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One group whose post-tax-and-transfer poverty rate hasn’t changed much is “non-elderly persons not in an economic family.” It was 30.8 per cent in 1976 and 29.5 per cent in 2017. Such people were just 15 per cent of all those who didn’t make the LICO cut in 1976. But they’re now 42 per cent of people living below LICO. If you combine them with “elderly persons not in an economic family,” they get you up to almost half of all the Canadians who don’t make the LICO cut.

Half is obviously a big number. But how do these people compare to the population as a whole? They are 1.2 million people among the almost 36 million covered by these data in 2017. That’s up a lot from 1976, when they were just 458,000 people. “Their numbers have almost tripled!”, you could say if you wanted to be dramatic about it. But they’re still just three-and-a-third per cent of the population, or one in 30.

There’s also a question about how many are permanently stuck below the LICO. Anecdote is not the singular of data but I am very familiar with two sub-LICO young people, just starting out on their careers, who are currently scratching by at near minimum wage but who seem likely (their mother and I certainly hope!) to work their way to higher incomes.

But even if the 1.2 million were all stuck below LICO for good, they are one in 30 among us. Is the best way of helping them really a new universal basic income that would apply to the other 29 out of 30 of us, as well?

Our sometimes apparently patchwork system of grants and assistance has already done well at filling income gaps in the past, first for seniors, then for kids of single moms. It’s not clear the remaining gaps are so wide we need an economy-wide grout like a guaranteed income to fill them.