It’s a great time to be a Canadian corporation looking for generous government handouts, but not such a great time to be a Canadian child, especially a poor child.
The child poverty group Campaign 2000 has just issued its report on the year 2025, and the news is almost all bad.
The report finds that in 2025 child poverty rose for the third straight year in Canada. An additional 30,000 children fell into poverty last year.
At that rate ending child poverty will take 400 years.
In November 1989, more than 36 years ago, the House of Commons passed a unanimous resolution vowing to end child poverty by the year 2000. Successive governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have missed that target by a wide margin.
At one point we were at least making progress, moving in the right direction. Then, more recently, we started to slide backwards. Today children remain the age group most likely to fall into poverty in Canada.
According to Statistics Canada’s official poverty-measurement, Canadian child poverty has more than doubled since 2020, to 802,200 children.
But that is, believe it or not, an optimistic figure. There is a broader Census Family Low Income Measure which, for Canadian children in 2025, yields an even more dismal result.
It indicates that nearly 1.4 million Canadian children now live in poverty. That figure is close to the total number of people of all ages who live in this country’s National Capital area, and greater than the populations of half of Canada’s provinces.
Then, beyond financially-measured poverty there is the question of adequate nutrition. On that, the Campaign 2000’s researchers conclude that two and a half million children now live in what they describe as “food insecure households”.
The food insecurity rate doubled between 2019 and 2023. It has not come down since.
Surge in poverty accompanies surge in inequality
Child poverty is not distributed evenly among all sorts of families. It is much higher for certain types of families – and even higher in cases where there is no family.
Close to half, over 45 per cent, of Canadian children in lone-parent families live in poverty. And for Canadians under the age of 18 who have no families at all the poverty rate is a staggering 99 per cent.
In 2022, close to 63,000 Canadian children lived in orphanages. In 2021, about 61,000 lived in foster or group homes.
The report details the rate of child poverty by province. Quebec has the lowest rate, 12.7 per cent, while resource-rich Saskatchewan had the highest, 27.1 per cent.
A number of factors explain Quebec’s success, among them the province’s universal, low-fee childcare system (in place since 1997). That system has increased Quebec families’ incomes by encouraging women to participate in the labour force.
Having more women working is not just good for those individuals and their families; it benefits the economy as a whole.
In addition to childcare, Quebec’s income supports to families are more generous than those of most other provinces, including neighbouring Ontario. Plus, the cost of living, especially that of rental housing, is lower in Quebec than in most other provinces and territories.
This surge in child poverty throughout Canada has happened while income inequality among Canadian families has also surged.
In 2025 the top ten per cent of families with children had an income 19 times greater than the bottom ten per cent. The report adds that the gap between the richest ten per cent and poorest has increased in recent years.
Campaign 2000 does give the Justin Trudeau-led Liberal government some credit for its efforts to at least mitigate the impact of poverty among children.
That government’s signature social policy initiative, the Canada Child Benefit (CCB), prevented over half a million children from falling into poverty in 2023.
However, the report points out that the “poverty reduction effect of the CCB has weakened since its implementation.”
Among the issues the report identifies are rising costs of housing and food, which undercut the advances the CCB had made.
To “restore the effectiveness” of the Canada Child Benefit Campaign 2000 recommends an additional “End Poverty Supplement”.
Such a payment would be similar to the Guaranteed Income Supplement below-poverty-line seniors receive on top of their basic pension, the Old Age Security payment.
The report makes other recommendations: a more progressive tax system, measures to assure all work is adequately compensated, and government initiatives to assure all those entitled to benefits such as the CCB actually receive them.
Temper of the times is indifferent to such issues as poverty
There was a time in Canada when the federal and provincial governments, and the Canadian public, would have been receptive to Campaign 2000’s message. Today, that does not seem to be the case.
Governments say they are laser focused on the economic and political threat from the increasingly Fascist-style U.S. empire. That focus, the Carney government tells us, requires massively increased military spending, lower taxes for corporations and high-income individuals, and costly subsidies of one sort or another to big business.
Paying for those priorities means setting aside environmental rules and slow-walking progress in expanding the social safety net.
The Carney government, sensitive to potential restiveness on the cost-of-living issue, did push through a one-time cash payment to low-income Canadians, notionally to offset high food prices.
But its approach on other social fronts, including pharmacare and dental care, has been to freeze them in place.
In many respects, Canada’s strategy for resisting an aggressive and expansionist United States is to become a little more like the U.S.
The voices proposing an alternative strategy, based on environmental sustainability and social solidarity, are still far off in the wilderness.
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