Income Poverty Among Aboriginal Families with Children: Estimates from the 1986 Census

Abstract

This paper brings together information from the 1986 Census of Population and Dwellings and the 1986 Income Distribution Survey to estimate poverty rates for Aboriginal families and other families. It also describes the factors associated with income poverty among Aboriginal families. The analysis in this paper is primarily descriptive and is limited to measuring income poverty using the Henderson poverty line. The main objective is to provide the first estimates of poverty among Aboriginal families with children since the early 1970s. The results confirm that in 1986, the common perception that income poverty rates are much higher among the Aboriginal population than among the non-Aboriginal population, although the gap is less dramatic for sole parent families than it is for two parent families. The major factor associated with this poverty is joblessness, with over half of all Aboriginal families with children having no employed adults. However, poverty is still higher among those Aboriginal families with children in which there is at least one employed adult than it is among comparable non-Aboriginal families with children