The dog days of summer…

This morning I tweeted (X’ed?) this thread. There have been interesting news stories about low income and poverty in SWO Ontario over the past few weeks. First there was this story that appeared in the London Free Press (then cross published by the Star) looking at the region and poverty rates and quality of life across SWO.

The national agency ran the numbers from the last census in 2021 to get a read on quality of life in municipalities across the country, measuring housing quality and affordability, education levels and poverty rates.

https://windsorstar.com/news/local-news/federal-agency-points-to-windsor-as-sw-ontarios-poverty-capital

This data comes from the new Municipal Quality of Life Dashboards which is a good summary and tool outlining the challenges in communities and give insight to how they impact quality of life. The data is largely sourced from the Census with some built in Cross Tabulation breaking the data by age or discrete groups that isn’t always readily available in the community profiles. The first story was followed up by a second one looking at a more Windsor focused lens talking to United Way and the Unemployed Help Centre. Food banks and affordability framing the discussion.

On August 9th, Statistics Canada released taxflier data on low income and inequality for 2021. This would be the tax year after the Census ending December 31, 2021. This was still a period with COVID impacts but it is our first post Census dataset looking at impacts on income. As programs like CERB began to wind down in the fall of 2021, yet the economy hadn’t fully re-opened or rebounded the impacts on incomes really show the gaps in our economy and social safety net.

Comparability

Before I get into the numbers, we do briefly have to talk about comparability. As is usually a problem Statistics Canada has chosen to use different measure to talk about poverty across stories/releases. Canada has 3 Poverty Measures each tell a different story around poverty. One of my pet peeves with Statistics Canada is despite having a national poverty line based on the Market Basket Measure – Statistics Canada releases data using other measures through the year. The Census profiles for Cities are only available in LIM and LICO, the aforementioned dashboard uses Market Basket Measure and the taxflier data uses LIM based on Census Families.

The second comparability issue is one of geography. The dashboard tool does review only municipalities (as the name implies) while Taxflier data is released at a CMA level. In Windsor’s case the CMA is all of Essex County – note the geography change that occurred in the 2021 Census. The London CMA as an example includes of Middlesex County as well as Strathroy and St Thomas with parts of Elgin County.

In Windsor Essex case, the comparability challenges are mitigated by geography. As the county municipalities have consistently had lower low income rates, it is logical that if the low income rates go up that they went up proportionally more in the City of Windsor compare to the rest of the county. This is likely true to the type of employment in of residents of the county have as well as the likelihood that CERB and other payments were being made to lower income portions of the community. As those ended the income impact was greater.

Change in Median Incomes.

Setting aside the long running wage lag that the Windsor-Essex region has had, the drops in incomes between 2020 and 2021 are significant, -5.7% the highest in Canada of CMAs. Statistics Canada explicitly states that the end of COVID benefits and the lower gain in employment income was the direct reason for these declines.

Low Income

From Statistics Canada:

For CMAs, Québec (10.4%), Victoria (11.5%), Saguenay (11.8%) and Guelph (11.8%) have the lowest low-income rates in 2021. The Windsor (19.3%), Toronto (18.6%) and Winnipeg (17.2%) CMAs had the highest rates of low income in 2021.

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/230809/dq230809b-eng.htm

So we are back to 1 in 5 households living in low income in 2021 in the Essex County with 75% of low income households residing in Windsor at the time of the Census. In 2020 based on LIM the low income rate in the Windsor CMA was 11.3% and for context in the City Windsor it was 15.6%.

The uptick has approximately 85,000 people living in low income in our region it, sees approximately 61,000 in Windsor or about 26% of the population. The data also include the “Average low-income gap ratio” which is the average income of people living in low income expressed as a percentage of the low income threshold. In Windsor it is 36.8%. This means that we average all of the incomes of those living in low income, it is a little over 1/3 of the way to the poverty line. Digging through the data, single parents (particular those with children less than 6) as well as seniors saw outsized jumps in low-income rates in our community.

Income Inequality

One of the quiet and under reported stories from the Census was the fact that Windsor had the 4th highest inequality in Canada (of CMAs). This trend continued with local income inequality rising across the country but also in Windsor between 2020 and 2021.

Conclusions

Windsor continues to fair poorly in relation to it’s peers in relation to raising median incomes, lower low income and higher rates of inequality and this creates risk for our community despite the good economic news that we have received IMO. I would guess that 2022 would see some improvement, as the economy “returned to normal” yet the affordability shocks of the post-COVID years also haven’t truly been captured. These affordability shocks will disproportionately raise the market basket threshold of the Market-Basket Measure driving up that measure of poverty. It is likely LIM will decline slightly back to the pre-COVID levels.

At the same time the economic activity that is being created in our community that is not going to benefit those living in low income. Odds are it is just going to attract new people to the region increasing demand side pressures. Heck the recently announced Temporary Foreign Worker Program Pilot is being called out by economists – here, here as placing downward pressure on wages in communities. That will be a pressure in Essex County!

As for the Nextstar battery plants but as I have written about previously, the LG plant in the US starting wage is $16 per hour (approximate $20 per hour CDN) barely above our regions living wage. You should listen to my conversation with Greg Layson from AutoNews on the EV Transition we dig into some of this.

Windsor faces structural challenges yet we seem to be failing to meet them, this data only reinforces that fact.