Prior to 1992, the conventional way of measuring poverty in Canada was in terms of “relative” deprivation. You are poor, in this sense, if you are less well off than most others in your community regardless of your actual standard of living. In 1989, the Canadian Council on Social Development estimated that about one in four Canadian children was poor using their (relative) poverty line (Ross and Shillington, 1989: 37).

In 1992, The Fraser Institute published Poverty in Canada. That book argued that measuring poverty in a “relative” sense was really an attempt to redefine poverty as inequality. Poverty is generally understood to mean real deprivation and a “lack” of the basic necessities of life. The book set out a methodology to measure poverty in this sense (an approach sometimes referred to as “absolute” poverty) and estimated that less than 10% of Canadian children were poor in the late 1980s. It concluded that the determination of the number of Canadians who could not afford all of the basic necessities was crucial to any understanding of poverty. A follow-up study, also called Poverty in Canada, published in 1994 by The Fraser Institute, argued that both absolute and relative measures should be used in all studies of poverty.