Thunder Bay has seen a number of
deteriorating social indicators over the last few years which include rising homicide rates, tragic deaths of indigenous people and increasing use of foodbanks. In looking at the causes of what
appear to be increased poverty and violence, one might consider that these
trends are the result of rising income inequality. Income inequality in both Canada and the
United States has been rising over the last few decades and researchers have
been drawing links between health status and economic inequality as well as the
role of inequality in fostering environments conducive to crime and violence.
We had a talk last week at Lakehead
University from Martin Daly whose book Killing the Competition makes the case
that most homicides are the result of competition between males over goods that are
distributed inequitably. In other words, economic inequality drives the homicide rate and all things given one would expect more unequal societies to have higher crime and homicide rates. Of course, this
raises the question as to what income inequality has been like in Thunder Bay
over the last few years and whether it too has trended up.
Needless to say, information on income
inequality at a CMA level is not easy to obtain or construct. However, there is tax filer data available
from Statistics Canada obtained from Revenue Canada and it is possible to
obtain annual data on median total tax filer incomes for the top 1 percent as
well as the bottom 50 percent and construct a ratio. One can construct a simple
dispersion or inequality measure by taking the ratio of the median income of
the top 1 percent to the median income of the bottom 50 percent on the tax filer
total income distribution. If this ratio
goes up over time, it implies increasing income inequality while if it goes
down it implies decreasing inequality.
The figure below plots this measure of income
inequality for the period 1982 to 2015 for Thunder Bay as well as Greater
Sudbury and Ontario. The results are
intriguing. In 1982, the median total
income of the top 1 percent of tax filers in Thunder Bay was 11.9 times that of
the median for the bottom 50 percent - $78,200 versus $6,600. By 2015, the ratio was 12.34 - $236,900
versus $19,200. While income inequality in Thunder Bay has gone up somewhat
over time, much of the increase was actually between 1982 and 2001 when the
ratio rose from 11.9 to 14.2 and has actually moderated since.
Given that homicide rates in Thunder Bay
trended downwards from the early 1980s to 2007 and surged since 2007, there
does not seem to be much correlation here.
Moreover, Figure 1 also plots the same inequality measure for Greater
Sudbury as well as Ontario as a whole.
Since the late 1990s, Greater Sudbury has actually been more unequal
with respect to this inequality measure than Thunder Bay and yet its homicide
rate is now lower. As well, both Thunder
Bay and Sudbury have a much more equal distribution of tax filer income than
Ontario as a whole which saw its ratio rise from 15.3 in 1982 to peak at 24.9
in 2006 before declining to 22.2 in 2015.
So whatever is disturbing the social fabric
of Thunder Bay, income inequality does not appear to be the obvious culprit.
