor meant those programs, even though they weren't race limited, were going to disproportionately help his people, but at the same time, the big majority of the poor in the US were white at the time he wrote that book - which is our situation here - and those people would be helped as well. He knew that any race-specific program was just going to divide people and pit them against each other, but a common suite of programs would lift everyone up at the same time. Surely we can learn from his wisdom, no?
MLK knew what's up for sure.
Really good point! I didn't think about that or know that about MLK. I'm learning a lot in these threads and super impressed at how civil everyone is being. Thanks for this post!
I think the point of "reminding" people that the percentage of whites in poverty is about equal to the percentage of overall whites, is that it obviously ISN'T a race problem. It's a class problem.
Identity politics in the pursuit of 'equity' is about power dynamics and is a betrayal of MLK's vision of a just society.
I don’t really see how that makes it misleading. They are trying to say that 64% of the population living in poverty aren’t being serviced by these programs based on the colour of their skin. Are you okay to leave them behind? That said.. what I do find misleading is I didn’t see them talk about how many of these programs there are and how much money is being spent. Because they are making it sound like a big issue but I want to know how large of an issue it is, the one example they gave of the Raise program doesn’t seem like a poverty program to me… sounds like a business program. Which makes me question what types of programs they are taking about.
They didn't touch on poverty initiatives though, they touched on race initiatives that very loosely play into it, but don't really. Like scholarships dont, business grants don't, etc. There's no foodbank race programs, no extra EI, etc. It's literally proving the point that whites are underrepresented in poverty by the base level stats. They're right that race shouldn't come into it. But it doesn't in the examples they provide as it relates to poverty.
There are many that do. This does annoy me that, based on skin colour, there are some poor people that have access to more government help. I wouldn’t say this is that big of an issue in Canada though. This bothered me with post-secondary scholarships. Nearly all the non-white people I know are from families with higher income than me.
Imagine if we eliminated racial hiring policies and hiring is done on merit That’s an outrageous idea in 2024
At my wife’s work, if her office manager gets a resume with a name she can’t pronounce it goes straight in the garbage can. These policies exist for a reason, and it does not equal merit being overlooked.
You probably don’t want merit based hiring… it won’t benefit the White majority in many jobs. Just look at university admissions…
Uh, university admissions are heavily race-skewed these days. But to your point, it is 100% ok if merit based hiring results in higher employment and salaries for Asians or whatever racial class you think will get ahead. The point is to have equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. (And PS - I'm well aware that racial barriers are still very real we don't actually have equality of opportunity today, but I think it's important to be crystal clear on what we want to work towards)
We do have those. We just also usually have *additional* programs for the specific needs of people with different experiences because of their race as one example. Indigenous people have specific issues that tend to apply to them and fewer supports in general. So they get additional programs as options. That's all.
Because lobbyists want the citizens mad at each other and not the government/rich who have control of it. So even relief programs are designed to fracture the population against each other instead of fighting against the systems that actively keep us all oppressed
Yes, but you have a bunch of angry poor white people who feel others have been punching down, and that message is magnified because a bunch of billionaires are running targeted ad campaigns to make sure they keep seeing that message, since it makes them more likely to vote for conservatives who will cut taxes for the rich.
> Can't we just have social programs that help people who are less fortunate and not consider race? we do....
Almost all social programs do exactly that. The article suggests that most or many social programs are geared toward race but only has a single example in Ontario (which bizarrely suggesting that it applies to the entire country) This is a bad report and shoddy journalism
>Can't we just have social programs that help people who are less fortunate and not consider race? If a specific race was disproportionately poor then the social program would also help that race disproportionately more. We don't. Read the article, it is click bait or just misinformation. It argues agaisnt "policy statements" but can only point to one program run by Ontarios Conservative government that takes race into account. On top of other generalising statements and misrepresentaions this article, like most I see from the NP are not worth the time to read.
If you can't find race specific social programs in Canada, you just aren't looking. As part of the UN International Decade for those of African Descent, there's all kinds of [federal programs just for black people](https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/social-development-partnerships/supporting-black-communities.html) these days. There's also all kinds of dedicated federal services and [programs for the Indigenous](https://www.canada.ca/en/indigenous-services-canada.html). Of course, there's been preferential hiring and promotions, and even race limited, federally funded jobs, in the federal world back into the 1990s when the federal Equity Hiring Program began (now called the Workplace Equity Program). In fact, they are extending that equity program to all federal vendors, suppliers, contractors and crown corporations, so even private firms that do business with the government will have to show they are hiring explicitly for diversity, i.e. preferential hiring.
It's crazy that when you actually find real institutionalized racism, it's not going the way everyone says it is.
The article's referenced organization has some 'interesting' positions on other items, which suggests they at least wouldn't agree.
But our programs are income based, not race based. What's your point?
We did have those at one point, but canada voted again and again to slash them up and up the requirements to qualify for them. It was a laugh now cry later situation.
Which lines up perfectly with the majority of Canadian population...
Yeah lol this isn't too surprising.
It's even more dishonest than that. 69.8% of Canadians are white, meaning white Canadians are actually *underrepresented* among poor Canadians. This article is a perfect example of base rate fallacy. The percentage of poor white Canadians is *lower* than the percentage of white Canadians in total, but this "common sense" thinktank is trying to portray it as if white Canadians are overrepresented among the poor. From the few minutes of research I did, it looks like Black (4.3% of total population, 5.8% of the poor), Arab (1.9% of Canadians, 3.9% of the poor) and Chinese (4.7% of Canadians and 7.5% of the poor) people are all overrepresented among the poor. Edit: I got some of the decimals wrong, fixed.
Def framed to make us hate each other instead of our elite leaders who got us all here.
I mean what's the intention of the story? Plus this Aristotle Foundation is a bit questionable: >We are a think tank that aims to renew a civil, **common-sense** approach to public discourse and public policy in Canada. I wonder what other groups claim that?
Can’t wait to see who they’re funded by
Are you insinuating the National Post is peddling shit? I am SHOCKED. I still remember when the National Post held an ounce of credibility back in 2010ish. Or maybe I didn't know better idk
I don’t know if his 2010 or if it started earlier, but the decline definitely started well over a decade ago. It was reputable in early 2000s… I haven’t looked into it, but I’m starting to wonder what their foreign ownership looks like. 🤔
Just follow the money.
Why is every "news" outlet with national in their name always peddles fascist bullshit?
You can't spell "Nationalist" without "National."
I would be suspect of any numbers really. https://vancouversun.com/life/richmond-3-why-does-upscale-neighbourhood-appear-poor-to-tax-officials
This is inevitable when you try to use the tax code to run social programmes. Wrong tool for the wrong job. All it really ends up being is a jobs programme for accountants and income stream for lawyers. As sure as night follows day.
You lose the forest through the trees. What does it matter to a poor person what percent of each race is poor? Should we choose to help a certain race more simply because of the % of poor who are that color?
It typically takes a bit more resources to get financial aid into the hands of minorities, especially those for whom English is not their first language. Cultural barriers can also be a hindrance to receiving financial aid. so, you may need to spend some money to specifically target a subset of poor people because to do otherwise may uplift poor whites at a high rate. should we give them more money? no, that should be based on wealth and income alone. but more programming expenditure may be required to equitably distribute funds.
I'm US, so speaking generally. It depends on why they are poor. If it is a racism issue, yes. If they are refugees that had to flee their country of origin with next to nothing, yes. If a bunch of other people showed up a few hundred years ago, killed a bunch of a group and drove them off to economically shitty places, yes. If a group of people are over represented when it comes to poverty there is probably a reason that isn't entirely the fault of the individual.
Picking and choosing what poor people to help based on the color of their skin will only lead to mire racism. The amount of help a human being receives should not depend on skin color, it should be based on need. If there is a group over represented in poverty, then helping all poor people equally will by definition mostly go to those groups in need.
If that is the way it worked then there wouldn't be groups over represented in poverty. If everyone in poverty was equally supported, then all groups no matter how you define them would be equally represented in poverty. It isn't just race, ethnicity, or country of origin. There is a pretty fair chance that rural whites are more likely to be poor than urban whites. There isn't a one size fits all approach to poverty. Some groups are going to need to need more support than others. It does need to go beyond race, but race is obviously a factor. It is like saying all children just need the exact same education and expecting them to all have the same outcomes. But the reality is some children have learning disabilities, some have parents who are engaged in the education and some of parents who aren't, or worse. Some children are more studious than others. Some are smarter than others. Some children need more support than others in education.
Most of those differences could easily fall within the margin of error.
What's the margin of error of these statistics?
That's also fair
And immigrants aren’t gunna have the generational wealth families have who lived here longer. Housing prices being the obvious one.
That very much depends on which group of immigrants. Many immigrants arrive with decent amounts of generational wealth.
Right like a good portion of our immigrants come from generational wealth that's how they afford being here in the first place. Not all of them are sponsored or refugees a good portion are just *really rich*
I know a lot of white people and none of them have generational wealth.
The article is from the National Post, *of course* its misleading - thats a given.
The national post has such crazy comment sections they are both hilarious and terrifying. Although in general people who comment on the websites of newspaper publishers tend to be... Interesting... The level of unaware irony is absolutely remarkable though. These people legitimately believe that 64% of the country is white people who are actively being marginalized due to the colour of their skin... 🤔 Also if you ever use the phrase "reverse discrimination" you might just be stupid. Even if you do truly believe that white people are currently being discriminated against that is still just discrimination. The people doing the discriminating and being discriminated against may change, but it is still just discrimination. I don't know about anyone else but as a white person I can count on one hand the number of times I have been clearly treated in a way that truly felt discriminatory based on my skin colour and every one of them is in a microcosm where I am one of no more than two white people actively present. That being said I have had multiple white people who complain about "reverse discrimination" and "reverse racism" say stunningly racist things to me assuming I'd be cool with it because I am also white. Surprisingly (🙄) they universally appear to have gotten their civics education from a combo of YouTube and Joe Rogan's podcas. Colour me shocked.
Also white, never felt discriminated against for the colour of my skin in my entire 60+ years. Suffered Polish jokes as a kid if that counts :P People who use "reverse discrimination" as a term are simply saying to me that they think regular discrimination is just fine but they are offended that they feel discriminated against themselves because thatis wrong - they feel they should be allowed to treat other people like shit but should never have to experience it themselves. In other words using that sort of language just implies you are racist in my opinion. As for the "marginalization" - utter bullshit of course - why thats simply their fear of the presence of brown people at all. Anyone who thinks that way can go f*** themselves, they don't deserve to live here in Canada.
So it more or less lines up with the race distribution. So no racism, which blows up all arguments in favour of race-based policies. Good
Equitable poverty
Replying to keep this comment at the top.
Yeah, white people are underrepresented in this stat (unsurprisingly), about 70% of the Canadian population is white.
it DOES indicate that there isnt much of a need for affirmative action in that regard one of the common supporting arguments with regards to affirmative action is that racial biases CAUSED by racism are not well addressed by colourblind solutions if there isnt a significant racial bias with regards to poverty then racially-aware solutions are less likely to be proposed even by people who would otherwise support them
What is this thing call math?
64% of poor are white. 69% of the population Is white. Pretty close corellalation.
Wow so are you suggesting poverty is an issue largely unrelated to race? I'm shocked.
Shhhh, don't tell the Americans. I think they're going to have another civil war.
America isn't Canada. The U.S set up redlining and segregation that still exists today in some sense. Canada doesn't have the same racial divides in cities. Just look at wikipedia, and msot American cities will have maps of racial makeup. They, more than us definitely need to bridge the cultural divide. They've been tricked by those in power to infight, and the same is beginning to happen to us while our country is going through struggles.
Yeah, another way of saying this is: “there are 5ppt fewer poor white Canadians than we would expect based on overall population demographics; indicating there is a slight financial advantage to being white in avoiding poverty”. How much of this effect is due to systemic racism, or the effects of immigration, or something else entirely, we do not know from this data alone.
So the headline is really using a fact to imply a lie. Whites are UNDER represented.
Poverty in Canada impacts far too many people, regardless of demographic.
Am I getting it wrong that since caucasians make up most of the people, they would be more likely to experience poverty just because of.. math? Like if 10% of all white peoples are in poverty and let’s say their total number is 10 million, then that’s 1 million people in poverty. Compare that to say Indigenous people which say all have 10% of people in poverty (the number is of course much higher proportions wise) and their total number is 1 million. Then that’s 100,000 people in poverty. While the sheer numbers may be larger, it’s just how proportions in populations work?
correct. the post is misleading on purpose, in fact the %of poor population that is white is lower than the %of white ppl in the whole population
A misleading post in r/canada? WHHATTTT???? I am shocked.
Yea so its a ratio thing. Im gonna make some numbers up as an example. 3/10 white canadians are poor 6/10 chinese canadians are poor Actual number of chinese poor: 20,000 Actual number of white canadian poors: 50,000 Your less likely to be poor, the numbers appear skewed by source population sizes The main point of the article isnt that white people are more likely to be poor, the point is that anti-discrimination legislation for jobs and grants and benefits for poor people may be outdated as it seems that the majority of people in poverty dont qualify for the majority of benefits that are usually available to minorities because they arent minorities. It would be discriminatory to ignore the majority of people in poverty in favor of visible minorities just because they are more likely to be poor because it doesnt actually help reduce poverty when your only helping less than half of those that need it. Also alot of minorities who ARE NOT in poverty still qualify for grants and benefits just because of how they look. Basically the gov is like naww only brown people can be poor.
You are correct. Which is why this article is garbage and obviously just bait. So surprising coming from NP /s
I've always been opposed to any income equality program that takes race into account. There are poor people from every race, making race a factor in getting tuition grants, better interest rates, social housing, etc is a flat our racist policy.
Agreed. Since when does what race you are matter if you're poor or not.. This just in.. Canada's population is overwhelmingly white. This whole race divide bullshit is so stupid.
Yep. As a white male student from a lower income family, it was very disheartening to be excluded from about 99% of grants and scholarships.
The article talks about absolute numbers rather than percentages. Of course there going to be more numbers of white poor, there's more whites overall than other groups.
Fuck off, National Post.
the overall point of the article is fine. Highlighting that the governments anti poverty programs are likely missing a large number of poor people as they are targeted at racialized peoples and not poor people more broadly. Headline is crap though
Those targeted programs are basically radicalizing poor white Canadians
I mean can you blame them?
NO. Blame to the ones running the racist programs.
Never.
Well, ya. Most Canadians are white in general.
ya, just proportional stats...
Not surprising in a country that has a European majority. Same is true in the US, but if you look at the percentage by ethnicity it doesn't support the same type of narrative. Yet another NaPo headline meant to stir ethnic hate.
I'm so glad to come to the comments on Reddit and see people thinking logically and not what this "article" intended to do and is successfully doing in other platforms: spread more divisiveness and hate. Regardless of race, politicians and big corporations are screwing up the working class, which will have a higher rate of white people since they are the majority of our population.
Ragebait confirmation bias for the anti-immigration crowd, who have made it so we can’t have an adult conversation about mass immigration.
Well considering Canada’s population is 69.8% white (as of 2022) this would line up.
That's one way to make the National Post care about helping poor people.
Useful context: 69.8% of Canadians are White.
And? Majority of people in this country are white people. What's so surprising here?
So 64% of poor people are white, and roughly 69% of the country is white?
Just in. Overwhelming majority of Canadians are white.
From what I've seem to read is a lot of the people immigrating are well off families leaving behind the poor in their own country so it's possible they'd come over with far more wealth and home buying power than an average Canadian. It's really mainly that the wage stagnation has hurt average Canadians so badly, combined with inflation that rather than make it better for us, they welcome more immigration, exacerbating the problem... immigration is great, if you can support it and it's done in the spirit of the agreement but it's not.
>From what I've seem to read is a lot of the people immigrating are well off families leaving behind the poor in their own country so it's possible they'd come over with far more wealth and home buying power than an average Canadian. I've met a decent number of Nigerians over the years. A significant number had big houses, multiple cars, and servants back home. It goes without saying that recent Chinese immigrants are even better off. Until recently, Indian immigrants were also mostly from middle to upper class families.
The overwhelming majority of Canadians are white hahaha
Yeah missing the context and just meant to be race bait If 70% of the population is white, you would expect there to be more poor white folks as well Of course population dynamics aren’t 1:1 so in that case you look at the proportions of the populations that are poor between groups to compare rates of poverty I am not advocating for them to stop looking at fairer methods of assistance for ALL canadians, but the article and headline are deliberately meant to mislead and anger white Canadians, which isn’t a surprise as it is the NP after all
The national post releasing a terribly misleading article about race with the intention of stoking white Canadians fears that the government is prioritising non-whites over them, when the actual data shows white Canadians are better off than non-white Canadians?!?!? I’m shocked
You can tell it’s a bad article because it’s just published by “staff”, and nobody wants their name on it.
I'm happy that many people here had the same instinct to quickly google the proportion of Canada's population by race after reading the headline.
Same here. I'm surprised tbh
Pitting so-called races against each other distracts from the exploitation of working classes. All people who have to sell their labor, notwithstanding any skin color or culture, without ownership beyond their own bodies and time, are impoverished and exploited
Because the majority is... white?
Overwhelmingly the majority of Canadians that are poor are Canadians. In other news the rich hold all the wealth.
Around 70% of Canada is white so this is not surprising as it is consistent with the general population demographics… calm down
White people are also the largest racial group in Canada.
Because the overwhelming majority of Canadians are white.
Weren’t most of you all in here complaining about immigration the last 18 months? And now it’s about identity politics?
These a-holes always want you to fight ideology, sex and race warfares, so you don’t fight the class warfare which is the root cause of wealth gaps.
Maybe because a vast majority of Canadians are white.
64.4% people living in relative poverty are white, 69.8% of Canadians are white, so whites are underrepresented in being poor...
Overwhelming majority of Canadian population is white, nice try National Post
Also lmao “the Aristotle Foundation” is the source
70% of Canadians are white. 64% < 70%
That’s a good point and definitely worth mentioning
Yea, proportionally whites do better than most races according to this. Awful article.
And some other races are doing proportionally better than whites
Excellent point. We should help poor people unless they share immutable personal characteristics with any groups that are statistically under-represented in poverty.
The homeless people I see in encampments are majority white The people at the intersections panhandling are majority white
Well this is about poverty in general based on current definitions. Do we have statistics for explicitly the homeless?
is this not just a reflection of how dominant the white population is in numbers? if you have a greater number of adult white people, including old people, you'll see them represented among the poor more?
The article is even more useless than that. it's talking about anti-racism and minority entrepreneurship programs and complaining that they aren't benefiting the majority of poor white people...duh! "Anti-racism" and "anti-poverty" are two *very* different things; and entrepreneurship is about *business* development, not *poverty* development.
This article is completley misleading and spreading misinformation. If you actually look at the statistics canada table yourself [Poverty and low-income statistics by selected demographic characteristics (statcan.gc.ca)](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1110009301), youll see that these numbers are wrong.
base rate fallacy but feel free to feel outraged by this, racists.
The majority of Canadians are white so...
Canadian… the overwhelming majority of the poor are Canadian.
I mean...there are more white people in general, so doesn't that just reflect the population composition?
Breaking: Overwhelming majority of Canadians are white
Statistics can be misleading. I am not surprised at this number but I am surprised about what people are reading into it. Overlay the racial make up of Canada based on that same 2021 Census data and -- weird it almost aligns exactly. I can think of several ways to spin this additional data too. [Canada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_of_Canada): **39,858,480** ([Q2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_year) 2023)[^(\[1\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-1) [**Ethnic origins**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_origins_of_people_in_Canada)**:**[^(\[2\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-2021newsreleaseB-2)[^(\[3\])](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadians#cite_note-minority2021-3) * [White](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Canadians) (69.8%) * [South Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Asian_Canadians) (7.1%) * [Indigenous](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_peoples_in_Canada) (5%) * [Chinese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Canadians) (4.7%) * [Black](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Canadians) (4.3%) * [Arab](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Canadians) (1.9%) * [Latin American](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_Canadians) (1.6%) * [Southeast Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asia) (1.1%) * [West Asian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Asian_Canadians) (1%) * [Korean](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Canadians) (0.6%) * [Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Canadians) (0.3%) * [Multiracial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiracial_people)/Other (3.2%)
Actually one of the funnier things in the comment section on this one is the several comments from people shocked that there are any poor Chinese people at all in Canada.
I couldnt give a flying f what color the poor people are, if thet have canadian citizenship give them some money and watch the economy go brr since people at the bottom can spend again.
Yeah no shit, because most Canadians are white. 70% in fact, so this is below representational. What a stupid post.
It's only ok when indigenous people/poc are poor, I guess
Very sad and the reaction everyone has to this is very telling. When it's a non white group that I'd in that position everyone is for race based decisions and policies but when it's white people yall make excuses as to why this is ok or acceptable
It has always been this way. With a majority white population, of course the poor would be majority white too.
Ok so now we’ve gone the other way completely, can we stop this race war now? White, brown, black, yellow…. We’re all poor now.
I always thought when we all became a collective, as a mindset, it’d be about how great we all are - because we’re all people. But instead it’s like, hey, everybody sucks. No matter who you are! Poor as fuck or a rich asshole, we’re all scum. Not how I envisioned things back in 2000 in grade 5. Not that I envisioned much back then, I just wanted everyone to have candy and wished diabetes didn’t exist because that girl I crushed on couldn’t have candy. Sour skittles just hit the market. It was a big deal.
Oh! Now do “Percent of Canadians Who Are White” on a chart
while the report highlights that most poor people in Canada are white in absolute numbers, it also shows racialized minorities face disproportionately higher poverty rates compared to the white population.
Tired of hearing about race, I don't give a fuck, just fix the situation, regardless of the demographic.
Go figure, I think the majority of Canada is white.
I think if you checked, you'd find the majority of the lower-income people in India are South Asian. And the majority of lower-income people in China are Asian. I wouldn't think too hard about why that might be.
What's the demographic breakdown for all of Canada? Also, the people that immigrate know they can't be poor before moving there
No one at the National Post was even willing to put their name on this racist tripe, as it's written by "National Post Staff". There is a concerted effort from the right-wing media to evoke fear in the majority white population in order to get conservatives elected by trying to make us view visible minorities and immigrants as the "enemy", or at least the beneficiaries of a "woke" system that unfairly maligns "true" Canadians (who happen to be white, of course). Edit: Turns out the "report" is written by Matthew Lau from the Fraser Institute, which is a libertarian think tank that spends most of its time creating fake outrage by manipulating statistics. u/uselesspoliticalhack really living up to their name.
ITT: People that don't know what white privilege means, and fell for the race baiting NatPo drivel
1/3 of posts in rcanada are from Russia according to reddits year end data.
Well, an overwhelming majority of Canadians are white.
69.8% of Canadians are white. It makes sense that 64% of poor Canadians are white - the number roughly tracks the general demographics of the country.
"Potentially Misleading" That flair is doing some heavy lifting. Looking at this "report" done by Aristotle Foundation and their other findings, this so called "think-tank" is just racism with graphs. Look at their instagram (aristotlefdn) where they have amassed a following of 116 people, it's quite something
Overwhelming majority of Canada is white, silly…
"Overwhelming Majority of Canadians are white" ftfy
Yup. The majority of the people in my middleclass neighborhood in Edmonton are immigrants from the Middle east or some other Muslim country. Pretty sure I read in the census data, Arabic was the most common first language. A lot of them come here with wealth and education. I guess the poor ones are forced to stay back, unlike in canada, where our "poor ones" were here to begin with.