10. Conclusion and next steps in the research on Aboriginal people
Aboriginal people are one of the five groups that were identified as being at greatest risk of experiencing social exclusion in the Canadian population. These groups have been identified as such, because they are the ones (single parents, unattached 45+, people with work limitations, recent immigrants and Aboriginal people) who are more likely to be poor at some time and to experience lengthy episodes of poverty. However, having made this observation, this paper no longer focuses on comparing the economic performance of these high risk groups with the rest of the Canadian population, but on the comparison of these groups among themselves. The researchers' aim is to determine whether the vulnerability to poverty is similar among all the high risk groups and, if not, what the special features of each group are.
To this end, the longitudinal data of the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID) was used, as well as a measure of persistent poverty that helps take into account three different facets influencing the long-term poverty situation of individuals: the fact that they experienced poverty at a given time, the average difference between family income and the low income cutoff when they were poor and the amount of time spent in poverty. These technical tools led to interesting observations concerning a specific group of Aboriginal people, i.e. off-reserve Aboriginal people. Of all the high risk groups, this is the one that displayed the best economic performance between 1993 and 1998.
Using the global experience of the overall population and then the experience of the high risk groups, four plausible alternative explanations of this better relative performance were proposed. The first concerns the level of education achieved, the second the labour market integration, the third the mobility between high risk and non-high risk groups (since it was noted that "mobile" people are more likely to avoid persistent poverty) and, finally, the number of risk factors that individuals have (since the more risk factors an individual has, the more likely he/she is to be poor). Since these relations are generally authentic, it was expected that these four reasons would explain the strong relative performance of off-reserve Aboriginal people. Yet, it would appear that only one of them explains it clearly, that being integration into the labour market. Off-reserve Aboriginal principal income recipients are better integrated into the Canadian labour market than those in the other high risk groups. In other words, an individual has a better chance of belonging to a family in which the person with the highest income works in a given year if this person was an off-reserve Aboriginal person than if he/she was part of another high risk group. Moreover, the off-reserve Aboriginal principal income recipient is more likely to have a stable labour market status and to never depend on government transfers. When compared to the other high risk groups, there is a higher probability among off-reserve Aboriginal that an individual will belong to a family whose principal income recipient worked throughout the period of the study and whose principal income recipient never received income from transfer payments. Surprisingly, this higher participation in the labour market by off-reserve Aboriginal people compared to the other high risk groups is true despite the fact that their level of education is not the highest, their mobility between groups is rare compared with the other high risk groups and they generally have more risk factors than the latter.
However, it should be noted that off-reserve Aboriginal people who are not registered under Canada's Indian Act are economically much better off than those who are. Off-reserve Aboriginal people who are not registered are often people who have only one parent who is an Aboriginal person and/or have lived on reserve only briefly, if at all, which implies they are closer to the rest of the Canadian population. This raises the question of whether, for Aboriginal people, leaving the reserve and separating from their community of origin is a good way of avoiding financial difficulties. But, while we know that registered off-reserve Aboriginal people face a higher risk of persistent poverty than those who are not registered, the current findings provide no information about the situation of on-reserve Aboriginal people. Thus, they do not allow us to draw conclusions about the economic situation of registered off-reserve Aboriginal people compared with registered on-reserve Aboriginal people, which are two more comparable populations for the purpose of drawing this type of conclusion. However, it would be appropriate to investigate in future work. But in order to do this, another source of data would be required, such as the Census, which is not amenable to a longitudinal analysis.
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