The latest and most authoritative arrived last week in the form of Statistics Canada's annual study on income distribution. Not only did the report show that the gap between the richest fifth of the population and the poorest fifth had widened slightly in the last year -- on average, the rich now make seven times as much as the poor, after taxes and transfers -- but it found that fully 5.3-million Canadians were living in poverty.

Or did it? Whenever these sorts of statistics are released, people like me can always be found to drone on about the misleading use of the word poverty.

StatsCan's so-called "low-income cutoff," we scoff, is not in fact a poverty line, as the phrase is commonly understood (OED: "minimum income level needed to get necessities of life"), nor is it intended to be used as such.

All that the LICO records is the level of income at which a family that wanted to spend as much as the average family on food, clothing and shelter would find it had to spend 20 per cent of its income over and above the proportion these necessities absorb of the average family's income. In other words, if the average family spends 36 per cent of its income keeping itself fed, clothed and sheltered, a family for whom the same expenditure would amount to 56 per cent of its income would be just at the low-income cutoff.

This is a strangely roundabout way to define low income, not least because the poor do not tend to spend as much as the middle class, even on the necessities. So even if there were any objective significance to those arbitrary 20 percentage points StatsCan chose to tack on to the average, it would not mean that anyone below the LICO spends more than 56 per cent of their income on the necessities -- only that they would have to spend that much if they wanted to live like the middle class.

The LICO measure, then, tells us only that 5.3-million people earn rather less than 25 million others do. It is an indicator of relative, rather than absolute privation: of inequality, rather than poverty. As such, it is of little use in comparing our progress against either international or historic benchmarks, since it is expressly a function of the average living standards found in one place at one time. It would be absurd to say that Canada had a higher level of poverty, in the sense of absolute want, than a country with one-quarter of our income, though it might still be true that we had a more unequal distribution of income.

Well, la de da. Isn't this just playing with words? Perhaps. But if inequality is what really concerns us, we should say so. To paraphrase Isaiah Berlin, relative inequality may be as important an issue as absolute poverty; it may even be more important than poverty; but it is not the same thing as poverty.

I suspect that in fact most people would say the relief of absolute want was a higher social priority than equalizing incomes from top to bottom.

It may even be that there is an inverse relationship between the two: that a more unequal society generates more in the way of total wealth, out of which it is possible to raise up the very poor. I don't say that this always holds: it depends on this redistribution actually taking place. But certainly the figures for Canada seem to show that, while we fare poorly on the relative scale, we do quite well in absolute terms. Prof. Christopher Sarlo, whose studies for the Fraser Institute pioneered the "basic needs" approach to measuring poverty, has found that there are barely half as many children living in poverty today as there were 20 years ago. Yet for most of the past decade the number of children in families below the LICO has been rising!

Does that mean that a basic-needs measure, using the actual cost of a market basket of necessities, is more "objective"? Not a bit of it. What would count today as the bare minimum necessary for a decent existence would far outstrip what was considered acceptable a hundred years ago. Even an "absolute" definition of poverty, then, is to some extent conditioned by contemporary living standards. And while Prof. Sarlo might include only a few items in his market basket, others might with equal or greater justice toss in a few more, on a broader definition of what is "necessary." So perhaps it is time to shift the terms of debate. If, using a market-basket approach, we can agree on a minimum income, below which no one should be expected to live, we will still not have an objective measure of poverty.

But we will have a useful one.