Low Income Explorer

This map colours each region by the percentage of people in poverty by the LIM-AT or LICO-AT measure by age group in 2020/2021, depending on which metric is selected. For an explanation of how these measures are computed see the section at the bottom. We grey out areas with fewer than 50 people as statistical rounding can severely distort the results. For either measure, poverty status is determined based on income, excluding non-regular income like capital gains or lump sum RRSP withdrawals. 2020 income data is impacted by COVID job and employment reductions as well as COVID related government transfers, which had the net effect of reducing the prevalence of low income populations. This makes it difficult to infer how the geography of low income might break down in other years. Compare this to the corresponding map from 2015/2016. As LIM-AT is tied to the median income, it is really more a measure of income inequality than of poverty. LICO-AT is an expenditure-based metric (adjusted to inflation). Cutoffs LIM-AT LIM-AT is a relative income measure, it captures how many people live below 50% of the adjusted median after-tax household income. It depends on the (square root of) the household size, below is a list with explicit income cutoffs: 1 person: 26,503 2 persons: 37,480 3 persons: 45,904 4 persons: 53,005 5 persons: 59,261 6 persons: 64,918 7 persons: 70,119 LICO-AT LICO is based on expenditure, it captures people or families that are expected to spend 20 percentage points or more of their after-tax income than average on food, shelter and clothing. The income cutoffs depend on the size of the economic region the people live in as detailed in the table below. Economic family size Size of area of residence Rural area Small population centres with less than 30,000 persons Medium population centres with a population between 30,000 and 99,999 persons Large urban population centres Population between 100,000 and 499,999 persons Population 500,000 persons or more Person not in an economic family 14,431 16,515 18,423 18,656 22,060 2 persons 17,564 20,101 22,424 22,706 26,849 3 persons 21,871 25,029 27,922 28,274 33,433 4 persons 27,284 31,226 34,836 35,274 41,710 5 persons 31,070 35,558 39,668 40,167 47,495 6 persons 34,457 39,435 43,993 44,546 52,673 7 or more persons 37,845 43,312 48,317 48,925 57,852 Source: Statistics Canada. Table 11-10-0195-01  Low income cut-offs (LICOs) before and after tax by community size and family size, in constant dollars .

Author: CensusMapper Team

Dataset: CA21