Report: Invest in an anti-poverty strategy in Ontario

With Ontarians losing jobs, increasingly reliant on food banks, and swelling social assistance rolls, now is the crucial time to invest in an anti-poverty strategy, a new report said on Tuesday.

Campaign 2000 said 317,900 children and youth under age 18 (almost 1 in every 9) were living below the poverty line in 2007, when Ontario was experiencing strong economic growth, adding the current recession means that Ontario’s child and family poverty rate will have since increased.

“These figures show the betrayal of a generation with a child poverty rate higher now than when federal politicians resolved twenty years ago to end child poverty in Canada,” Campaign 2000, a cross-Canada public education movement to build Canadian awareness and support for the 1989 all-party House of Commons resolution to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000, said.

Campaign 2000 said the Ontario government’s Poverty Reduction Strategy has committed to reduce the provincial child poverty rate to about 9 per cent by 2013 and lift 90,000 out of poverty between 2008 and 2013.

“Over the past twenty years the proportion of Ontario’s low income children who live in working poor families has increased,” said Campaign 2000. “Getting a job does not always guarantee an escape from poverty.”

In 2007, 34 per cent of all poor children in Ontario lived in families where at least one parent was working the equivalent of a full time full year job, but unable to earn enough to lift their family out of poverty, said the report, adding the growth of non-standard precarious work such as temp agencies, has led to jobs with lower pay, poor benefit coverage, and less security.

Changes to Employment Insurance eligibility have meant that only 30 per cent of Ontario’s unemployed received EI benefits in 2007, compared to about 80 per cent in 1990.

The report also said that between August 2008 and August 2009, the number of people receiving social assistance (Ontario Works and Ontario Disability Support Program) rose to 798,105, a 12 per cent increase in one year.

Almost half (47 per cent) of people receiving Ontario Works last August were sole support parents and their children.

“Having to rely on social assistance in Ontario is a sentence to poverty,” said Campaign 2000. “Recent improvements in child benefits have begun to reduce the depth of poverty, but a single parent with one young child on social assistance still lives about $5,660 per year below the poverty line.”

The number of children having to rely on Ontario food banks each month, said the report, has increased from 97,390 in 2000, to 118,160 in 2008 - a 20 per cent  increase over eight years.

“The economic recession coupled with rising prices for food and energy has led to increased reliance on Ontario food banks in the last year,” said Campaign 2000.

Ontario Campaign 2000 calls for the provincial government to take immediate action in five areas:

 Begin the process to transform social assistance by starting the promised Social Assistance Review and making some immediate changes: raise adult rates by $100 a month and increase allowable assets to $10,000 for families.

 Make a downpayment on Ontario’s promised Affordable Housing Strategy by introducing a Housing Benefit, a new monthly allowance for all low-income Ontarians who spend more than 30 per cent of their income on rent.

 Invest to save thousands of child care spaces which are threatened due to expiring federal funding.

 Increase the minimum wage to $11 an hour in 2011, with indexation.

 Increase the monthly Ontario Child Benefit to a maximum of $125 a child.

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