Social Policy in Ontario

Child and family poverty has dropped significantly across Canada since 2015, but a new report shows the problem persists in all 338 federal ridings, with First Nations and recent immigrant children impacted the most.

“The latest data continue to paint a stark portrait of inequality with high- and low-income families living in close proximity while divided by wide social and economic gaps that leave too many children hungry, sick and stressed,” says the report by Campaign 2000, a national, non-partisan coalition committed to ending child poverty.

“Every community, every candidate and all political parties have a stake in the eradication of poverty,” says the report being released Monday.

Between 2015 and 2017, almost 134,000 Canadian children were lifted out of poverty, a decline of nine per cent, according to the report.

But nearly 1.4 million — or 18.7 per cent — continue to live in families struggling to survive on low incomes, says the report based on 2017 income tax data, the latest available.

The report considers children to be poor if their families are living below the Low Income Measure, after taxes, or 50 per cent of the median Canadian family income. That was about $33,000 for a single parent and $47,000 for a family of four, in 2017.

The numbers vary dramatically across the country with the highest levels of child poverty found in federal ridings with the largest proportions of Indigenous, racialized, immigrant and lone parent families.

These ridings also have the highest unemployment rates, the highest proportion of renters and those who pay more than 30 per cent of their income for housing, the report says.

The riding with the biggest drop in child poverty was Scarborough-Guildwood, where it declined by almost a quarter to about 32 per cent. The riding with the smallest drop was Brampton West, where child poverty declined by just 0.1 per cent to about 16 per cent, the report notes.

Twenty-eight ridings in seven provinces saw child poverty rates rise during this period, with the highest increases in two Saskatchewan ridings near Saskatoon.

The riding of Churchill-Keewatinook Aski in Manitoba, a rural area with numerous First Nations communities, continued to have the highest child poverty rate at almost 64 per cent.

In the 68 ridings with the highest rates of child poverty, an average of 32 per cent of children — more than 400,000 — are growing up poor.

Ridings with the lowest poverty rate are still home to more than 175,000 low-income children, or 13 per cent of all children living in poverty, according to the report.

Twenty-nine ridings with the highest child poverty rates are in Ontario, with 14 of them in Toronto.

Single mother Arafa Ahmada, 39, who came to Canada as a refugee from Tanzania almost 20 years ago, is among the 39 per cent of families living in poverty in Toronto Centre, the urban riding with the second-highest rate of child poverty in the country. (Winnipeg Centre has the highest at 40.5 per cent.)

“It has been very tough,” said Ahmada, who has been raising three children on her own in Regent Park since her marriage ended a decade ago.

“But I have been teaching my kids how to budget and how to buy only what we need,” she said.

Ahmada, who earns less than $25,000 a year as a part-time pharmacy assistant, says she also wants her children, ages 13, 11 and nine, to recognize the value of work.

“I want them to see that when they go to school, I go to work,” she said.

All three children have excelled in school, with her daughter making the honour roll in Grade 8 last year. They play soccer, take swimming and music lessons and are supported by after-school homework clubs and leadership programs.

Ahmada and her family have benefited from subsidized child care and a city program that waives recreation program fees for low-income families. She says she is also grateful for her subsidized apartment that is part of Regent Park’s ongoing redevelopment and wishes more families living in poverty had access to similar supports.

Monthly federal and provincial child benefits, which boost Ahmada’s annual income by almost $20,000, make all the difference and allow her to save for her children’s education, she said.

“I have always stressed the importance of education,” she said. “I tell them it doesn’t matter who you are, once you have an education, you can be whoever you want to be.”

But Ahmada is disappointed poverty hasn’t been a major issue in the election.

“They are always talking about the middle class and the rich,” she says. “We hear nothing about us.”

The introduction of Canada’s first national poverty reduction strategy this year signalled a renewed commitment to ending poverty at the federal level, the report notes.

However, the report says the targets and timelines — to cut poverty in half by 2030 — are “too low” and “too long.”

The report also takes issue with Canada’s new official poverty line, the market basket measure, which defines poverty based on the cost of goods and services that individuals and families need to achieve a modest, basic standard of living in 50 regions across the country.

While the measure is adjusted annually to keep up with inflation, the goods and services it tracks have not been updated since 2008. (An update is expected in 2020, based on 2018 costs.) It also doesn’t capture child poverty in many First Nations communities.

Based on the old measure, the cost of a market basket for a family of four in the Toronto area in 2017 was $41,362 — meaning families with disposable income below that level are considered to be living in poverty. Across the country, the average cost of a market basket is $37,489.

“While there have been some really big decreases in child poverty across the country, decreases are uneven and some of the communities with the highest rates of child poverty haven’t seen the kinds of decreases we would have expected,” said Leila Sarangi, Campaign 2000’s national co-ordinator.

“Any incoming government will have to focus on place-based and localized solutions with community input, especially in Indigenous and First Nations communities, which continue to have the highest rates of child poverty in the country,” she said.

Ottawa needs to strengthen the national poverty reduction strategy and boost income support programs, she said. Families need access to high quality public services, such as affordable housing, child care, medication, dental care, mental health services, education and training, she added.

Campaign 2000 has written to all party leaders asking them to respond by Oct. 10 on how they would fight poverty in Canada. Their responses will be posted on the organization’s website before the Oct. 21 vote.

“Though we’ve seen some strong policy proposals this federal election around issues like child care, housing, pharmacare, the Canada Child Benefit and other issues — the reality is that all leaders have been virtually silent on the larger issue of poverty,” said Michèle Biss of Canada Without Poverty, a national non-profit organization and member of Campaign 2000.

Poverty came up just once in the TVA leaders’ debate last Monday, and only in a passing comment related to seniors, she said.

“Housing and food insecurity were not mentioned by any of the leaders a single time,” Biss said. “Canada is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, we have the resources to do better, but if our leaders leave poverty out of the discussion, the most marginalized in this country will continue to be ignored.”