WATCH: The latest child poverty report card finds B.C. has the fifth highest poverty rate in the country – an improvement from last year but critics say it’s nothing to celebrate. Grace Ke reports.
Advocates for B.C.’s youth released their 2014 report card today outlining the problem of child poverty in this province.
The First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition says nearly one in five B.C. children live in poverty, a number that has not shrunk over the last two decades.
“Our first BC report card showed that one in five (over 170,000) BC children were poor,” according to the report, which largely used 2012 taxfiler data. “It is profoundly disappointing that 18 years later the data still shows that one in five (169,420) BC children are poor.”
Related: 25 years since Canada vowed to end child poverty, where are we now?
Single-parent households are particularly vulnerable, with 49.5 per cent of children in lone-parent families living in poverty.
The group has made 19 recommendations that they say could cut B.C.’s child poverty rate to less than 7 per cent by 2020. Recommendations include raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour and adopting a $10-a-day child care program.
This year’s report highlights the 25th anniversary of a promise made in the House of Commons “to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000.” Since the resolution was passed, B.C.’s child poverty rate has actually risen from 15.5 per cent in 1989 to 20.6 per cent in 2012.
The full report card can be found here.
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