Child Poverty In Canada

In 1989 all parties in the federal government unanimously agreed to eliminate child poverty in Canada. There was no plan and consequently the number of children living below the poverty line has steadily risen. The poverty of children cannot be addressed without dealing with the poverty of adults. Those provinces with a poverty strategy in place have seen some success in reducing the effects of poverty, while the provinces without strategies in place have seen their poverty levels increase. The most interesting solution that is currently out there revolves around a guaranteed annual income to assist in raising people below the poverty line to the poverty line. Though this is one possible solution, it requires that Canada recognize poverty

Statistics Canada does not define poverty but provides the data to determine poverty using Low Income Cut-Offs (LICO), Low Income Measures (LIM), and Market Basket Measure (MBM) lines, but recognizes that using these measures may not be the best practice to use in low income studies as they tend to underestimate the number of people living in poverty (Zhang, 2010). Given this caveat, these lines still show that a family living in poverty is on average about $6000 below the poverty line per family member (Basic Income Pilot, 2015). This “depth of poverty” is what needs a national

The Ontario Government cites the success of diverse programs such as junior kindergarten, the Ontario Child Tax Benefit, Ontario Catapult Microloan Fund, and the Social Enterprise Demonstration Fund in helping reduce the poverty or at least the effects of poverty. The first two programs providing direct assistance to families with child while the latter provided assistance to social economy enterprises that may assist with needs of those living in poverty (Government of Ontario, 2014). Even a traditionally conservative province such as Alberta has started to develop a plan for reducing poverty not residual in its approach; using words such as wellness, and financial empowerment in their plan (Government of Alberta, 2015). In contrast, British ColomGAI, which has no defined poverty strategy, has seen the Depth of Poverty grow more than any other province. (Make Poverty History,