More than one in 10 Canadians below the poverty line as incomes slip: StatCan

Signage marks the Statistics Canada offices in Ottawa on July 21, 2010. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick)

More than one in 10 Canadians are living below the poverty line, according to the latest data from Statistics Canada. While Canada’s 11 per cent poverty rate in 2024 is largely unchanged from 11.1 per cent in 2023, it is well above the seven per cent poverty rate reported in 2020.

In the same period, the median after-tax income for Canadian families and unattached individuals – those living alone or with people they’re unrelated to such as roommates – dropped by nearly $2,000 from $77,400 in 2020 to $75,500 in 2024, after adjusting for inflation.

4.5M Canadians below poverty line

Statistics Canada’s poverty line is based on the ability to afford basic goods and services like food and housing. It also varies depending on household size and geography.

For a family with two adults and two children, that income threshold in 2024 ranged from a low of $45,860 in areas of Quebec with a populations of 30,000 to 99,000 to a high of $116,211 for residents of Nunavut’s capital, Iqaluit. In large Canadian cities, the 2024 threshold stood at $61,763 for Toronto, $49,244 for Montreal, $62,842 for Vancouver and $57,840 for Calgary.

According to a new Statistics Canada report, approximately 4.5 million Canadians lived below the poverty line in 2024.

Driven by a higher cost of living in Northern Canada, the largest poverty rate in 2024 was recorded in Nunavut at 31.7 per cent, followed by British Columbia at 13 per cent and Ontario at 12.5 per cent. Quebec continued to have the lowest poverty rate in 2024 at seven per cent, which was down 0.7 percentage points from 2023.

The poverty rate in 2024 was also higher than the national average for racialized groups (15.5 per cent), those with disabilities (12.6 per cent) and Indigenous people (18.1 per cent) aged 15 years and older. For seniors aged 65 years and older, the 2024 poverty rate was down 0.5 percentage points to 5.4 per cent.

In 2024 approximately 9.8 million Canadians, or about 24 per cent of the population, reported that their households experienced some form of food insecurity, which was down by just over 360,000 people from 2023.

After-tax income down from 2020

The median after-tax income for Canadian families and unattached individuals in 2024 was $75,500, which was up $400 from the previous year but down from $77,400 in 2020.

The slight increase in 2024 was largely driven by the after-tax income of Canadian families, which was up 1.8 per cent in 2024 to $108,900. The median for unattached individuals, meanwhile, stood at $41,000 in 2024, which was virtually unchanged since the precious year.

Families and unattached individuals in the territories had the highest median after-tax income in Canada in 2024, led by those in the Northwest Territories ($116,100), Nunavut ($109,600) and Yukon ($89,300).

In terms of median income, the provinces were led by Alberta ($85,300) and Ontario ($79,500), while the lowest median incomes were recorded in Nova Scotia ($64,200), New Brunswick ($65,100) and Prince Edward Island ($65,900).