John Tory pledges to work at reducing child poverty in Toronto
TheStar.com – News/CityHall – “If ever there was a wakeup call, this would be it,” the mayor-elect says of a report showing city has highest child-poverty rate among Canadian cities.
Nov 14 2014. By: Jennifer Pagliaro, City Hall reporte
Mayor-elect John Tory promised Thursday to be a leader in working to reduce poverty in Toronto, which has the worst child-poverty rate among Canada’s big cities.
“If ever there was a wakeup call, this would be it,” Tory said in an interview in advance of Friday’s full release of “The Hidden Epidemic: A Report on Child and Family Poverty in Toronto.”
The report, a preliminary version of which was released in August, puts Toronto at the top of a list of 13 major urban centres, tied with Saint John, N.B., for the highest rate of child poverty in Canada.
Tory promised there will be a strategy, with targets and deadlines, for reducing poverty in the city, to which council has already committed itself. He said it will take the work of citizens, unions, churches, politicians and other organizations to make a dent in these latest figures.
“I think it’s going to take that kind of mobilization,” he said. “We cannot and we will not be able to solve this problem solely on the basis of resources coming from municipal taxpayers.”
Progress in reducing child poverty numbers in Toronto has “stalled,” with more than 145,000 children under 18 — nearly a third of all children at 29 per cent — living in low-income families, according to a coalition of advocates who co-authored the report.
“We were shocked just to find poverty rates or low-income rates at 29 per cent overall,” said Children’s Aid Society of Toronto community worker Michael Polanyi, one of the authors. “Toronto’s often talked of as the economic engine of Canada and an extremely wealthy city, and so I think that’s what was really striking to us and part of the reason we used the word ‘epidemic.’”
The report calls on the city to help eradicate poverty by co-ordinating services, collaborating with business and community leaders, and lobbying on the city’s behalf at Queen’s Park and Ottawa.
Tory said he believes the city should tackle the root problems of poverty: adult unemployment, the difficulties of keeping youth in school, transit and housing.
He said the kind of community programs that benefit children long-term in these communities cannot be temporary or suffer from insecurity.
“You can’t come to the table on these things and only be there for a short period of time,” he said.
The report reveals a stark divide along geographic, ethnic and racial lines.
Fifteen of the city’s neighbourhoods have between 40 per cent and 63 per cent of children living in poverty, including four neighbourhoods where most children live in poverty: Regent Park (63 per cent); Oakridge (57 per cent); Thorncliffe Park (53 per cent); and Moss Park (52 per cent).
This in a city that, according to one recent study, is home to 118,000 millionaires — “almost one for every child who lives in poverty,” the report notes.
“A lot of it is about the opportunity lost to so many children in our city,” Polanyi said.
More than half of Scarborough’s 25 official neighbourhoods had poverty rates over 30 per cent, the highest compared to the downtown core, North York or Etobicoke. On the report’s map, the region is a sea of orange, a warning sign of sorts.
Maria Sultana lives in that Scarborough uncertainty, currently renting a junior one-bedroom apartment with her husband and 2-year-old son in a highrise near St. Clair Ave. East and Victoria Park Ave.
She came to Canada from Bangladesh to join her husband four years ago. She heard Canada was a rich country, a country where poverty didn’t exist. Since arriving, she was been on a wait list for government-subsidized housing for three years. Her husband is on disability pay. She would like to have another child. She dreams of having two bedrooms to call her own.
“When I came to Canada, I and my husband struggled and struggled — no job, no money and the rent is too expensive,” she said. In the winter, she says, there are few buses that take her where she needs to go.
“Everything is so . . . a hard life, this Canada,” she said.
Those who work in the community say that while the main “policy levers” are still housed with the federal and provincial governments, the city has an important role to play.
“It’s got a lot of tools at its disposal that influence the day-to-day reality for people living at low income,” said Rob Howarth, executive director of Toronto Neighbourhood Centres. “The city already does a lot to kind of ameliorate the impact of poverty, but it has a potential to do a lot more.”
Fixing the root causes of poverty isn’t just about spending more money, Howarth said, but rethinking how the city spends the money it already has — influencing job creation, pushing for local training as part of city contracts, co-ordinating non-profit sectors on new social programming and improving childcare and food security.
What’s encouraging, the report’s working group says, is that Toronto has committed to developing a framework for child poverty reduction by early 2015. In April, city council voted unanimously to develop a strategy.
That strategy, the report says, should address the disparity amongst neighbourhoods and diverse groups while creating specific goals.
“The hope for the strategy is it would identify some target and timeline,” Howarth said. “If we do it right, it would also give a way to lay a filter over the city’s budget each year and assess the budget decisions based on are these going to take us towards reducing poverty in our city, or are they not going to make a difference, or make matters worse?”
The report shows clear divides along socio-economic, cultural and geographic lines.
Some groups, including people with African and Middle Eastern backgrounds, are three times more likely to be living in poverty than those of European backgrounds, the report found.
It identifies three key areas that underline child poverty: Unemployment, lack of supports and poor access to community services.
Those issues are acutely felt in Toronto, where the rate of unemployment, 8.4 per cent, was the highest of any major Canadian city in 2013.
Meanwhile, services such as childcare in Toronto remain “prohibitively expensive and in too short supply,” the report says. In Toronto, a “mid-range” cost for monthly infant childcare is more than $1,500. Subsidies, the report says, only benefit 7 per cent of children in Toronto. There are nearly 18,000 children on the waiting list for a subsidy.
A recent report by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives showed Toronto is among the least affordable cities for childcare in the country.
The “exorbitant” fees mean even middle-income families are squeezed out, said Anita Khanna of Family Service Toronto, another of the report’s authors. As advocates, they are hoping for more money for subsidies in the new term of council.
“We have choices that we can make,” Khanna said. “We feel spending money to reduce poverty and particularly child and family poverty . . . is a great investment and is something the city reaps benefits from.”
The working group authors say they tried to conclude their report, to be released at a press conference at city hall Friday morning, with some optimism.
Polanyi pointed to council’s commitment to a poverty reduction strategy and to Tory’s promise to bring partners to the table to create solutions.
“He’s also spoken about creating a city where no one is left behind and where priority neighbourhoods are not feeling left out and where prosperity is shared,” Polanyi said. “I think the timing of this report is important in the sense that it’s recognizing the commitment that has been made by the past council, the commitment that has been made by the incoming mayor and it’s encouraging the new council to make this issue a priority.”
Sultana hopes they listen.
“I think government will do something for lower-class family, low-income family,” she said. “Our position is so bad.”
The report authors are from CAS, Social Planning Toronto, Family Service Toronto, Alliance for Poverty-Free Toronto, and Colour of Poverty.
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