A fifth of on-reserve families to miss out on child-benefit boost

OTTAWA — Thousands of Indigenous families living on reserves will miss out on a boost to the Canada Child Benefit when the more lucrative payments hit parents’ bank accounts today.

Almost every eligible family in the country receives the monthly, means-tested benefit, but take-up rates for families on-reserve lag behind the wider population — largely chalked up to lower taxfiling rates among Indigenous families.

Tax returns are the basis for calculating payments to families.

The government estimates one in every five Indigenous families on-reserve who should qualify are not receiving the benefit, an improvement from two years ago, when about half of families onreserve missed out on it.

Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos called the issue a key focus for the government over the past year of its mandate, saying the benefit is missing too many children from a population that tends to have larger families and is more likely to experience poverty.

“These families need and deserve the [child benefit] even more than the average Canadian family,” Duclos said. “We’ve got to improve on delivery of the [child benefit], and I would say this is the number one priority in the months to come.”

Indexing the benefit to inflation will increase program spending to about $25.1 billion by 2022, from the $23.7 billion budgeted for this fiscal year.

The Conservative critic on the file said the government should have indexed the benefit right away so the payment didn’t lose its buying power as prices went up. Karen Vecchio said some families might feel the extra money still doesn’t go far enough with the high cost of housing, or as costs rise for goods and services subjected to the federal carbon-pricing scheme.

She also called in-person and social-media promotion Thursday of the child benefit by cabinet ministers “government showboating. “This is all getting ready for [the election in] October 2019.”

NDP families critic Brigitte Sansoucy said the child benefit itself simply isn’t enough to tackle child poverty. Indexing the benefit to inflation, she said, was “the least this government could do to help families in Canada.”