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Reducing poverty is a key societal goal. Canada has done a good job in addressing this issue for children and seniors. According to the “market basket measure,” Canada’s official poverty metric, the poverty rate for people under 18 fell from 19.2 per cent in 2006 to 8.2 per cent in 2018, while the rate for people 65 and over also fell significantly, from 7.6 per cent to 3.5 per cent.
In contrast, the poverty rate for the working-age population (those 18 to 64 years of age) was 10.3 per cent in 2018 — which is higher than for the other two groups and represents less of a decline. (It was 16 per cent in 2006.) Partly because of the country’s success in reducing poverty among children and seniors, the working-age population accounted for 75 per cent of people in poverty in Canada in 2018, up from 67 per cent in 2006.
Working-age people are even more important in terms of the poverty gap, that is, the total amount of income by which Canadians in aggregate fall short of the poverty line. Statistics Canada estimates that this gap was $18.5 billion in 2018 and that 82 per cent of it would need to go to working-age people, up from 74 per cent in 2006.