By Laura Track, Adrienne Montani and Trish Garner
When Conservative MP James Moore asked a Vancouver reporter whether governments have an obligation to ensure children don’t go to school hungry, his comments were rightly criticized by Canadians across the country as callous and cruel.
The comments were also incorrect.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as well as international human rights treaties that Canada has committed to uphold, require governments to protect our rights to equality, life, and security of the person, and to do everything they can to ensure an adequate standard of living for all.
Yet, our governments have failed to ensure our nation’s great wealth results in, at the very least, students arriving at school with nourishing food in their bellies, ready and able to learn.
British Columbia’s child poverty rate is once again the worst in the country – one out of every five children in B.C. is living in poverty. That’s 153,000 kids – enough to fill the stands at a Canucks’ game eight times over. First Nations, immigrant, and racialized families, as well as families with children with disabilities, tend to be especially poor.
Astoundingly, half of all children living in families headed by single mothers are poor, living an average of $9,000 below the poverty line. Poverty among single mother-headed families arises from a number of factors, not least of which is the difficulty single moms face finding quality, affordable child care that allows them to sustain paid employment.
One policy that actively undermines parents’ ability to support their children is the claw back of child support payments. When a single parent on social assistance receives child support from the child’s other parent, the government takes that money away from the child, clawing back the entire amount from the family’s social assistance cheque.
Social assistance rates in B.C. are already incredibly low and haven’t risen since 2007, despite the rising cost of living. As a result, families on welfare struggle to survive on incomes that are well below the poverty line.
Vast amounts of research demonstrate the toxic role poverty plays in undermining healthy childhood development, as well as the huge additional costs in health care, education, the justice system and lost productivity we are already paying by allowing poverty rates to remain so high.
Fortunately, most British Columbians don’t share Mr. Moore’s dismissive view that we have no collective responsibility for the well-being of our communities’ children. Some 87 per cent of British Columbians think the premier and prime minister should set concrete targets and timelines for reducing poverty.
Yet, B.C. is now one of only two provinces left without a poverty reduction plan. Now that Family Day is over, we need real action on family poverty.
Laura Track is the legal director for West Coast LEAF; Adrienne Montani is the provincial co-ordinator of First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition; and Trish Garner is the organizer of the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition.