Manitoba poverty woes deepen amid dark days

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/04/2020 (2152 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With no fanfare, national anti-poverty group Campaign 2000 last week released its report card on Manitoba. The title — Broken Promise, Stolen Futures: Child and Family Poverty in Manitoba — says it all.

It was a follow up to the organization’s national report in January, which stated Canada’s child poverty rate is at 18.6 per cent (decreasing only 3.4 per cent in 30 years) and 1.35 million children live in poverty — with a disproportionate amount being Indigenous, racialized and immigrant children, and children in female-led single-parent families.

If you missed it last week, you’re not alone; almost no media covered the report, as the COVID-19 pandemic held the spotlight. On any other day, it would have been front-page news.

The Manitoba report card echoes the claim by national Campaign 2000 advocates that Canada is masking the amount of children and families in poverty by using the Market Basket Measure (MBM, calculated by taking a “basket” of essential goods and services and subtracting a family’s average income) instead of the Census Family Low Income Measure (CFLIM, calculated by using 50 per cent of median income divided by family size).

MBM, the report argues, “allows for claims of much less poverty than actually exists.”

This results in huge discrepancies. Canadian officials, using MBM, state 26,000 Manitoba children live in poverty; Campaign 2000, using CFLIM, says the number is more than 85,000.

Even if the truth was somewhere in the middle, that’s 50,000 Manitoban children in poverty.

There’s more: the report points out Manitoba’s reduction rate of child poverty is the third-slowest in the country, behind only Ontario and Nova Scotia. At that rate, child poverty in Manitoba will be eradicated by the year 2717.

One out of every six children in a two-parent home in Manitoba live in poverty; the same for one out of every 1.6 children in a single-parent home.

Manitoba leads Canada in children under six years of age in poverty (31 per cent), second only to Nunavut (37 per cent).

On-reserve child poverty in the province is even worse.

“Indigenous children on reserve exhibit the shameful rate of 65 per cent, while more than half (53 per cent) off-reserve live in poverty,” the report card states. “Also, more than one in four (26 per cent) of Métis children and almost a quarter (23 per cent) of Inuit children are living in poverty. This compares with a rate of 17.1 per cent of non-Indigenous children in Manitoba.”

The Manitoba government has made the problem even worse, according to the new report.

Since October 2017, the province has cut nearly $100 million from the child-welfare systems, imposed “block” funding on child and family agencies that has hampered programs, and “clawed back” money earmarked for Indigenous children in care. This has resulted, according to the report, in children in care turning 18 and being “immediately propelled into homelessness.”

The neglect, mistreatment, and overwhelming ineptitude is costing Manitobans.

“We know that austerity, cuts and cancellations, and policies that favour the wealthier, have made income inequality in Canada and Manitoba grow rapidly over the last three decades,” the report states. “And, while cuts have served to reduce budget expenditures in the very short term, poverty is costly, putting a burden on health, policing, justice, and family budgets.”

Now, with the COVID-19 pandemic, things are getting worse.

In March, nearly one million jobs in Canada were lost, with around 25,000 of these in Manitoba.

Economists suggest Canada’s unemployment rate is now around 20 per cent (four times what it was in February). Manitoba’s unemployment rate has doubled from the 6.4 per cent it sat at before the pandemic hit, according to Statistics Canada. This means more children in poverty. The report, while released last week, is already outdated.

In the days leading to the COVID-19 crisis, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister was asked by the NDP to support school-level breakfast programs for hungry children. He rejected the call, blaming parents for not “fulfilling their responsibilities.”

He was widely criticized for being out of touch and not understanding many Manitobans must work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They are not neglectful, but overworked.

Many of these parents are now at home, unemployed.

To fix this impending disaster, a breakfast program is going to be the least of Pallister’s worries.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca