Latest child poverty rate report shows Nova Scotia families brought above the poverty line by COVID-19 relief, playing a big role in break from higher rates

HALIFAX, NS – On the surface, it looks like a great headline about reducing child poverty in Nova Scotia. The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives in Nova Scotia published the data in its annual report. But co-author Dr. Lesley Frank says it was the result of bold and direct financial support that came from the federal COVID response. And they were temporary, as was the reduction in child poverty. The Acadia University professor also says there needs to be a plan, based on data from this report and the most recent census. And if we don’t pay now, we’ll pay a lot more later.

copy

Sheldon MacLeod: The Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, Nova Scotia chapter, has released its latest testimony on child poverty in our province. Nova Scotia’s child poverty rate has fallen by record numbers thanks to COVID-19 financial support. One of the report’s co-authors, Dr. Lesley Frank, is a professor in the sociology department at Acadia University. And thank you for joining me, I really appreciate it.

dr Leslie Frank: Thanks for inviting me, Sheldon.

SM: This is an annual report, this is the 2022 edition. And it sounds like good news. Is that good news?

LF: Well, it’s something to celebrate. You know, I’ve been writing the Child Poverty Report with the CCPA-NS for over a couple of decades. And there is often not much to celebrate. We have seen some reduction in child poverty at various times over the last 31 years. But we’ve never reached anything less than 24 percent child poverty in Nova Scotia in that time. So the celebration this year is that 2020 data shows that with some bold, swift government interventions, we can reduce child poverty. So in 2020 we had a rate of 18.4 percent.

SM: And you attribute much of that decline to the fact that federal programs were available. And those were cash programs. Those weren’t credits, that was hard money in my pocket. And it helped fill the bellies.

LF: That’s right. It was also a pretty quick action and easy to apply for. And we’ve seen the biggest drop in a single year since we’ve tracked child poverty rates. It fell by 24.3 percent. Sometimes it does not decrease at all or increases slightly.

SM: So that was something you hadn’t seen. What are people saying about the research you’ve done and the report you’ve produced from it?

LF: Of course, those in the know and those working with families affected by poverty and food insecurity who have done the hard work on the ground are not surprised. And I’m not surprised, because we knew that the actual level of investment that was coming from the federal government was likely to lower poverty rates. It was an amount higher than that of people living on pure government transfers, those who had no market income. The rate from the CERB was significantly higher than many low-income families had previously.

While there is a reduction, one in six children not helped still live in low-income communities in the province. So the pandemic benefits reduced the child poverty rate by 31 percent in that single year alone. They weren’t the only government transfers, if you add them all up, that were included in Canada’s child support and GST payments that people had previously received.

The overall reduction in child poverty is quite significant and in a single year. This is how it can be reduced. Without all these things, the child poverty rate would have been much higher, for example at 41%, which is 18.4.

SM: This is a snapshot of the past. And we look at food inflation, the lineups at the food banks, and the demand for those infrastructures. Is it inevitable that this number will go the other way?

LF: Well, we all expect that. Yes. We may not see that until we have data for 2022, because some of the gross benefits of the pandemic lingered into 2021. But from what we know from anecdotal conversations with our neighbors and from the stories told by family resource centers and by food banks, just the sheer despair people are experiencing.

They claim they’re seeing record numbers at food banks, Family Resource Center staff are strapped in on the ground and still getting the job done helping people access resources, but they’re also running a whole host of new food security interventions a way , which they had not done before. So it’s not just food banks that other organizations are also introducing in a number of different food-based interventions that may today be helping people access food in ways they wouldn’t have without those interventions.

But it doesn’t address the root causes of why people experience higher rates of poverty and food insecurity. Our tracking data is, as always, a bit sluggish. So the evidence comes after the stories, the quantitative evidence.

SM: This was due to a government’s response to a global pandemic. And often I hear people in the social services community say you either pay now or you pay much later when it matters, when it manifests in some other way. where are the lessons What can we tell politicians about what this tells us about humanity and the sociology of food?

LF: There is a real lesson in this testimony. It was good to write about it personally. As I said before, there is often not much of a message to write on the child poverty report. But the lesson we learned from what can happen if they act boldly when things happen quickly means a lot to kids. Kids can’t wait, you know, we’re going to tinker with that amount of support and increase the rate by $100 per family.

I mean it doesn’t help increase the poverty rate because the incomes of these families are so far below the poverty line. That only bold action, like setting a rate that we know is above the poverty line, will actually change the poverty rate. And so we can implement some tactics. And we read a lot, for example, about a small increase in income support that might buy you a bag of groceries, it does nothing to shift the needle, as I said, in poverty rates.

SM: This is clear, empirical evidence you can provide to a government, MLA or MP that this is something that can change people’s lives in real, measurable ways. This report also contained a number of recommendations. Tell me about some of them.

LF: Well, our first recommendation would be that we need a plan, right? We have to pay attention to the evidence. And we have to be realistic about what our interventions are. That means creating a poverty reduction plan that includes goals, timelines, and interventions that we know will lift families above the poverty line. If we want to see change, we know these poverty lines. And we need to make sure that income, whether it comes through wages or government transfers, gets us there.

Because children have short lives (during puberty), the effects are long-lasting and they cannot wait. They can’t wait for us to try this, try that, see what happens two years later. We need an actionable plan. I just want to add that it is important to realize that some groups of children are much poorer than others. So it’s not just about income. There are systemic discrimination and inequality dynamics that underscore why some groups of children have higher rates than others. And we’ve seen that year after year after year.

And with that testimony, we’ve been able to report on the 2020 census data, which allows us to break down child poverty rates by child group. So we know that racialized children are almost twice as likely to be affected by child poverty as nonracial children. Newly immigrated children in Nova Scotia have a child poverty rate of 32.6 percent. Indigenous children living on a reservation in Nova Scotia have a rate of 43.6 percent.

Unfortunately sometimes governments do a little, oh, let’s look at this poverty statistic with this little bit of data to support it, which paints a rosier picture. But often these data sources actually exclude, for example, all First Nations children living in reserve. So we need to be transparent with the data and look at all the data that’s in front of us when making these plans.

SM: Well, like you said, it feels good to know that something has changed. Unfortunately, reality and hunger bring us back to square one. Is there anything else we should add or you would like to say before we wrap up?

LF: Just one last thing I would say. There is something to celebrate. There is evidence that we can do it. And these interventions, which have been bold and have worked, cannot be temporary. We’ll pay later.

SM: dr Leslie Frank, professor in the second Health Canada Research Chair in Nutrition, Health and Social Justice at Acadia University in the Department of Sociology. Thanks a lot for this.

LF: Thanks for inviting me, Sheldon.