Podcast: Daphne Bramham on the child poverty report.
It’s a shameful and longstanding distinction that a greater percentage of B.C. children live in poverty than anywhere else in Canada, and 2011 was no exception.
You can argue over which Statistics Canada data to use — low-income after tax or before tax, market basket measure, or the deprivation index.
But it doesn’t alter the fact that British Columbia’s record is abysmal.
At best — using the 2011 after tax, low-income cut-off — 93,000 B.C. kids, or 11.3 per cent of all children in the province, lived in poverty.
At worst — using the before tax, low-income cut-off — there were 153,000, or 18.6 per cent of all children, live in families struggling with high housing costs, low wages and unavailable or unaffordable childcare.
There’s an even more shocking and distressing statistic if you drill down into the numbers, as Lorraine Copas of the Social Planning and Research Council of B.C. did to prepare the 2013 Child Poverty Report Card, which was released Tuesday.
Preschoolers are way more likely than any other children to be living in poverty. Put a different way: One in five kids under the age of six likely doesn’t get enough food to eat, isn’t properly clothed or housed.
At 21 per cent, that’s eight percentage point higher than the national average, and nearly three percentage points higher than the B.C. average.
What makes that statistic so awful is that it is well-documented and even frequently acknowledged by politicians that the early years are crucially important to a child’s emotional, mental, social and physical development.
Poverty often robs those preschoolers of the opportunity to reach their highest potential, get a good job and live to a healthy old age. As a society, allowing them to grow up in poverty means that we have already forfeited a generation of workers and potentially engaged citizens and taxpayers.
“Investment in poverty reduction is an investment in health and probably the best investment you can make in health-care prevention,” Ted Bruce, Vancouver Coastal Health’s executive director of population health, said Tuesday after the report was released.
Among the statistics that Bruce gave are these: Lower-income children are 1.7 times more likely to go to hospital for asthma-related problems; poor people are twice as likely to have serious illnesses and die as much as a decade before high-income earners; and, as the report notes, the gap between rich and poor in British Columbia is greater than in any other province.
Bruce also said it is time to dispel the myth that poor kids have junkies and alcoholics for parents. The overwhelming number of low-income children — 60 per cent — come from families with two working parents, who are struggling to feed, clothe and house their families. Many of those working families are new immigrants.
But there is another alarming statistic in the report card. The poverty rate for children living in families headed by lone mothers more than doubled to 49.8 per cent in 2011, up from 21.5 per cent the previous year. That increase tracks the precipitous drop in median market income for single mothers to $21,500 from $32,000 in 2010. That happened over the same period that the median incomes for single moms in every other province rose.
The trouble with the seemingly intractable problem is that there is no single solution. It’s not a matter of just growing the economy, or jobs, jobs, jobs. That has obviously not worked, because since 1999 — through hard times and prosperity — the child poverty rate has consistently remained above the national average.
Conversely, it is also not possible to fix child poverty only with universal, taxpayer-funded programs.
What is needed is a comprehensive plan to address different pieces of the poverty problem that involves everyone in the community — government, service providers, business, philanthropists, and those who have experienced and overcome poverty.
In addition to recommending a plan that includes timelines and a legislated target — First Call suggests a rate of seven per cent by 2020 — the report makes 16 other recommendations.
Few are new; most seem only to be common sense.
Ensure that working people can earn wages that they can live and support their families on. Help them with affordable child care, housing, dental care, eyecare and prescription drugs. Increase welfare rates to the after-tax poverty line.
Make it easier for people to move from welfare to the workforce.
Quit impoverishing young parents with high, post-secondary school tuition fees and usurious student loan repayment rates.
All of that, of course, will take time. And, as Bruce points out, little kids don’t have the luxury of waiting.
The security and futures of children shouldn’t be subject to the whims and trends of our carpe-diem society. It’s not right that they can be so greatly disadvantaged by a bunch of adults who either can’t get it right or can’t be bothered to try.
The situation in British Columbia is a travesty, especially because it has been this way for so long.