The May instalment looked at the two approaches to defining poverty and Statistics Canada's position on the issue. Canada has no official poverty line. The concept of poverty is very important.
Poverty is a strong term.
It connotes a sense of real deprivation. First, LICO is far too complex to be a useful poverty line. Most people, including academics, don't have the foggiest notion of how LICO is constructed and how it is rebased. This leads to frequent misinterpretations in the media and in some policy documents. Some concepts are intrinsically complex and require, of necessity, indirect and convoluted measurement.