According to a report from a New Brunswick Crown Corporation, the number of people living in poverty in the province was cut in half between 2015 and 2020.
A progress update on the province’s five-year poverty reduction strategy from the Economic and Social Inclusion agency says that 58,000 New Brunswickers were experiencing poverty in 2020, down from 119,000 in 2015.
But not everyone is convinced by those numbers.
“I’ve done a little bit of digging into the data and certainly it’s a wonderful example of what spin doctors can do to put lipstick on a pig,” said Green Party leader David Coon when asked about the report.
The report uses the Market Basket Measure (MBM), which is the official poverty metric used across the country. It’s calculated based on the cost of a series of goods and services including housing, food, clothing and transportation for a family of four.
Coon says the metric is more favourable than others. He prefers the Low Income Measure (LIM), which considers a home low income if it earns 50 per cent less than its community’s median income. In 2019, there were 17,000 children experiencing poverty, according to the MBM, and 30,190 according to the LIM.
The executive director of the Economic and Social Inclusion agency, Stephane Leclair, says the report uses MBM because of its standardized nature, allowing for comparisons across jurisdictions.
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“When you compare New Brunswick to Nova Scotia or P.E.I., you should read the same information, where a few years ago it wasn’t the same. Some were using different data,” he said.
The 2021 Child Poverty Report prepared by the Human Development Council uses the LIM, citing concerns over the limitations of the MBM. The MBM is based on the Canadian Income Survey, a much smaller sample size than the tax filer data used by the LIM, and isn’t automatically adjusted to reflect cost of living changes. It also doesn’t include a number of expenses experienced by many families.
“The MBM does not include childcare,” the report says. “It does not include non-insured health expenses like dental and vision care, prescription drugs, private health insurance and aids for those with disabilities.”
Coon doesn’t disagree that poverty in the province declined over the period examined by the report, but says it wasn’t due to the actions of the provincial government.
The overall poverty, as expressed by MBM, fell from 16.2 to 7.6 per cent between 2015 and 2020. But Coon says that improvement appears to be largely due to federal government programs, such as the Canada Child Benefit, which provides direct payments to parents based on income level.
“The message that comes out of this report for me is that government financial supports matter and most of the difference in people’s live that have been made by government transfers over the last five or eight years has been from the federal government, it’s time for the provincial government to step up,” he said.
Leclair doesn’t disagree, but says it’s important to give the provincial government credit for the work it’s done to make life easier for low income people as well.
“The provincial government did a lot of things as well with the day care initiative and especially with the tax breaks for low income earners,” he said.
But both of those initiatives were introduced after the period studied in the report. The deal to reduce child-care fees in the province by half was announced in April of this year, with the lion’s share of funding coming from Ottawa. And the increase to the basic personal amount and the low-income threshold were announced in March.
Liberal social development critic Robert Gauvin says he’s not sure the report accurately reflects what New Brunswickers are seeing and experiencing right now. He pointed to a chart in the report that shows an uptick in social assistance recipients in the current year.
“It’s hard to tell people (that poverty is down) when there’s more and more people that are living in the streets, you’ve got tent cities Moncton, Fredericton and Saint John, all over the province, you see that more and more,” he said.