For many years now, Statistics Canada has published a widely used set of low income cutoffs (LICOs) to measure the rate of low income in Canada. While not intended for use as "poverty lines," they do provide an indication of the degree of low income in various areas of the country. This month's article by Andrew Heisz, Low income intensity: urban and rural families combines the LICOs with the average depth of low income to provide a more complete measure of low income in Canada. This article uses this alternate measure to compare urban and rural families in 1993 and 1997.