Phillip Bowen

The goal of addressing poverty in Canada is complex because of its subjective definition and methods of measurements. However, poverty and social inequality affect many Canadians in their material, social, and psychological wellbeing. Toronto, which is Canada’s largest urban area and financial capital, has also been identified as the nation’s capital of income inequality. Many people in Toronto deal with a lack of income, adequate and affordable housing, education, employment, access to social services, and many other factors. Therefore, poverty has multiple dimensions and should be analyzed using multi-disciplinary approaches. This study locates and analyzes the areas within the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA) that have high concentrations of people in multidimensional poverty from the year 2001 to 2016 using k-means cluster analysis. Poverty indices are also created for small geographic areas with the weighted linear combination model in order to identify which areas have significantly increased or decreased in poverty during the same 15-year period. The results show that a large and increasing amount of people are living in poverty in the Toronto CMA, however this trend is not universal in the CMA. The inner suburbs consistently had the highest concentrations of poverty, while poverty decreased significantly in the inner core and increased rapidly in the outer suburbs. Policy recommendations are provided along with the results to help multiple levels of government, organizations in the public and private sector, and researchers to achieve the goal of alleviating poverty in the Toronto CMA.