Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

Income disparity suffered by Indians should trump concerns about other groups, an SFU economist involved in the research says.

By Shannon Proudfoot, Canwest News Service, March 31, 2009

The income gap between aboriginals and other Canadians is so wide it should trump concerns about other ethnic disparities in this country, a Canadian economist says.

“My way of thinking about it is once you start thinking about ethnic disparity in Canada, you should really only be paying attention to aboriginal people,” says Krishna Pendakur, an economics professor at Simon Fraser University. “They’re an order of magnitude worse off than all other ethnic minorities.”

He and his brother Ravi Pendakur, a sociologist at the University of Ottawa, recently completed the largest study of its kind quantifying the exact size of that gap, and the results are stark.

“Those of us who live in Canadian cities have an intuitive awareness that aboriginal people are on average kind of poor,” Pendakur says. “The thing is that if you then push yourself and ask how poor, you don’t really have any answers. We were lacking a quantitative assessment in this area.”

Using an extensive database from the 2001 census, which includes 20 per cent of all Canadian households and 100 per cent of those on aboriginal reserves, the researchers traced the earnings gap of several segments of the aboriginal population, both on reserves and in cities.

They looked at aboriginals with registered status living on and off reserve, those without registered status who still identified themselves as Indian, Metis or Inuit on the census questionnaire, and people who didn’t identify themselves as aboriginal but said their ancestors were.

The income of males with registered status living on a reserve is 50 per cent lower that of non-aboriginals, they found, while women in the same category have incomes 21 per cent lower than other women. Registered male and female aboriginals living off-reserve, meanwhile, have incomes 38 and 23 per cent lower than their peers — a disparity that’s “less, but still gigantic,” Pendakur says. “Even comparing people who have the same age and the same education level, aboriginal people are even then astoundingly poorer,” he says. People who claimed aboriginal identity fared better than those with registered status but still much worse than their non-aboriginal counterparts, he found. Even those who simply claim aboriginal ancestry lag behind.

With the study taking into account age, education and even location, prejudice is the only explanation left for this gap, says Dan Wilson, senior director of strategic policy and planning with the Assembly of
First Nations. Figures show income levels for aboriginals are dramatically lower. Total income (wages, investment income and government benefits) compared with non-aboriginal Canadians:

. Registered Indian living on a reserve: 50% lower for men, 21% lower for women
. Registered Indian living off-reserve: 38% lower for men, 23% lower for women
. Not registered, identify as a North American Indian (first nations): 33% lower for men, 19% lower for women
. Aboriginal ancestry: 18% lower for men, 12% lower for women
. Earnings for registered Indians living in cities compared with non-aboriginals:
. Vancouver: 40% lower for men, 40% lower for women
. Victoria: 35% lower for men, 32% lower for women
. Calgary: 35% lower for men, 33% lower for women
. Edmonton: 38% lower for men, 26% lower for women
. Winnipeg: 47% lower for men, 38% lower for women
. Saskatoon: 63% lower for men, 44% lower for women
. Montreal: 23% lower for men, 20% lower for women
. Ottawa-Hull: 25% lower for men, 4% higher for women
. Toronto: 18% lower for men, 23% lower for women

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