Introduction

View the most recent version.

Archived Content

Information identified as archived is provided for reference, research or recordkeeping purposes. It is not subject to the Government of Canada Web Standards and has not been altered or updated since it was archived. Please "contact us" to request a format other than those available.

Archived

This page has been archived on the Web.

Statistics Canada has a long history of publishing data on low income Canadians. The low income cut-offs (LICOs) were first published in 1967 as part of the 1961 Census monograph series and are by far Statistics Canada's most established and widely recognized approach to estimating low income cut-offs.

Following the practice of many international organizations, Statistics Canada began to publish before- and after-tax low income measures (LIMs) in 1991. LIMs are particularly convenient for making international comparisons, since estimating the cut-offs requires only data on family incomes within a country and they are constructed relative to the median within each country. As such, they require no adjustments using exchange rates or purchasing power parity indexes as would be necessary to make meaningful comparisons of absolute levels of income between countries.

Media, researchers and policy-makers interested in measures of low income are typically concerned with the extent to which individuals in the population are living in poverty. Unfortunately, defining poverty is far from straightforward. The underlying difficulty is that poverty is a question of social consensus, defined for a given point in time and in the context of a given country. Decisions on what defines poverty are subjective and ultimately arbitrary¹. Given this, Statistics Canada has always referred to the low income cut-offs and low income measures as indicators of the extent to which some Canadians are less well-off than others based solely on income and as such, are low income and not poverty measures.

Other statistical organizations are also sensitive to the use of the word 'poverty'. Eurostat refers to its measure (similar to the LIM) as an 'at risk of poverty' measure. In the United States, where an official poverty measure exists, the poverty rates are qualified as being calculated according to a specified definition, allowing that other measures are possible.

The purpose of this document is to provide the dollar cut-offs used to define the low income population. Low income status is always determined using family income. The family concept used is the economic family, that is, all persons living in the same dwelling and related by blood, marriage, common-law relationship or adoption.

---

1. Refer to 'On poverty and Low income' (Fellegi) and 'Describing the Distribution of Income: Guidelines for Effective Analysis' (Skuterud, Frenette, and Poon) for a more detailed discussion on poverty and low income.