Poverty

For more than two decades, I have urged that an absolute measure of poverty should be part of Canada's complement of key indicators telling us how we are doing. I have argued that it is important not only because it will allow us to determine how many Canadians do not have the basic necessities covered-information we currently do not have on any official basis-but also because an absolute measure would correspond much more closely to descriptions used in the media, and by many social activists, of poverty and the predicament of the poor in Canada. This paper is the latest in a series of studies on the measurement of poverty in Canada.