1. Introduction
The Applied Research Branch, under its agenda for research into social exclusion, has identified Aboriginal people as being one of the five groups of people who are the most at risk of being poor or socially excluded. The four other high risk groups are those who belong to single parent families, people with work limitations, recent immigrants and people aged 45 to 64 who live alone. The purpose of this project is not to confirm yet again the existence of these high risk groups but rather to compare them among themselves. While seeking to determine whether some of these groups manage better than others in economic terms, it was determined that, surprisingly, off-reserve Aboriginals are the ones displaying the best overall performance among high risk groups. Thus, this study more specifically seeks to identify this fact and understand what lies behind it.
To this end, after a brief discussion of the concept of social exclusion, the database used (The Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics) will be presented and the chosen measure of poverty (persistent poverty) along with the technical details related to the manipulation of data will be set out. Then, the descriptive statistics on persistent poverty in the different groups will be presented to clearly illustrate the stronger economic performance of off-reserve Aboriginal people. The next sections will be dedicated to, first, the presentation of the four most plausible explanations to explain this fact and, second, to the presentation of the reasons that effectively explain their strong performance in terms of persistent poverty compared to the other high risk groups. Finally, the key points of the study will be summarized in the conclusion.
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