Research Changemaker
ALUMNI NEWS MAGAZINE | Spring/Summer 2021
Daniel Dutton sees his research into deep poverty in New Brunswick as a building block towards a future where there is more understanding and better solutions for the poorest of the poor in our society.
Dr. Dutton, adjunct professor in the sociology department and assistant professor of community health and epidemiology at Dalhousie Medicine New Brunswick, has authored a report for the New Brunswick Institute for Research, Data and Training at UNB, that shines a light on the nature and prevalence of extreme poverty in the province.
Deep poverty in New Brunswick: A description and national comparisons is part of broader research into the social determinants of health and the impact spending on social services has on the lives of the poor.
“The objective of this report was to add clarity to discussions about what it means to live in deep poverty,” says Dr. Dutton. “We are trying to pre-emptively avoid that academic discussion about how you define poverty by just putting the numbers out there and giving people a common language to discuss deep poverty, and also describing the state of affairs of people living under that poverty line.”
New Brunswick has struggled for generations with entrenched poverty. Dr. Dutton says the province traditionally has had low rates of social assistance compared to most other provinces.
However, he says the problem is stubborn. Dr. Dutton’s findings show that those living in deep poverty are more likely to be single, living alone, middle-aged and on social assistance. His report states that having children or being over the age of 65 are both protective of deep poverty due to the additional government transfers that target those households. For instance, receiving Old Age Security at age 65 can immediately lift an individual out of extreme poverty.
“So now we have a target group of people where an intervention would probably alleviate deep poverty and we have a measure of what success would look like, meaning we would know how many people are in deep poverty and if that number goes down, we can call that success.”
“We wanted to shine a light on what these numbers are and ask whether we as a society are willing to say, ‘That’s okay. We are willing to tolerate that many people living in deep poverty,’ or whether we look at that number and say, ‘We should decrease that number’.” Using data from the Canadian Income Survey for the years 2012 to 2016, Dr. Dutton was able to construct a consistent picture of who is living in deep poverty in New Brunswick. In any given year, there are approximately 100,000 people living below the poverty line in New Brunswick, and approximately 18,000 of them live in deep poverty.
Dr. Dutton says that in New Brunswick, income poverty is measured using a number of key indicators, including the Low-Income Measure (LIM) after tax. Deep poverty is measured as having an income at 50 per cent or less of the LIM in a given year.
While recently, the amount was increased and indexed to the cost of living, Dr. Dutton says one government solution to deep poverty would be to raise single social assistance payments to a level above 50 per cent of the LIM.
For reference, he says the 2016 deep poverty threshold was $11,328 for a one-person household.
Dr. Dutton’s past work includes studies on homelessness, a phenomenon he finds fascinating.
“In Canada, we have opportunities to intervene with people who do not have a place to stay,” he says. “That is one of the most fundamental things we can affect.”
“We can all agree that every human being should have access to food and a place to stay, yet people are still experiencing homelessness. I like studying outcomes that are policy amenable, so we could develop rules that eliminate some forms of homelessness if we put the resources into it. It is interesting to me to see how governments make decisions and how those turn into outcomes for individuals living their lives.”
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