Single residents in Outaouais top Quebec's poverty threshold

Tashi Farmilo

A person living alone in Gatineau needs to bring home more than $43,000 after tax every year just to escape poverty. That is the finding of a major new study released April 30 by the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS), and it makes Gatineau the most expensive city in Quebec for a single person, more costly even than Montreal.

That number is not a comfortable salary. It is the bare minimum needed to afford decent food, adequate housing, a way to get around, clothing, basic health care, and a modest cushion for emergencies. It leaves little room for anything else. Fall below it, and by the institute's measure, a person is living in poverty.

Most workers in the Outaouais are falling well short of it.

Someone working full time at Quebec's minimum wage, which rises to $16.60 an hour on May 1, takes home roughly $27,600 a year after tax. That is about $15,000 less than what IRIS says a single person in Gatineau needs to get by. Closing that gap would require nearly doubling the minimum wage. IRIS calculates that a single person needs to earn around $30 an hour, working full time, just to reach the poverty exit line.

Housing is the single biggest reason Gatineau ranks so high. Rent for a single person now costs an estimated $20,745 per year, the steepest of any city in the study, edging out even Montreal. Across all seven cities examined, rents rose an average of 10.9% over the past year, nearly double the 5.9% increase the Administrative Housing Tribunal recommended. This is the third year in a row that actual increases have far outpaced official guidance.

For families, the situation is harder still. A single parent raising one preschool-age child in Gatineau needs just under $56,000 a year to stay out of poverty. A two-parent household with two young children needs $84,565. Those are after-tax figures, meaning the gross income required is considerably higher.

One of the more striking findings in this year's report involves Montreal and Sept-Îles, two cities that have arrived, for the first time, at nearly the same living income for a family of four: $88,812 in Montreal and $88,266 in Sept-Îles. They get there by opposite paths. Montreal's crushing housing costs add nearly $10,000 a year compared to Sept-Îles. Sept-Îles, with no meaningful public transit, requires two cars per household, adding nearly $9,000 in transportation costs. The result is a near-tie between a dense urban centre and a remote northern city, for entirely different reasons.

At the affordable end of the scale, Trois-Rivières remains the least expensive city in the study, with a living income of just over $33,000 for a single person, largely because of its low-cost transit network. Even so, rents there climbed 15% in the past year alone.

This year's report also accounts for rising fuel prices tied to the war in Iran, applying a 15% surcharge to fuel costs based on the pattern seen after the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, when pump prices jumped more than 30% before slowly coming back down.

The hardest picture in the report is reserved for those with the least. A senior living on Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement has a disposable income of about $25,400, just below the federal poverty threshold, and that threshold does not even include uninsured medical costs that older people disproportionately face. Someone on basic social assistance receives $12,377, roughly 30 cents for every dollar the living income requires.

The report does not argue that these are obscure policy problems. It argues that they are the daily reality of a very large number of people, many of them working, many of them doing everything that is conventionally expected, and still not making it to the other side of the poverty line.