[Canada] Poverty hits one in six kids in Ontario

from The Toronto Star

Study blames increase in part-time, contract work

Report urges hike in minimum wage, quality child care
NAOMI CARNIOL
STAFF REPORTER

One in six children in Ontario lives in poverty, a study being released today found. That's 443,000 people under 18 across the province.

Adrian is one of them. The 11-year-old Toronto boy loves music and wants to learn to play the guitar, but his mom, Myriam Canas-Mendes, can't afford lessons. Some days she can't afford groceries. She visits a food bank or skips breakfast so Adrian and his 7-year-old sister, Olga, can eat.

Canas-Mendes works part-time as an outreach worker at a community café, but only gets to work when someone else can't make it. To pay for her family's basement apartment, she relies largely on social assistance.

The money falls short each month no matter how hard Canas-Mendes tries to stretch it. "Sometimes you can't even sleep. There is so much tension in your life," she said.

The federal government promised in 1989 to eliminate child poverty by 2000. The child poverty rate in Ontario reached 16.1 per cent in 2003, compared with 11.6 per cent in 1989, today's study by Campaign 2000 found. The network of more than 90 organizations is devoted to ending child and family poverty in Canada.

Despite economic growth in Ontario, the child poverty rate "has been stuck" between 15 and 16 per cent since 2000, the study said.

That's partly because of an increase in part-time, contract and temporary work, said Jacquie Maund, one of the report's lead authors.

Parents aren't "finding jobs that provide enough hours at a sufficiently high pay or any benefits to lift their families above the poverty line," Maund said. Thirty-three per cent of children living in poverty had at least one parent who worked full-time year-round in 2003, the study found.

Another reason the child poverty rate has remained steady is "huge holes to our social safety net have not been adequately repaired," Maund said.

Cuts to social assistance in the 1990s, combined with inflation, caused a 40 per cent decline in the past decade of what people on social assistance can afford to buy, the report said. "A family of four on (social assistance in Ontario) would receive a monthly benefit of $1,250 in 2005 — one-half of what a four-person family needs to purchase the basic necessities of food, clothing, shelter and transportation."

`Sometimes you can't even sleep. There is so much tension in your life.'Myriam Canas-Mendes, mother of two, on living in poverty

Child poverty hits some families disproportionately hard, the study found. Forty per cent of children living in poverty are cared for by single mothers. Poverty rates for children in aboriginal, visible minority and immigrant families are double the average rate in the province.

"Good quality child care is one essential pathway out of poverty" because it allows parents to receive training and work, the report said. In Ontario there are only regulated child-care spaces for 10.7 per cent of children up to age 12, the report noted.

A co-ordinated approached to fighting child poverty is needed, Maund said.

"We're looking for the Ontario government to make children a priority in the upcoming budget and to make a commitment to spend up to $1 billion to jumpstart an Ontario action plan to reduce child poverty."

The action plan should include "social investments" in affordable housing and quality child care. Social assistance rates should be raised and tied to inflation.

Ontario must stop deducting the national child benefit supplement from the cheques of families on social assistance, the report argued.

The action plan also needs to improve the quality of Ontario's labour market by raising the hourly minimum wage from $7.75 to $10 and indexing it to inflation and investing in more programs that ensure immigrants have access to jobs that match their training, the report stated.

"Growing up in poverty is linked to poor health, lower school performance and low pay and unemployment as adults," Maund said.

"There are long-term costs to not addressing our child poverty problem now."