On November 20 Jezebel posted an article with the headline “You Gotta See These ‘Regular’ Women Looking Sexy-as-Hell in Lingerie” The article shared that customers of the plus size lingerie line Curvy Girl were posting pictures of themselves in the garments (as opposed to paid models). The first comment, echoed by many to follow, was: “So, obese now equals normal. Oh America…”

Melissa A. Fabello wrote about thin privilege for Everyday Feminism, as a person who has never experienced fat discrimination, “I have never had someone dismiss me as a dating prospect based on my body type, nor had someone scoff, openly, while watching me eat French fries in public.” Fabello makes a point  that though thinner women can hate their bodies, they do not feel oppression because of them the way larger women would—thin clothing sizes are available, food choices aren’t judged, health isn’t questioned.

I applaud her point, but I’m not sure this is true: What about the little girl at the beginning of the documentary Miss Representation, who was crying that because she is thin people say she has an eating disorder? It’s an endless cycle, and all body shaming really accomplishes is turning women against each other.  Time is spent hating our own bodies, hating others, trying to figure out what is normal— then how we can surpass normal. That time should be spend being engaged in making the big political decisions that affect us. The beauty industry thrives on the money we spend out of hate. Shame that manipulation, not the female body.

A former This intern, Hillary Di Menna writes Gender Block every week and maintains an online feminist resource directory, FIRE- Feminist Internet Resource Exchange.

Many First Nations citizens see their tax-exempt status as a function of the treaties and other legal arrangements with the Crown, or as partial compensation for the resources taken from the lands. They believe that imposing an income tax would be not only unfair, but unconstitutional.

Canada’s courts have upheld tax exemptions as a means to preserve the collective rights of First Nations, ensuring that the Crown does not attempt to erode the reserve land base through taxation.

The federal government has made little effort to explain the policy to Canadians, allowing an unhealthy resentment to grow. There has been little counterpoint to the pressure from the right on this issue. Given the public confusion, it seems a worthwhile exercise to actually do the math and see what light it sheds on the matter.

First, it helps to be specific about whom we are talking. Income is only exempt from tax when earned by status Indians working on reserves. The 2006 census identified fewer than 700,000 people who have a North American Indian identity. This number includes about 133,000 who are non-status Indians and slightly more than 565,000 status Indians who might be exempted from paying income tax, if they earned income on-reserve. Bearing in mind that half of Aboriginal people are under 20, more than 40 per cent of status Indians live off-reserve, and Aboriginal people have an unemployment rate more than twice the national average, it is not surprising that the number of people exempted from paying taxes is actually quite small. In fact, the most recent figures tell us that the number of First Nations citizens living on reserves who had employment or self-employment income was only 103,885.

Unfortunately, Statistics Canada has not made average income numbers for on-reserve employment freely available—which would have allowed for a more precise calculation—but we do know that the median income is $13,637. This allows us to estimate the total employment and self-employment income earned on-reserve as somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.4 billion.

So what is the total of tax revenues lost to Canada as a result of the exemption?

The federal income tax rate for those earning less than $41,544 is 15 percent. Provincial tax rates vary, but adding them into the calculation puts the tax rate somewhere between 20 and 25 percent across the country. The basic personal deduction is $10,382, which would leave just over $4,000 in taxable income from the median, even with no other deductions. On that amount, one would owe between $800 and $1,000. Multiplying that back out against the 103,885 earners, the exemption amounts to between $84 million and $104 million in foregone revenues.

If all of those earning income on-reserve actually qualify for the exemption, the Receiver General is collecting approximately $100 million less in taxes as a result.

It is possible to quibble with the figures here. I have used the most recent census figures from 2006 with the 2010 tax rates and using the median income level rather than the average leads to a lower total. Nonetheless, even the highest mark-ups on all of this data wouldn’t put the lost revenue higher than $120 million.

That number is nothing to sneeze at, of course. But in the context of a 2010 budget of more than $261 billion, it’s also not going to make or break the federal government. Nor does it seem disproportional or unfair, when looked at in context. By way of comparison, there are $1.4 billion in annual subsidies for oil and gas companies, equivalent to the total income earned on-reserve, and $120 million in subsidies for ethanol production, equivalent to the highest estimation of revenues lost to the Canadian government through the income tax exemption.

More to the point, the tax exemption in no way compensates for shortfalls in funding to First Nations. The provinces spend more than 20 percent more on children than the federal government does on First Nations children, whether those kids are in school or under child welfare services care. The disadvantage to First Nations children from these two policies alone amounts to far more than the foregone tax revenues, and there are dozens of other examples.

Taxes pay for public services like roads and water, and First Nations communities are notoriously under-serviced. A 2005 study by the Assembly of First Nations found that, per capita federal funding for First Nations citizens is $7,200. That’s far lower than the amount that the government spends on the population in general. In Ottawa, for instance, the combined per capita spending by all three levels of government totalled $14,900, more than double the amount being spent on-reserve.

Given the amount of energy certain groups have spent decrying this tax exemption, one might have expected them to conduct an analysis of this nature. The fact that they haven’t might suggest that there is another agenda at work in their complaints.

The balance of advantage is clear when the tax exemption is compared to the lack of services on-reserve. To whom is the system unfair when the numbers are so grossly tilted the other way? And why focus on this issue when there is so much else that needs to be done?

Recalling the views of the Supreme Court, if First Nations land can be eroded through tax policy, it is an efficient way to end communal land ownership in Canada. Once that is accomplished, First Nations can be fully assimilated into the mainstream and any resources on or near their lands can be exploited without the inconvenience of consultation or compensation. Complaining about tax policy is only one of many ways in which the right wing in Canada is seeking to achieve that goal.

Consider this: the population growth of racialized or non-white groups continues to outpace that of white Canadians. This has created a shift in the demographic balance of the Canadian mosaic, with our population on its way to becoming a “minority majority.”

According to Statistics Canada, by 2031, over 70 percent of Canadians living in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver will be from a visible minority or racialized group. Already, almost half the population in the Greater Toronto Area is a visible minority. Yet we are not seeing an equivalent shift in the halls of power: in business and in government, visible minorities—particularly African-Canadians—still represent a small fraction of the decision-makers relative to their overall population.

In April, a report by the Law Society of Upper Canada looked at the legal profession relative to others and made the following observations: “In Ontario in 2006, members of a visible minority accounted for 30.7 percent of all physicians, 31.7 percent of engineers, 17.6 percent of academics and 11.8 percent of high-level managers, compared to 11.5 percent of lawyers.”

A recently released study, entitled “DiverseCity Counts: A Snapshot of Diverse Leadership in the Greater Toronto Area,” showed that while some sectors are doing better at reflecting the general makeup of the population, visible minorities are underrepresented in leadership positions. Today, visible minorities comprise 49.5 percent of the population, but only 14 percent of senior-level leaders.

The implications of this imbalance will only become more significant as the population continues to shift. Canada must demonstrate the potential of harnessing the best of all of our peoples. Diversity in the leadership of our institutions matters. Far from being a form of tokenism, a significant increase in the number and diversity of visible minorities at all levels of leadership is essential to Canada’s competitiveness.

In May, Governor General Michaëlle Jean addressed business, academic, and socialsector leaders in a speech to the Canadian Club. She told the audience that “saying yes to diversity is saying yes to modernity, to opportunity, and to the very future of our country.” There is an economic case for embracing diversity: to create a “brain gain” by recruiting, hiring, mentoring, developing, and retaining a qualified and diverse workforce. Imagine the dividends for Canada’s global competitiveness when all its citizens have an equal opportunity to lead, to innovate, and to contribute to our social, economic, cultural, and political landscape.

The DiverseCity study also found that visible minorities are underrepresented in the media, accounting for only 19 percent of appearances by broadcasters, reporters, print columnists, subject experts, and commentators. Diversity in media leadership and representation of visible minorities is improving incrementally, but larger gains are needed. Why do we not see or hear from more visible minorities in daily coverage? How long must we wait for media outlets to do the research and start assigning these stories?

One initiative to improve the coverage of racialized minorities is DiverseCity Voices, a new electronic database of experts who are also visible minorities. Journalists can turn to the website to find underrepresented leaders who are able to provide commentary and opinion on current affairs.

Since joining the website, I have appeared in a variety of local and national print and radio, television, broadcast, and social media outlets, providing my opinions on subjects ranging from the Olympic Games, the G20 summit, and Africentric Schools. I’ve received more calls from journalists looking for comment, and that’s important to me. Young people become what they see, and role models of all backgrounds need to be seen and heard.

Sociologist John Porter’s Vertical Mosaic, published in 1965, remains the touchstone for a deeper understanding of the structure of Canadian society. Porter’s findings portrayed Canada as a hierarchical racial pecking order, with attendant consequences for social mobility, access to power, and economic success. In the Canadian mosaic, whites were (and still are) the dominant culture at the top of the heap. Fifty years on, Porter’s study still rings depressingly true. But there is reason to be optimistic.

With a conscious effort to create and sustain diversity in all our institutions, it is possible that Canada’s vertical mosaic will be replaced by one that is inclusive, linear, and beneficial to us all—no matter where we come from or the colour of our skin.

Computer model of a Bisphenol-A molecule.

Canadians – a bunch of walking, talking BPA vessels? Apparently so. Statistics Canada recently released results from their first nationwide look into bisphenol A, and the results aren’t pretty.

According to a Globe and Mail report on the stats, 91 per cent of Canadians tested show some sort of BPA exposure, and teenagers carry most of the brunt, with their bodies often containing up to 30 per cent more BPA than the rest of the population.

When the first round of BPA warnings surfaced years ago, it looked like Canada would take a stand that could lead to the ingredient being declared a toxic chemical. And since then, while that declaration has stalled, the levels of BPA found in our bodies continues to rise.

It can seem like fear mongering, but BPA really is in a shocking amount of everyday products. CDs, tin can liners, and plastic water bottles all contain BPA. Most people get a steady BPA diet through food packaging. The big deal is that the chemical mimics estrogen — the average level of BPA in our bodies is actually close to 1,000 times the normal level of naturally occurring estrogen.

Of course, some scientists, and those who are involved in the BPA industry, say that just because something is in our body, doesn’t mean it’s causing harm. And it’s true that while we can speculate on what this added BPA might mean for us, we don’t know for a fact if it causes health problems.

But it’s concerning the ease with which we let synthetic products become a part of our diet with very few restrictions. The argument that it’s probably not causing any harm to our bodies is ridiculous — seeing as how BPA’s not a naturally occurring ingredient in our food system, we shouldn’t be ingesting it.

It’s interesting that the media also recently wondered why puberty continues to hit our adolescents earlier and earlier. If what we’re putting into our bodies as fuel isn’t natural, our bodies won’t act that way either. (Of course it hasn’t been proved if there are any links between chemicals like BPA and early puberty, though the New York Times article linked above does mention it briefly.)

The pessimist in me wonders if it’s too little too late now. We’ve been exposed to products with BPA so long that all the studies are doing is proving that our bodies are at the whim of packaging manufacturers. This is testing that shoud have been done years ago, but it’s only now that we’ll get a peek at what’s happening to us.

But if I’ve been reluctant to argue this at length, it’s because StatsCan has never done much to earn my goodwill. As a journalist interested in statistics, I have come to expect frustration and disappointment when dealing with StatsCan. That’s why I hope that we can take this opportunity to talk about how it could be better—rather than fighting blindly for the status quo.

The most serious problem with Canada’s data authority is access to data, or more accurately, the lack thereof. And all of the restrictions on access, going back many years, have been justified by some extremely strange concerns around privacy. Sound familiar?

On Statistics Canada’s website, you’ll find a variety of publicly-available summary statistics. If you’re willing to pay a more or less reasonable fee, you can buy access to other simple time series—the unemployment rate going back several decades, for example. But while subject- and neighbourhood-level summaries (or “metadata”) can be useful in some contexts, the most valuable census product is “microdata”—individual-level results, coded and cleaned up so that anyone with statistical software can create their own metadata or run regressions.

A microdata record for a given household can contain a lot of personal information. But I’ve been up to my elbows in U.S. Census microdata, analyzing some of the most sensitive information it contains—right down to sexual orientation and income—and I’m confident asserting that nobody has ever recognized themselves or a neighbour in a census record.

That’s because when it’s creating public-use microdata, the U.S. Census Bureau modifies records in specific ways that further obscure people’s identities without affecting researchers’ analysis. They only provide broad location information, for example. As a result, public-use records are specific enough to be useful, but not refined enough to be identifiable.

That, presumably, is why the U.S. government is comfortable posting large samples from its public-use microdata on the ungated web. Anyone can download detailed census microdata for 14 million Americans, and even more exhaustive American Community Survey and General Social Survey data.

Public use microdata samples exist in Canada as well, but you have to be affiliated with an approved university to access them, and the data is substantially degraded in the name of privacy. There is a lot that you can’t do with the Canadian data, because so many useful variables aren’t included, and because 2.7% of the Canadian population is a pretty small sample if you’re already researching a tiny minority, like, say, lesbian families. That’s how, as an undergraduate, I ended up studying the American census even though I could download Canadian microdata.

Lucky for academics, if not anyone else, StatsCan does provide more detailed microdata at a small number of physical locations, the Research Data Centres. Applying for access to the centres is a Byzantine process, only open to students and academics. (Today, as a journalist, I wouldn’t even be considered.)
Researchers must prepare a lengthy proposal for StatsCan, laying out their objectives, and describing and justifying their methodology. Proposals must include information about the accomplishments of the applicants, including “identifiable contributions made by the applicants to the advancement, development and transmission of knowledge related to the disciplines supported by” the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

If approved, researchers have to go through a security screening process and sign a contract with StatsCan. The process can take years, which means that only academics prepared to devote their life to social research ever have access to the RDCs. But a form that asks how many bedrooms you have is fascist, right?

Even government employees have to jump through hoops to access StatsCan’s most useful data: all requests are assessed by a provincial or territorial representative on the Federal-Provincial-Territorial Consultative Council on Statistical Policy:

The request for access is submitted to the Program Manager of Statistics Canada’s Research Data Centre Program who coordinates a review of the proposal by Statistics Canada subject matter experts. The review is completed within 10 working days. If it is determined that Statistics Canada can quickly and efficiently carry out the work, the Departmental representative will be informed of this and of the associated cost to complete the work. However, if Statistics Canada does not have the resources to complete the work quickly and efficiently, the provincial/territorial employee identified is eligible to become a “deemed” Statistics Canada employee, under Section 10 of the Statistics Act, for purposes of completing the work.

Now that’s small government at work.

The upshot of all this is that journalists, bloggers, businesspeople, students, and anyone else with a copy of SPSS and a dream ends up studying the United States rather than Canada. Consciously or not, that influences Canadian identity. It drastically reduces the rewards that we could reap in return for all of the money and time spent administering the census.

It’s also colossally unfair. Sure, the long form means giving up some privacy, and yeah, it’s a hassle. But I don’t need much in return—I just want the right to access the results myself, without getting a PhD and then staring down StatsCan’s bureaucracy. I also want smart people everywhere—not just a few academics—to be able to refine that data gold mine into information that can improve my life. If the underfunded, under-siege U.S. federal government can do it, then surely Ottawa can try.

It's time to rid our neighbourhoods of the green menace. Creative Commons photo by Robert S. Donovan.

From the first breath of spring, we North Americans dream of an expanse of green grass, a vast carpet that tickles our skin and stains our sundresses on which we can spend long, lazy days barbecuing and reading summer fiction. But our love affair with the lawn has got to stop.

Even pesticide-free, grass is an environmental menace. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates the footprint of fertilizing an acre of lawn equals a 700-kilometre car trip, and Statistics Canada found that gas-powered lawnmowers—which two-thirds of Canadians with lawns own—contribute to smog as much as driving from Saskatoon to Montreal. Kentucky bluegrass, which actually has its roots, so to speak, in Europe and the Middle East, is so ill-suited to our climate that it requires constant water and food (causing irate and impassioned CBC Radio listeners to vote it Canada’s worst weed). But lawns stretch across 32 million acres of the U.S., occupying more space than wheat, corn or tobacco. (There are no comparable numbers collected from Canada.) Who knew so much green space could be such bad news?

Edible Estates: Attack on the Front Lawn (Metropolis Books, 2008), a project by artist and environmental designer Fritz Haeg, documents one solution to our yard woes. He turned lawns into farms, growing “edible landscapes” in three sites in the U.S. and one in England. Destroying the uniform lawns, to Haeg, is more than ecological: it’s revolutionary. “The monoculture … covering our neighbourhoods from coast to coast,” he writes, “celebrates puritanical homogeneity and mindless conformity.” Like Joni Mitchell’s hissing summer lawns, which represented control and repression in unhappy suburban marriage, Haeg’s work dismantles the way the lawn “divides and isolates us.”

Haeg’s projects defied that isolation, with communities collaborating on the antilawn designs. But for those of us with small green squares, going lawn-free doesn’t have to be complicated. The answers are easy to implement. Put down mulch so water stays in the soil. Compost and collect rainwater. Plant native species in abundant diversity: they won’t need much water and they’ll handle pests better (start with Evergreen’s native plant database). Plant trees: they are still the best carbon sinks we have. Get out your shovel, put on some sunscreen and let it grow, lawn-free, from there.

What's the real value of a university education? The answer's more complicated than you might think. Illustration by Graham F. Scott.

Welcome to Margin of Error. Each month, I will be picking apart some number or statistical problem in the news or on my mind. I will draw on my own modest knowledge of econometrics — the statistics of economics, lately being applied to all kinds of problems — and interview the occasional expert. If you spot a questionable number that you’d like me to pick apart, send a tip to marginoferror (at) this (dot) org.

Thanks to midterms, university students across the country are too busy to read this. That’s probably just as well, because I’m here to share a story that might upset them — the degrees they are cramming for probably aren’t worth as much as they think.

It’s no secret that people with university degrees, on average, make more money. If you’re interested in how much more, you might look up some census data, take the average wages for someone with a degree, and subtract the average wages of someone without a degree.

But if you are following along on the back of an envelope — aren’t you proactive! — I hope that you won’t assume that you’ve figured out the effect of a university degree on income. It doesn’t matter how many times we say that correlation does not imply causation — reporters everywhere keep falling down the rabbit hole. And it’s hard to blame them, with oversimplified press releases like this coming out of Statistics Canada.

To understand what is wrong with this simple calculation, it helps to imagine an ideal experiment that could tell us how much going to university raises one’s income. Let’s say we could take a large group of high school graduates, and randomly assign half of them to complete university. Travelling several decades into the future, we would ask them about their income, and compare the two groups.

The difference between doing this and using census data is the random assignment. In real life, the choice to attend university is far from random. It might have to do with your ability to pay tuition, parents’ education, work ethic, or intelligence. If students who are likely to make more money anyway are also more likely to go to university, then we cannot tell what we are measuring – the initial advantage that secures a place in university, or the impact of the university education itself.

Luckily, there are some alternatives to this impossible experiment. Using statistics, we can control for just about anything that we can observe. Tons of research has been done on education and income. Close to home, a paper published in August in the Canadian Journal of Economics, by Vincenzo Caponi and Miana Plesca, focused on data from Statistic Canada’s 1994 General Social Survey. (The official version is gated, but a draft is available for free.) This paper looks at 3,274 people, all high school grads aged 17-65, not students, and employed in 1994.

If we simply look at averages, in this survey, men with university degrees made 59 per cent more per hour than men with only high school diplomas. For women, the gap was 50 per cent. But for all the reasons we’ve discussed, the authors do not do this — they use control variables. With basic controls — immigration status, province, marital status, education, work experience, etc. — the university wage premium drops to about 42 per cent for both genders.

Then the authors use a fancy procedure called propensity score matching. This lets them compare workers with different levels of education that nonetheless have a similar background, taking into account, among other things, parents’ education and number of siblings. With matching, the university wage premium drops further, to about 35 per cent for men and 39 per cent for women.

Unfortunately, there is a bigger problem. What if university students posses some inherent intelligence and motivation — let’s call it ability — that is difficult to measure? Caponi and Plesca argue that ability is inherited, so they control for it by using parents’ education. Most studies from the US control for ability by using test scores. But it is hard to believe we could ever control for, for example, someone’s drive to land a high-paying job. If the parts of ability that are impossible to measure also help you get into university, than we’re still overestimating the impact of university.

That isn’t to say that a degree is useless. First of all, the premium is still large, even with controls, so we can guess that in a perfect experiment it would not disappear. University might also benefit students in ways that do not affect income. Increasing the number of university graduates in Canada might be good for our culture or economic growth.

But there’s something to be learned here, whether you are studying for midterms or not. All sorts of things can cause two numbers to be correlated. When you hear an argument about causality, you should always think about what has been left out.

* December 2008 StatsCan figures. These have likely risen since then.

While at first glance it might look like the federal government is playing favourites, with benefits starting earlier and lasting longer in Newfoundland and Labrador, these regional inequalities actually make a lot of sense.

Explains Julie Hahn from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada: “When a region’s unemployment rate increases, the entrance requirement is relaxed and the benefit duration is extended to allow more time for a successful job match.”

This is why Newfoundland and Labrador, with unemployment rates nearly five times Edmonton’s, sees their residents eligible for EI at the minimum number of 420 hours, while Edmontonians need to work the maximum 700 hours.

So while the schemes aren’t equal, they are designed to be fair. If only last year’s EI surplus, which topped more than $50 billion, was handled with such care. That money, which could have been used to support laid-off manufacturing workers, was instead funnelled into the government’s general revenues, where it helped pay off the national debt — and cover corporate tax cuts.

It’s true in some circles that taking an active interest in one’s finances is considered anathema to being truly left-leaning, that it’s a distasteful, bourgeois hobby. And if you’re making millions off investments in tobacco companies and weapons manufacturers, it probably is. But that isn’t always the case. The flipside of that argument is that taking control of one’s finances is the ultimate expression of self-determination.

Learning about personal finance should be of most interest to those who don’t have much of it—and in that category we can safely include the many people who work for low-paying NGOs, non-profits and charities. After all, do you think Belinda Stronach reads personal finance magazines? Hardly—she can pay someone to manage her money for her, whereas the rest of us need to learn to do it ourselves.

It’s easy to understand why many lefties find personal finance literature so odious, as much of it is written with the same underlying conservative philosophy—that you need to master your finances in order to pay the least amount of tax possible. Most lefties naturally, and rightfully, disagree with such a position. As supporters of a social welfare state, we realize that if we didn’t pay taxes there would be no such thing as universal health care.

My take is a little different: I think you should bone up on personal finance in order to pay the least amount of money possible to the multinational corporations that control your life. According to the latest information from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian family carries a rather astounding $12,300 in credit card and “other” debts, to say nothing of what we owe on mortgages ($82,800), student loans ($10,400), lines of credit ($13,500) and car loans ($11,200). That means big bucks in interest payments for banks and credit card companies. But why are so many of us giving them more money than we have to?

What’s your interest in keeping the big banks profitable, the same ones that shutter small-town branches they deem not profitable enough and charge increasingly higher service fees for fewer services? Or what about credit card companies that charge interest rates that are more than 15 percent higher than the Bank of Canada’s prime lending rate and insist on giving consumers more credit to spend than they can ever hope to pay off? Surely if the money you shell out in unnecessary interest payments stayed in your hands, you could find better ways to spend it than bolstering the bottom line of these multinational money-making machines.

The same thinking applies to investing. Yes, most of the literature you’ll find is couched in terms of making RRSP contributions as a way to reduce your so-called tax burden. But try to look past that. Because if you don’t learn how to invest properly, and simply pour money into an ethical fund, you may end up more philosophically compromised than if you’d just bought a regular mutual fund. The fund manager’s idea of what is ethical may be quite different from yours. If you don’t learn what to look for, you won’t know what your money supports.