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Search results for: “node/poverty”

  • UNSPUN: Poverty Policy Choices and Winnipeg’s Inner City

    Provincial government policy can be designed to punish those in poverty, or to reduce poverty. Both approaches have been tried in Manitoba, the first in the 1990s and the other more recently. We can compare these approaches by examining Winnipeg’s inner city. Over the past 15 years, and especially the…

  • Budget 2017/18 No Strategy No Change to Poverty

    Low income Manitobans were hoping that this year’s budget would offer a plan to help lift them out of poverty. A well-funded strategy with targets and timelines for its implementation and for reducing poverty would give Manitobans confidence that their government is making poverty reduction a top priority. However, despite…

  • And then there was one: BC is now last province without a plan to tackle poverty

    On October 22, the Government of Saskatchewan announced in their Throne Speech that it would commit to the development of a poverty reduction strategy, making British Columbia the very last province in Canada without a plan to tackle poverty. This despite the fact BC has the highest or second-highest poverty…

  • BC budget moves in the right direction but too slowly to address pressing challenges like housing, climate, toxic drug supply and poverty

    With COVID centre stage for the past two years, Budget 2022 marked a shift back to normal. Yes, the budget earmarks $2 billion in contingencies for potential COVID needs, but this took up a mere half page of the main budget document. The budget narrative instead is framed around child…

  • Fast Facts: Proposed legislation a sentence of poverty for low income workers

    Working should be a route out of poverty, but for some, low wages are a poverty trap. The current minimum wage is inadequate as at $11/ hour, it places workers as far as $8,000 below the poverty line. Minimum wage should be increased through pre-announced steps to $15.53/ hour and…

  • Nova Scotia Alternative Budget

    The Cost of Poverty in the Atlantic Provinces

    Download 459.08 KB23 pages The purpose of this report is to underline the cost to the provincial governments of not addressing the needs of the population. The Atlantic region has had to invest to deal with the pandemic, first in terms of health care resources, and second, in terms of…

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    Raising the minimum wage is good for public health

    Soon we expect the Fair Wages Commission to advise the BC government on a path towards a $15 minimum wage and a plan for regular increases. This will be very good news for our province. Increasing the minimum wage is an important step in reducing poverty and income inequalities that…

  • An effective poverty reduction plan is not just a piece of paper

    Last week, First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition published its annual report card on child poverty in BC. As in past years, the results were sobering. Based on 2012 data, 20.6% of children, or one of five, live in poverty in BC. Nearly half of children living in…

  • Three decades lost

    Less than 1% reduction in child poverty in Nova Scotia since 1989 CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE FULL REPORT Halifax – In Nova Scotia there are 40,710 children or close to 1 in 4 children (24.2%) who live in poverty based on the most recent data. The 2019 Report Card…

  • Stop the Cheques, Invest in Education Instead

    Previously published in the Brandon Sun and the Winnipeg Free Press March 4, 2023 The Manitoba government is playing a shell game: using federal and inflationary windfall revenue to give out tax cuts while neglecting public spending needs. Manitobans want the province to stop the tax cuts and adequately fund…

  • Fast Facts: Manitoba Ranked Highest for Indigenous Child Poverty

    Children need to feel and see they are important members of their communities and treated as such. A new study out Tuesday finds that Manitoba has the highest number of on-reserve First Nations children in poverty in the country at 76 per cent and the highest indigenous children in poverty…

  • Fighting poverty through tax credit reform

    One way to fight extreme inequality is to have a progressive tax system. We mostly think about this in the form of progressive income tax brackets, which are structured so that those who have higher incomes pay higher tax rates. Other taxes, however, like sales tax or the carbon tax,…