The executive director of Ability New Brunswick says a report released by the Economic and Social Inclusion Corporation is disingenuous and doesn’t reflect the reality people are experiencing in the province.
The report, released in October, suggests poverty rates have fallen in the province and compares data from years 2015 and 2020. It showed that 58,000 New Brunswickers were experiencing poverty in 2020, down from 119,000 in 2015.
But Haley Flaro said the data is misleading.
“Looking at today’s data that I’m seeing coming through our door, we have quite a serious situation,” the executive director said in an interview on Monday.
In particular, Flaro said the year 2020 is an outlier. The federal government introduced the Canada Emergency Response Benefit to help people through the pandemic. It allocated $2,000 every four weeks for people who qualified.
Flaro said it showed that a livable wage helps lift people out of poverty and did so temporarily.
In 2020, 32 per cent of New Brunswick workers received CERB, according to Statistics Canada.
“Since then, many have returned to lower-paying jobs with significantly reduced income than in comparison to the CERB amounts,” Flaro said in the release.
“The reality is that 2020 reflects a time when many low-income individuals were making more money from CERB than they would have been working full-time.”
In fact, Ability NB said at least 30,000 New Brunswickers are living in deep poverty, which means they are on social assistance and taking in $9,500 annually.
“But let me tell you, since 2020, we are in the deepest poverty I’ve ever seen in New Brunswick,” she said.
The Economic and Social Inclusion Corporation declined an interview on Monday.
In a statement, though, it says it “recognizes that the last few years have had a unique influence and that those influences shift year-to-year.”
“It is not a report on the state of poverty in New Brunswick,” the statement said.
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