Hope for Housing CBC News recently released an article titled It's next to impossible to pay the rent working full time for minimum wage, new report calculates . In this post, I will analyse the evidence to see why the data referenced by the CBC does not corroborate their click-bait title and conclusions. The Problem with Averages First off, they link rental information from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), which provides access to annual data of average apartment and townhouse prices throughout metropolitan centres in Canada (limited to populations 10,000+). There are several issues with providing only average values. One large problem is that averages are susceptible to skewing from outliers; a small number of very expensive apartments can significantly inflate the averages. A more instructive measure of centre is the median, as its value is robust even with the existence of outliers. Furthermore, they include no measure of spread, or var
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