Living in the Red: Exploring Winnipeg's Debt-scape

Abstract

Canadian households are now deeper in debt than at any time since Statistics Canada began collecting debtor data in 1961. Debt, payment delinquency, and bankruptcy are increasingly a part of the lives of the young, the socioeconomically marginalized, and renters. This In-Brief explores the TransUnion dataset available through Winnipeg’s Community Data Consortium, including the spatial patterns of non‑mortgage debt, bankruptcy risk, and the back-end debt ratio in Winnipeg. We find that low income areas have lower levels of non-mortgage and back-end debt but are at a higher risk of bankruptcy. The outer suburbs and high-wealth emerging areas have the highest levels of overall non-mortgage and back-end debt but the lowest bankruptcy risk.