Aboriginal Employment, Income and Education

Archived Topic Box from the 2006 Sixth Annual Benchmark Report

Aboriginal communities in BC and across Canada experience an economic gap with the broader population, with higher levels of unemployment and lower incomes. Educational achievement and enrollment rates also lag those of non-Aboriginal students.

Generally speaking, available data on the Aboriginal population are nowhere near as detailed or as varied as data for the population as a whole. To address this gap, Statistics Canada began collecting Labour Market Survey data for Aboriginal peoples living off-reserve in the four western provinces in 2004. The province of British Columbia sponsored an expansion of this survey to produce more reliable information.

Among the population aged 15-64 in 2004¹, 71.5% of the non-Aboriginal population (ages 15-64) had a job. This compares to 58.0% of Aboriginal peoples to produce a 13.5 percentage point gap in the employment rate. The 2004 unemployment rate for the non-Aboriginal population was 6.6%. The rate for the Aboriginal population was more than 2½ times higher at 17.3%. In 2004, the average hourly wage rate for the non-Aboriginal population was $19.15 which was $2.13 higher than the rate for the Aboriginal population.

Employment & Income Trends²
While the long-standing socioeconomic disparity certainly still exists, it is narrowing. Data from the 1996 and 2001 Censuses reveal improvements between the employment and education related performance of the Aboriginal population and that of BC's Non-Aboriginal population. While comparisons with the general population are illustrative, it is also important to look within Aboriginal communities, and recognize improvements made relative to past performance.

BC's Aboriginal population (ages 15 and older) reported a 62.9% labour force participation rate in 2001, with a 48.7% employment rate and a 22.5% unemployment rate. In contrast, Non-Aboriginal BC residents (ages 15 and older) reported a slightly higher participation rate (65.3%), a significantly higher employment rate (59.6%) and a significantly lower unemployment rate (8.5%). British Columbia's Aboriginal population posted a strong gain on the employment rate (5.4%) between 1996 and 2001 and also posted a gain in the participation rate. The Non-Aboriginal employment and participation rates fell by 0.8% and 1.8%, respectively. The employment rate gap between Aboriginals and Non-Aboriginals fell from 14.3 percentage points (31.0%) in 1996 to 11.3 percentage points (23.2%) in 2001. The participation rate gap fell from 4.6 to 2.4 percentage points (7.5% to 3.9%).

The median income of all British Columbians 15 years of age and over was $22,095, while the province's Aboriginal population registered a median income of $13,242. This significantly lower median income among the Aboriginal community is on average 20.6% derived from government transfers, as compared to 11.8% for the general population.

A similar gap is evident when we consider employment income only. In 1995, on average, the Aboriginal population earned 64.7% as much as the Non-Aboriginal population. This gap narrowed to 67.4% in 2000 on the strength of a 9.9% growth in real earned income among the Aboriginal population and growth of 5.5% in real earned income in the Non-Aboriginal population.

A related factor is the type of work performed by the Aboriginal population. In 2004, non-Aboriginals were almost twice as likely to be working in management and professional occupations than Aboriginals (25.3% vs. 13.3% for a gap of 12.0 percentage points). Thirty-five percent of Aboriginals were in the semi-professional and technical occupations versus 32.3% for non-Aboriginals and over half of all employed Aboriginals were in intermediate and lesser skilled occupations (51.6% vs. 42.3% for the non-Aboriginal population). In 2004, Aboriginal peoples were more than twice as likely as non-Aboriginal peoples to work in the forest sector.

Education
The Aboriginal population is young relative to BC's overall population. Ensuring that this growing number of Aboriginal youth are adequately educated and trained will be a vital step in reducing the community's current employment and income gap relative to the Non-Aboriginal population. Completion rates have been on the increase in BC in recent years for Aboriginals as well as Non-Aboriginals. Between 1999/00 and 2004/05, the Aboriginal population saw an 9 percentage point increase in its' completion rate while the Non-Aboriginal rate improved by 4 percentage points, narrowing the completion rate gap from 39 in 1999/00 to 34 in 2004/05.

Notes: ¹2004 refers to the 12 month average from April 2004 to March 2005. ²The employment and income data in this section are from a different source than those referenced in the section above and cannot be compared directly because of differences in the target population. Data on the Aboriginal population are limited and not updated often. Most of the data in this analysis are from the 1991, 1996 and 2001 Censuses. Contrary to our usual practice of archiving material that can not be updated fully, this analysis remains from previous Reports due to the importance of the subject.