Brar and Raise the Rates managed to attract a fantastic amount of media attention, and sparked a much-needed and long-overdue public conversation about the inadequacy of welfare benefit rates. Simply put, the MLA on Welfare initiative was a huge success and fantastic public awareness exercise.

Such public awareness matters. Opinion polling we at CCPA commissioned a few years ago found, for example, that British Columbians, when asked cold, are generally split evenly on the question of whether welfare rates should be increased. But if the question is prefaced by simply telling people what rates are, support for an increase jumps to three-quarters. Meaning, when people move past the myths and learn the reality of how low benefit rates are, and how hard life on welfare actually is, they don’t like it. That’s good.

While most of the coverage of Brar’s month was sympathetic, a few negative voices were heard. In particular, the Minister responsible (Stephanie Cadieux) and the Fraser Institute made a number of media interventions in defense of BC’s abysmally low welfare benefit rates. Their comments indicate they truly need to get out of the office more — they simply have no understanding of what life on welfare is actually like.

Among the key points made by the Minister and Fraser economists was that we needn’t worry about the $610 basic rate, because a majority of welfare recipients receive more (either because they have children or a recognized disability), an amount they deem “adequate.” It’s true that most welfare recipients get more than the basic rate, but calling those rates “adequate” is way off the mark.

As the National Council of Welfare notes, those on welfare with children and those with a disability still live thousands of dollars below the poverty line. And extensive research conducted by the CCPA (a study I co-authored called Living on Welfare in BC, which followed real people on welfare over a two year period, rather than just pondering numbers as the Fraser folks have) found that even those in receipt of the higher (supposedly “adequate”) rates were still frequently reliant on food banks and other charities to meet basic needs.

Indeed, we found low rates often force people to make destructive choices – such as remaining in abusive relationships – that are harmful, and for which we are all paying.

Adequate? The family welfare incomes don’t even reach the Fraser Institute’s own thin-gruel poverty line – a line that is itself significantly lower than every other low-income measure produced in the country.

The government and Fraser Institute maintain they don’t want welfare to be “attractive.” Well, we are a long way from that. The reality is that life on welfare is a day-to-day struggle in which all one’s time and effort is spent merely meeting basic needs for food and shelter, which ironically makes it harder to find work.

If Brar’s month-long experiment teaches us anything, it is that rates need to be substantially higher, and that we need a better – more rational as well as compassionate – way to set welfare benefit rates. That’s just what Steve Kerstetter proposed in his 2006 CCPA-BC policy paper A Better Way to Set Welfare Rates. It is unconscionable that governments are content to hold welfare rates frozen year after year, as inflation eats away at the real value of a welfare cheque. And currently no clear rationale guides the setting of rates. Instead, rates should be tied to the actual costs of basic needs (ensuring that shelter, nutritious food, clothing, transportation, and other core needs are affordable) – something that is clearly not the case today. And then benefit rates should increase annually in line with inflation.

The Living Wage for Families Campaign, along with 54 organizations representing over 300,000 British Columbians, recently issued an Open Letter calling on all municipal election candidates to help low-income families in their cities by passing a Living Wage policy if they are elected (available here).

Many families are struggling to get by; they are working hard but just can’t keep up with ever rising living expenses. Despite the recent increase in the minimum wage, it is estimated that at least 25% of families with children in the Lower Mainland still earn less than a living wage income, that is, a wage that allows them to cover their basic living expenses (calculated at $18.81/hour in Metro Vancouver). Fifty percent of single parents with children don’t earn a living wage. This is especially true of the ‘hidden workers’ who support the work of our cities; the people who clean our buildings, who provide our security services, or who serve us our food.

Why should municipal governments care about this? Because it is municipal governments themselves that end up paying a large price for these low wages.   Families earning low wages mean there is less money circulating in the local economy, and parents (forced to take on more hours or a second job to make ends meet) have less time to spend with their children. Municipal governments and school boards consequently end up filling the gaps by paying for additional services and policing costs.

Some business leaders are concerned about the living wage. They claim that it will negatively affect the private sector. Yet leading businesses around the world are voluntarily agreeing to become living wage employers. Businesses like KPMG and LUSH in the UK, and now Vancity credit union here at home. These employers commit to pay the living wage, not only to their direct staff, but also to contracted staff in traditionally low-paying sectors. And here’s the big surprise – they have all determined that doing so is good business practice.

The call for a living wage has also been falsely labeled as a “union” demand. In fact, most people earning less than the living wage are not unionized. Moreover, the call for a living wage has come from a broad cross-section of organizations – faith groups, parents groups, immigrant groups and community organizations such as the United Way of the Lower Mainland and the Health Officers Council of BC. They understand that a living wage is key to ensuring healthy childhood development and community cohesion.

Opponents of the living wage have claimed that small businesses will go bankrupt, that cities will face huge cost increases, and that even your granny will be negatively affected. Yet these attacks conveniently forget to mention that countless studies have shown that the cost to cities of living wage policies are minimal – New Westminster’s Living Wage Policy is costing less than a quarter of one percent of their budget – or that families who earn living wages have more money in their pockets to spend in local businesses.

Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, nobody can deny the fact that many families are struggling to get by. The data indicates that child poverty in BC is mainly a low-wage story; the vast majority of the 100,000 children living in poverty have at least one parent in a low wage job, with a third working full time in the paid labour force.

This is an area where municipal governments can and should lead. In doing so, BC cities will be joining 140 US cities who already have living wage ordinances of some form.

Will living wage policies result in a slight increase in costs for municipal taxpayers. The short answer is “Yes, but only slightly.” But the real question is this: do we as municipal taxpayers want people employed –– on our dime –– at a wage rate that cannot ensure healthy childhood development or allow parents the time to be with their children and participate in the social and civic lives of our communities?

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Michael McCarthy Flynn is an organizer with Metro Vancouver Living Wage for Families campaign. Seth Klein is BC Director of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and a co-author of Working for a Living Wage.

The proposed Act also outlines how the strategy should be development, and the broad contents of what it should cover. (The proposed Act should be posted here shortly.)

During his leadership campaign, Adrian Dix committed to a poverty reduction plan. So it is gratifying to see how the Opposition would seek to make that commitment real. In other provinces, initiatives such as this have been supported by all parties, so it would be nice to see the Government support this Act.

Importantly, the proposed Act outlines how a government should be held accountable for progress. It commits to embed targets in legislation, to appoint a lead Minister, to have a cabinet committee to oversee the strategy co-chaired by the Premier, to have an outside advisory committee to hold the government to account, and to annual reporting to monitor progress. That all signals a strong commitment.

In the coming months, I hope to hear more from the Opposition about what their first steps would be, as initial needed actions are known and needn’t wait for the development of a full strategy.

In it, we praised Cristy Clark for her quick action on the minimum wage, announcing that it would move to $10.25/hour by May of next year. Of course, kudos should go to all those who have campaigned on this issue for a long time.  We did express concern about what happens after May 2012, emphasizing that ultimately, the minimum wage should be based on a a clear rationale, namely, tie it to the poverty line and index it, so that we can cease having this debate every couple years.

On a related point: some critics have said that increasing the minimum wage as Premier Clark has done won’t reduce poverty. Well, yes and no. If the minimum wage were now linked to the poverty line (such that a single person working full time, full year at the minimum wage would have an income at the Low Income Cut-Off), it would need to be about $11.50 in 2011. So if you are only increasing the minimum wage to $10.25 by next year, you are not going to see any noticeable reduction in the poverty rate (the breadth of poverty). However, this new increase will have an impact on the depth of poverty, bringing thousands of households and individuals closer to the poverty line. And that matters.

One other outstanding concern relates to the newly introduced lower minimum wage for people who serve liquor. Their minimum wage will only reach $9 in May 2012, based on the premise that they will make up the difference in tips. While there are certainly high-end bars where workers make great tips, there are also many lower-end and quiet ones where workers do not make $1/hour in tips. And personally, when I tip, I’d like to know that I’m paying someone extra (above a poverty wage).

BC Federation of Labour President Jim Sinclair also raises some important flags about this alcohol servers wage in another Vancouver Sun opinion piece (here).  Similar concerns were raised in a short report produced by the CCPA’s Manitoba office in 2001, available here. The CCPA report notes the following about a “tipping wage”:

The majority of those we interviewed do not believe a two-tiered tipping wage is a just or desirable policy. And many say that, based on their experience, such a policy would be almost unmanageable and very much open to abuse. A little less than half of our respondents receive an average of one dollar or more in tips each shift…

Many workers–both those who do and those who do not earn tips–feel that people deserve tips as a compliment to their wage…

Many workers do not have control of their tips even once the tips have been received. Many businesses divide tips evenly among the employees; often this is done after each shift by those who have worked the shift. But many workers receive their tips only every two weeks and must trust others, most commonly management, to fairly divide the money. To add to this, because of the variable nature of tips, there is no way of knowing how much one is entitled to over each bi-weekly period.

Minimally, having gone this route, this new policy will require careful enforcement and evaluation.

Well, here’s a very different proposition: the leader and party who gets out ahead of the crises we face – who articulates an understanding of their severity, matched by a willingness to meet these challenges with bold solutions and rally us to action – will be politically rewarded.

Take for example the case of climate change and the false debate during the last provincial election over BC’s carbon tax. Both major parties, in effect, told the public, “You won’t have to pay for the changes we need to make.” The Liberals said, “Yes, we will have a carbon tax, but we will return all the money to you in recycled tax cuts in other areas.” The NDP said, “We will go after industry, not you.” No one was speaking the truth, namely, “This challenge is great, and in the near term, we’re all going to have to help pay for climate action, and make some major changes to how we live, work, move around and play.” Ideally, coupled with an inspiring vision: “But done right, the result will be a better quality of life, more inclusive communities, new green jobs, and a more equitable society.”

Who among those vying for leadership today will say, “I firmly accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that climate change is a pressing reality; the defining issue of our time. Its effects are already being profoundly felt in British Columbia. Meeting this challenge will entail fundamental changes, and time is of the essence. If you don’t want a leader who will be guided by this reality, then vote for someone else.”

In the face of the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us, who will say, “I believe public policy should be guided not by the demands and anxieties of the wealthiest among us, but by the needs and wellbeing of the poorest and economically insecure, and I will make policy decisions through that lens.”

Who is willing to say, “I think there is no excuse for poverty and homelessness in a society as wealthy as ours, and their elimination will be a core priority of my government.” Indeed, who might say, “Judge my government by this measure, not by the increasingly less relevant measure of GDP growth.”

And perhaps most daring but honest of all: who will admit that to successfully accomplish these tasks –– confronting climate change, doing so in a manner that provides economic security for modest and middle income families, and eradicating poverty –– will require substantial increases in government spending and investments, which in turn will require an overall increase in taxes. (Now there’s a reality precious few politicians want to admit to, even though most business leaders quietly share this view.)

I could name many more environmental and economic truths that politicians dare not speak, coupled with bold policy ideas they may privately support but which advisors convince them are not realistic. Beneath them all is a simple question: Who will articulate a vision for a province that is truly ecologically sustainable and socially just? (CCPA senior economist Marc Lee offers some of his ideas for what might constitute such a vision here.)

Perhaps one of the reasons that voter turnout is so poor is that a sizable chunk of the electorate is simply uninspired and disaffected, having come reasonably to the conclusion that none of those vying for power is truly speaking to the severity of the challenges we face.

In contrast, one of the reasons behind the recent election of someone like Rob Ford in Toronto, or the historic successes of people like Mike Harris, is not that what they espouse corresponds to the values of the majority of voters (and their “solutions” are simplistic in the extreme), but rather, people like that these leaders brashly say what they think and do what they say.

Or for a more “progressive” example, take the case of recently departed premier Danny Williams (paradoxically a millionaire conservative). He led a bold poverty reduction plan, and asked that his political future be tied to its success. And he brashly stood up to resource corporations (oil companies and AbitibiBowater), demanding that Newfoundlanders receive a fair social contract from these firms. Newfoundlanders hugely rewarded such leadership, making Williams the most popular politician in Canada.

Political boldness such as this comes as a blast of fresh air into the otherwise stale re-circulated air that characterizes politics-as-usual, in which caution is the watchword (and in which progressives vying for leadership fail to offer up a competing vision with as much clarity).

And so a plea to the leadership contenders: trust the public. Trust that we can handle an honest conversation about the challenges we face.

A risky political proposition? Perhaps. But then again, perhaps winning without a mandate to lead us through major change – rooted in fairness and security – isn’t worth the victory.

The piece highlights cuts to welfare, and notes, “One of the keenest slashers was British Columbia, which despite being one of the richest provinces has one of the highest rates of child poverty (10.4%) after taxes on family income.”

It continues:

Half a dozen provincial governments, including those of populous Ontario and Quebec, have launched poverty-reduction programmes; many include attempts to prod or help people back into work. Newfoundland, helped by royalties from oil and mining, has cut its poverty rate in half (to 6.5%). Earlier this month, a House of Commons committee urged the federal government to adopt a national strategy. The response of Stephen Harper’s Conservative administration was that the best long-term strategy to fight poverty is “the sustained employment of Canadians”. That is certainly a necessary condition, but is it sufficient? Both the government and its critics might ponder why it is that growth seems to bypass so many.

Too true.

First, last week brought news that Danny Williams is stepping down as premier of Newfoundland and Labrador. Personally, I’m sad to see him go. Rarely mentioned in the news reports last week about his record of accomplishments is the leadership Williams brought to the poverty reduction file, not only in Newfoundland, but nationally. Newfoundland’s Poverty Reduction Plan was among the most bold in the country, and it was driven by Williams himself. The one downside of the Newfoundland plan was that it did not embed specific targets in legislation. So hopefully it will remain a center-piece of the Newfoundland government after Williams’ departure.

Second, two weeks ago, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development, and the Status of Persons with Disabilities (the HUMA Committee) released its excellent and long-awaited final report on the federal role in poverty reduction. Its core recommendation: “We are recommending that the federal government join with the provinces to introduce an action plan for reducing poverty in Canada.” This is truly an outstanding report, and managed to find all-party support on most of its many recommendations. The full report can be downloaded here. A number of national organizations are asking people to lobby the government in support of the HUMA report’s recommendations. You can find an easy way to add you voice here (on the website of Make Poverty History).

Also two weeks ago, Food Banks Canada released its annual HungerCount report (you can find it here). Food Bank use went up 5% in BC (comparing March 2010 with March 2009), and was up 9.2% nationally.

Finally, last week also saw the release of the annual report cards on child poverty. The BC Report Card was released by First Call and SPARC BC, and can be found here. BC has now had the highest child poverty rate in Canada for seven years running.

First, on Tuesday, BC Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall released a special report entitled Investing in Prevention. The report received quite a lot of media attention. However, most of the coverage dealt with the common-space issues of healthy eating, exercise and smoking. Almost no attention was paid to two of Dr Kendall’s five key recommendations. Specifically, Recommendation 2 calls on the government to:

Recommit to early childhood development. The report 15 by 15: A Comprehensive Policy Framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC, produced by the Human Early Learning Partnership, provides a blueprint for government to follow.

And Recommendation 3 says:

Look at those provinces and territories that have committed to poverty reduction (e.g., Quebec, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, New Brunswick, Manitoba, and Yukon) and create a “Made in BC” program.

And more good news: this morning at the annual Union of BC Municipalities convention, the UBCM delegates passed a resolution calling on the province to adopt a comprehensive poverty reduction plan.

You can hardly tell by their actions. BC did introduce full-day kindergarten in some communities this fall, but other than that the family policy front has been rather quiet lately.

The latest childhood vulnerability numbers won’t tip you off either as vulnerability has grown over the last decade, reaching 30.3% in 2009/10.

Don’t get me wrong. Setting goals is an significant first step and the government should be commended for taking a stand on this important issue.

However, without changing policy and taking action goals remain nothing more than laudable aspirations.

This is precisely the point that the Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP) at UBC makes with their new BC Smart Policy Report Card, released earlier in September. The report card assesses government actions in the area of family policy and compares them to benchmark recommendations developed by HELP in their 15 by 15 report, which was commissioned by the BC Business Council last year.

The findings? There has been some movement on the family policy front over the past year, but the BC government has only made about 5% of the recommended new investments in family policy. At this rate, the researchers estimate that it would take 20 years to reduce early childhood vulnerability to 15%, or 15 years longer than the government’s stated goal of “15 by 15.” It seems that the provincial government is well on its way of failing to achieve their goal unless they take decisive action on family policy and soon.

Many would have been satisfied to end it here with calling current government family policy a failure and making a call for bolder action. But HELP’s report card moves beyond name calling and assigning failing grades to analyze what it would take for smart family policy changes to be implemented.

HELP researchers recognize that politicians are rarely leaders; they follow what they perceive to be the popular mood among their constituents. So HELP’s report card looks beyond the need for political leadership and explores the role of the broader community in pushing for increased investments in smart family policy. Here’s their read on where the broader community is at and where it needs to be:

HELP’s recommendations for moving forward? An broad-based, frank discussion about priorities and trade offs around family policy.

British Columbians need to talk about how to find new funding or reallocate existing dollars in order to invest in the social and economic benefits that smart family policy will promote.

HELP researchers end their report card with an appeal to all British Columbians to take responsibility for changing the status quo:

Please start talking about [the key questions and trade offs] at your dinner tables, among your neighbours, in your offices and with your political leaders.

I fully agree that starting the conversation is how we move forward. So why not start by posting a comment here on the blog and, as I’ve noted before, by participating in the 2011 BC Provincial Budget Consultation?

On the other hand, social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have shown how situations can override a person’s usual inclinations and cause them to do something which they would normally abhor, such as killing other people in wartime.

Our understanding of human behaviour has grown dramatically with the development of neuroscience. Many of my future posts will consider what these discoveries tell us about creating healthy human beings, and healthy societies.

Of course, these are very political questions.

One key concept is that of  “outside-inside” (in the words of psychologist Arthur Janov). We tend to internalize what we experience in our environments. Food and air, for instance, are obvious examples. It matters whether our food and air are clean or if they are polluted with various toxins.

A second key concept is “neuroplasticity.”  Neuroscience has shown that our brains are not static and unchanging. For instance, every thought and feeling in our minds corresponds to a physical change in our brains. Learn something new, and your brain changes.

In other words, every experience in our lives alters our brain.

A third element are the so-called “mirror-neurons,” which are a fundamental to our “social brain” (Dr. Dan Siegel). In brief, these neurons fire in our brains when we observe the feelings of others. In fact, we absorb the feelings of other people so much that Siegel suggested that we call them “sponge neurons.”

Finally, people tend to absorb the dominant values and beliefs of their culture, including its political ideology. Marx wrote that the ideas of the ruling class are the dominant ideas of society, and Gramsci elaborated on the concept of this ideological hegemony.

As political scientist Gary Olson wrote in Capitalism Short Circuits Our Moral Hard-Wiring, “Capitalists maintain domination, in part, through subtly but actively creating society’s prevailing cultural norms.”

Our brains as well as our beliefs are shaped, more than we realize, by the ideology of capitalism, with its emphasis on greed, selfishness, competition and individualism.

In the words of  Frans B.M. de Waal, “You need to indoctrinate empathy out of people in order to arrive at extreme capitalist positions.”

These norms and expectations often overrule our natural compassion, even though it is now clear that “the human brain is hard-wired for empathy,” in Olson’s view.

Finally, research has shown that poverty (e.g. stress, overwork, poor nutrition) take a terrible toll, not only on adults, but children, and even babies in the womb. Not only is physical health damaged, but emotional and intellectual health suffer.

We need to go beyond these symptoms and address the root causes of human suffering.

Six provinces now have poverty reduction plans, although most are still fairly new, and therefore we don’t yet have data to tell us what kind of success they are meeting with, the exceptions being Quebec and Newfoundland. What their plans and results tell us is that poverty isn’t inevitable – that policy matters.

The example of Newfoundland is particularly instructive. There, the Conservative government of Danny Williams has made poverty reduction one of its overarching goals. Back in 2004, Newfoundland’s poverty rate was the second highest in Canada after BC’s. It is now 6.5 per cent, the third lowest in Canada. Their plan has led to concrete policy changes: welfare benefit rates have gone up (and were already higher than BC’s relative to the LICO) and they have been indexed (they go up every year according to the CPI); the minimum wage has been increased to $10; and the province followed Quebec and made dental care universal for children.

Ontario now also has a plan. Indeed, their plan is legislated, with a 25% reduction in 5 years. And notably, that legislation, the Ontario Poverty Reduction Act, was passed with unanimous all-party support, one week before BC’s provincial election last May, at the height of the recession. Like Newfoundland, they have a cross-ministerial secretariat, with a lead minister. And their lead minister must present annual progress reports. They have struck a welfare review panel, undertaking a comprehensive review of all the social assistance rates and rules. And they have gone the route of introducing an Ontario Child Tax Credit (like the federal one) worth $1,300 a year (another policy vehicle for increasing the incomes of low-income families, whether their income comes from welfare or paid employment).

More recently, New Brunswick has tabled their plan. The government there has fundamentally altered the tone of the debate, particularly about welfare. They too have legislated their plan in what they call the Economic and Social Inclusion Act. They too have all-party support. They have enacted some very large increases in welfare benefit rates, and indicated that this is only the start. And they have increased and indexed the minimum wage. And they too have a secretariat to coordinate plans.

The key common features of these plans are these:

• They have been advanced with all-party support
• They have specific targets and timelines, which in most cases are embedded in legislation.
• They are comprehensive (meaning they deal with income – both social assistance and other government income supports, as well as measures to boost labour market income; but they also address the social infrastructure on which low and modest income families depend, such as housing, education, child care, and community health care; and they have specific measures to address poverty among those populations where poverty is most acute, such as Aboriginal people, recent immigrants, people with disabilities and metal illness, and single parents).
• They have accountability mechanisms, such as public consultations, funding for independent monitoring groups, and obligations to report annually on progress. A key need is for timeline benchmarks that are frequent enough that a government can be held accountable within the life of each mandate.
• There is a cross-ministry secretariat to coordinate and integrate plans, and to ensure that policies do not act at cross-purposes.

(The preceding was part of my recent presentation to the BC Legislature’s Standing Committee on Children and Youth. For the full presentation, click here

And to join the call for a BC poverty reduction plan, click here

Among the points I raised with the committee: too often this issue gets lost in a fruitless debate about how to measure poverty. The simple truth is that no measure is perfect. But by whatever measure one uses ­­–– the LICO (low-income cut-off) before-tax, the LICO after-tax, or the Market Basket Measure –– BC has the highest overall poverty rate and the highest child poverty rate in Canada. So we need a plan to change this reality.

The point is to pick a consistent measure (or a set of measures), which allows us to monitor progress over time and relative to other jurisdictions.

And when one compares BC’s performance (using either the LICO or the MBM) in this way – relative to the historic norm and relative to others – what emerges is not good.

The poverty and child poverty rates have come down in recent years (at least up to 2007, the last year for which we have data). That is to be expected. Generally, the poverty rate tracks the economic business cycle. For this reason, people are rightly worried that the poverty rate in 2008 and surely in 2009 will go back up (already we know from the annual Hunger Count report that food bank use was back up 15% in 2009 – an early warning).

But even within the data leading up to 2007, there are worrying elements:

• For example, after a near unprecedented period of economic growth, spanning from the end of the recession in the early 1990s to 2007, one would have expected to see much more of a decline in the poverty rate. But that didn’t happen. Instead, by 2007, the overall BC poverty rate (at 11%, using the after-tax LICO) had still not managed to attain the 1989 trough of about 10% reached before the 1990 recession.

• With respect to child poverty, the performance is even less impressive. 1989 was also the year in which the House of Commons resolved to end child poverty by 2000. As we all know, that didn’t happen, and indeed, the national child poverty rate by 2007 saw no progress – we were right back to where we started in 1989. But this masks provincial differences. In fact, most provinces have seen a modest improvement. The national picture is weakened by the fact that only two province saw negative progress in that time – Ontario and BC.  Indeed BC realized the least progress since the House of Commons’ ill-fated resolution, with child poverty increasing by 30 per cent between 1989 and 2007.

• Also, while the national child poverty rate has consistently gone down since the mid 1990s, BC alone saw a disturbing upward spike in the years 2002, 2003 and 2004 (again, you see this using either the LICO or MBM). This is likely a result on welfare policy changes instituted in 2002.

It is instructive to look at how BC does relative to some other provinces, and in particular, relative to Quebec and Newfoundland, as they are the provinces with the longest standing poverty reduction plans.

In many respects, the MBM is a better measure, as it is more reflective of the actual costs of basic goods in each place (such as differences in the cost of housing). However, data only goes back to 2000, and for the first few years, HRSDC was not reliably producing annual updates. But that appears to now be changing.

Importantly, the success in Quebec and Newfoundland isn’t just about an improved economy and job creation. Notably, if one were to look at market income alone, the child poverty rate in both of these places in 2007 was higher than in BC. It is after incorporating government transfers that their poverty rates fall below us. The lesson: government policy makes a difference.

Conversely, when we rely only on the market, economic growth and job creation, the results with respect to poverty reduction are weak. That is what we see in the BC case, where we have recorded very low unemployment in recent years (up to the onset of the recession), but poor progress on child poverty. In BC, the story of child poverty is primarily as low-wage story; 56% of poor children in BC live in households with at least one parent working full-year full-time in the paid labour force.  That’s why a plan needs to address issues such as the minimum wage, employment standards, and a living wage. And that’s why, when we call for a poverty plan, and the response from the Premier is that the government’s goal is to have the lowest unemployment rate that we can – that goal, while laudable, is insufficient.

Here’s an excerpt:

B.C. had the third-highest increase in unemployment in the country during the recession. Some 51,800 jobs were lost between October 2008 and October 2009, representing 2.2 per cent of B.C.’s total jobs. Unemployment increased over this period to 8.3 per cent from 5.2 per cent.

While the number of EI recipients rose sharply as unemployment grew, with nine B.C. urban communities experiencing an increase of 115 per cent or more in the number of EI recipients, coverage remained low, rising to 48.2 per cent in October 2009. In other words, more than half of B.C.’s unemployed were not receiving benefits, despite the fact that the province’s economy was one of the most devastated by the recession.

Citizens for Public Justice, along with Canada Without Poverty, has been leading a campaign called Dignity for All – a national call to end poverty in Canada.

Last night (April 26), New Westminster City Council voted unanimously to adopt the first municipal Living Wage policy in Canada. They have used the broad definition of the family living wage, developed two years ago by CCPA, First Call and the Victoria Community Council (meaning, modelled on a family of four with two young children), and applied the policy to both direct staff and contractors, which is fantastic, as it means this now sets a national standard/precedent for similar policies/bylaws. Hopefully, other cities will follow soon.

The motion was as follows:

That the City establish a Living Wage Policy that is tied to an hourly rate established each year by the Living Wage for Families Campaign; and,

That the Living Wage policy will apply to both full time and part time employees; and,

That there be no threshold in terms of dollar value of a contract or number of employees; and,

That the policy apply to persons that perform physical work on City premises and properties; and,

That staff bring back information to Council regarding implications of the Living Wage on contracted services.”

It’s a great win for the Metro Vancouver Living Wage for Families campaign (which includes First Call, CCPA, ACORN, HEU, and many others). Special recognition should go to the lead city councillor on this, Jaimie McEvoy, and to BC ACORN which initiated this effort in New West.

The first of these short reports was posted to their website this week.

The report includes a startling finding — not only does BC have the highest child poverty rate, our province has also realized the least progress since the House of Commons’ ill-fated 1989 resolution to end child poverty. Make that negative progress. While most provinces saw a drop in their child poverty rate between 1989 and 2007, only Ontario and BC saw the situation worsen, with BC experiencing the largest increase (of 30%).

Here are the details:

Let’s take a longer-term view of the child poverty statistics and compare poverty rates twenty years ago in 1989 and in 2007.  The year 1989 was the best year of the 1980s for the economy, and the national child poverty rate was 15.3 percent.  It was also the year that the House of Commons voted unanimously to work to end child poverty by the year 2000.

Canada never got anywhere near that goal.  In fact, the national child poverty rate in 2007 was 15 percent.  The year 2007, like 1989, came at the end of a long cycle of economic growth prior to the current recession.

The table shows the poverty rates for Canada and each of the provinces in 1989 and 2007.

CHILD POVERTY RATES IN 1989 AND 2007, CANADA AND ALL PROVINCES
	1989	2007	% CHANGE
Alberta	19.3	11.2	-42%
Prince Edward Island	13.5	8.3	-39%
Newfoundland and Labrador	20.0	13.0	-35%
Saskatchewan	21.9	16.7	-24%
Manitoba	22.7	18.8	-17%
Nova Scotia	16.1	14.9	-7%
New Brunswick	17.9	16.7	-7%
Quebec	16.0	14.9	-7%
CANADA	15.3	15.0	-2%
Ontario	11.9	14.5	+22%
British Columbia	14.5	18.8	+30%
Source: Statistics Canada, Income Trends in Canada  1976 to 2007 (Low Income Cut-Offs Before Taxes)

Eight provinces reported declines in the child poverty rate in this 20 year period, some of which were dramatic.  British Columbia and Ontario were the only provinces that did worse over this time period, with BC the worst by far.  Together, child poverty in these two provinces kept the national child poverty rate from falling significantly.

The provincial government of Ontario recently passed anti-poverty legislation with the unanimous support of the legislature that seeks to reduce the child poverty rate by 25 percent over five years.