One in five Nova Scotia children living in poverty, report finds
A new report underlines Nova Scotia’s chronically dismal record on family poverty and affordability.
The child poverty rate in Nova Scotia was 20.5 per cent in 2021, marking an 11.4 per cent increase from the previous year, the Nova Scotia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) found in its report card on child and family poverty released Wednesday.
“It makes me very uncomfortable to think that governments might be prioritizing child poverty because, of course, children don’t deserve to live in poverty but nobody deserves to live in poverty,” said Christine Saulnier, the Nova Scotia director of the CCPA who co-authored the 65-page report with Lesley Frank, a CCPA-NS research associate.
Saulnier said the focus falls to children because of the urgency around their development and the short window of time necessary to support the province’s youngest who are below the poverty line.
“That’s why we call for our government to use the additional revenue that’s coming in and actually end poverty for children,” Saulnier said.
The report finds that the 2021 year-over-year increase in child poverty in the province of 11.4 per cent is the largest single-year increase since the provincial government’s 1989 promise to eradicate child poverty.
This report card provides the number and percentage of children living in poverty based on the most recent income-based statistics, with the current report card providing analysis from 2021. The two-year lag time is required for the data to be cleaned, analyzed and prepared for public use by Statistics Canada and there are no comprehensive data sets that are more up to date for measuring poverty, the report authors say.
35,330 children
A provincial child poverty rate of 20.5 per cent represents 35,330 children, or one in five Nova Scotia children who live in low-income families.
In 2021, Nova Scotia had the fourth-highest child poverty rate in Canada and the highest rate in Atlantic Canada.
Saulnier said the one in five rate relates to children 17 of years and younger but in the category of children younger than two years of age, the poverty rate would be 24.6 per cent or one in four children.
“These are the development years, these are the years that we really want to be supporting families,” Saulnier said.
Saulnier said the “most direct way to support people living in poverty is to provide them with additional income,” whether that be income from government supports or employment income.
“Last year’s report card showed that governments can act quickly and protect people from falling into poverty while lifting others out of poverty, even during a pandemic and an almost complete shutdown of the economy,” the current report reads.
“In just one year, between 2019 and 2020, the child poverty rate decreased in Nova Scotia by 23 per cent. This was the most significant single-year reduction in poverty on record. Government intervention, in particular the federal pandemic benefits, worked.”
Saulnier said governments should continue to follow that template.
CERB
“It’s about income assistance in particular because of how low the income support is for people on income assistance who are relying primarily on what is a last resort,” Saulnier said.
“It means they are in deep, deep poverty, which is why $100 doesn’t make a big difference because they are thousands of dollars below the poverty line. The affordable living tax credit, the child benefit, just doing tiny little incremental changes, of course every little bit helps and I am sure everybody living in poverty is very thankful for all of the support that is coming their way, but it is only helping them to live in poverty. It isn’t actually lifting them out of poverty unless there is a significant increase in support and that was the CERB.”
The Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) provided financial support to employed and self-employed Canadians who were directly affected by COVID-19 pandemic and related government restrictions.
Combined federal and provincial government transfers in 2021 reduced child poverty by 50.5 per cent overall and lifted 36,140 children under the age of 18 out of poverty, the report says.
Without these benefits, the child poverty rate in Nova Scotia would have been 41.4 per cent. Seven other provinces or territories were more effective in reducing child poverty through government transfers than Nova Scotia.
Nova Scotia’s poverty reduction due to transfers was the least effective in the Atlantic provinces.
Rates vary
“The Nova Scotia government is waiting on the federal government to do more instead of leveraging what the federal government has done,” Saulnier said. “We continue to push because we believe that the government is capable and able to do this (end child poverty) should it have the political will to do so.”
The report found that the province’s child poverty rates vary depending on factors that include geography, family type and race.
The child poverty rates are highest in Queens County (28.5 per cent), Cape Breton Regional Municipality (27.6 per cent), Cumberland County (26.1 per cent) and Annapolis County (26 per cent).
In 2021, 45 per cent of Nova Scotia children, 22,860 children, living in lone-parent families were below the poverty line, compared with 9.3 per cent living in two-parent families, and the poverty rate of mother-led lone-parent families was nine per cent higher than father-led families.
The child poverty rate for racialized children was 11.7 per cent higher than the overall average.
The report provided 10 policy recommendations for the provincial government, including the implementation of a poverty elimination plan, the establishment of an independent child and youth commission that was first promised by Premier Tim Houston in 2021, a significant increase in income assistance rates, a transformation of the child welfare and social assistance system and addressing racism and all forms of discrimination as root causes of child poverty.
“We do have to hold government to account for the decision to not act on this issue,” Saulnier said.
