The Churchill Keewatinook-Aski riding is home to the highest child poverty rate in the country.
A report released Monday by Campaign 2000, a movement to end poverty in Canada, took a look at the child poverty rate in each of the 338 federal ridings in the country.
The Churchill riding has a rate of 64.2 per cent, while the riding of Winnipeg Centre comes in at third in all of Canada with a 41.1 per cent rate.
Canada’s average child poverty rate is 17.4 per cent. The report found nearly half of the federal ridings (162 out of 338) have poverty rates at or above the average.
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READ MORE: 1.2 million children in Canada live in poverty: census
Other Manitoba ridings with rates well above the national average include Dauphin-Swan River-Neepawa (33.8 per cent) and Winnipeg North (32.3 per cent).
Local poverty rates
A recent Manitoba child poverty report card finds 27.4 per cent of the province’s children live in poverty, well above the national average and the second highest total in the country next to Nunavut (36 per cent).
Kearn Taylor-Hughes with Winnipeg Harvest also sees more families experiencing poverty coming into the food bank,
“In the last 10 years, the amount of food bank usage has gone up 58 percent.” Said Taylor-Hughes.
“I think this report is indicative of that, and the fact that we need to find solutions to support chilldren of parents who are impoverished.”
READ MORE: Advocates call for Manitoba poverty reduction strategy
The federal government has been meeting with and hearing stories from Canadians over the last year, putting together a national poverty reduction strategy which is expected to be released at some point later this year.
READ MORE: Child poverty up in Canada since 1989
Campaign 2000’s report calls for the child poverty rate to be cut in half by 2020.
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