Sydney-Victoria leads province in child poverty
Ten of Nova Scotia’s 11 federal ridings have higher than average child poverty rates.
In the lead up to the announcement of the federal poverty reduction strategy, which is slated to be announced in the coming weeks, Campaign
2000 released a breakdown of child poverty data riding-by-riding based on the most recently available data from the 2015 census.
Campaign 2000, a national advocacy group, has been tracking progress against child and family poverty through annual report cards released each fall since 1991.
According to the data, which uses something called the low income measure-after tax, the Nova Scotia riding with the highest instance of child poverty is Sydney-Victoria, where a third of children under age 17 live in a low-income household. It is also 10th in the country.
Sydney-Victoria is followed by Halifax and Cape Breton-Canso, which both have just under a quarter of kids living in lowincome households. The other ridings hover between 24 and 18 per cent, except Sackville-Preston-Chezzetcook, where the percentage of children that live in a low-income household is around 13 per cent. The national average is 17.4 per cent.
According to Lesley Frank, associate professor of sociology at Acadia University, research associate for the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives Nova Scotia and Campaign 2000 steering committee member, out the data by riding gives Canadians, and the MPs that represent them, a better sense of just how widespread the child poverty problem is.
“It’s a problem that all our federal MPs need to be paying attention to,” Frank said.
Looking at data from Nova Scotia, Frank said there are identifiable reasons for the high rates.
For example, Sydney-Victoria has a high rate of lone-parent households. It also has the highest rate of people who identify as Indigenous — a group that faces a lot of systemic inequality — in all the Atlantic provinces.
“Other areas might have different issues. For example, in Halifax, one of the things you can see just by looking at that data is that it has to do with, partly, housing costs,” Frank said.
Just over 35 per cent “of people in that riding spent more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter.”
Sydney-Victoria MP Mark Eyking told The Chronicle Herald that he’s not surprised with the results. He said poverty has been one of his key issues.
“We lost three huge industries that had big repercussions. The steel, coal and the groundfish industry and that has had a major effect on us,” Eyking said.
Seasonal industries like fishing and tourism means lower incomes for some of his constituents, Eyking said.
“I can see it in the numbers. When we came out with the Canada Child Benefit I knew our recipients receiving those payments would be quite high; we were one of the highest,” Eyking said, adding that over $5 million went out to families in his riding last year.
“The last couple of years, we’ve had huge investments in Cape Breton, First Nations communities especially. I think that’s where we keep working on. It’s helping with the day-to-day needs but also helping with the economy so we get more jobs out there,” he said.
Eyking said he believes there is room for improvement with child care. He said he often hears from constituents about the need for a universal program, similar to what exists in Quebec, to help parents get back in the workforce.
“Talking to some of the Quebec MPs, they say that changes the game quite a bit for a lot of especially single parents,” Eyking said. “It’s something I think we should look at.”
When it comes to targeting child poverty, Frank said there is not one catch-all solution, but there are things that are shown to help, such as universal drug and dental coverage, as well as affordable child care.
Frank also said greater investment in the Canada Child Benefit, as well as a more cohesive way to measure and track poverty reduction would be positive steps toward improving the situation.
Jean-Yves Duclos, minister of families, children and social development, said Canadians can expect the national poverty reduction strategy, which was first announced in 2015, to be unveiled in the coming weeks.
Duclos said the strategy will do two things including the consistent measurement of poverty across Canada.
“The second is to make the federal government accountable to achieving objectives of reducing poverty for these indicators,” he said.
“We want to set clear, transparent manners of measuring poverty around which people will be able to work and second we want to establish fixed objectives and make sure the federal government is held accountable to meeting those objectives.”
Duclos also said the federal government’s poverty reduction measures have helped reduce the number of children living in low income families by 40 per cent of the 2015 census numbers.