A new report card is sounding the alarm on childhood poverty in Nova Scotia. More than two in five Nova Scotian children are living in food-insecure households, according to Statistics Canada—a number that has been “steadily rising” in recent years, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives-Nova Scotia report warns. And it comes as provincially-funded school breakfast and pay-what-you-can lunch programs prepare to pause for the winter break.
On Tuesday, Dec 17, the CCPA-NS released the 2024 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia: Swift Action is Needed for Child and Family Wellbeing. The report draws on Statistics Canada data from 2022. That year marked the highest single-year increase in child poverty rates in Nova Scotia in decades. Between 2021 and 2022, the province’s child poverty rate jumped by 16%, to a shade less than one in four Nova Scotian children, or 23.8%. In the same year, the share of children under 18 who were food insecure—or lacked access to food “because of financial constraints”—rose from roughly one in three children to two in five.
The figures gave Nova Scotia the highest child poverty rate in Atlantic Canada and the fifth-highest in Canada.
The CCPA-NS report calls the increase “all the more troubling” because it represents the highest single-year increase in Nova Scotia since Ottawa pledged in 1989 to eradicate child poverty by 2000. “With more than one of every five children living in low-income families…we should be ashamed of the lack of progress and concerned about this troubling trend.”
The report also looks at how geography, age, family type and size, race and immigration influenced childhood poverty rates, and these findings include the following:
- Child poverty rates were highest in Digby (36.1%), Annapolis (34.4%), and Cape Breton (32.4%) and, despite all census divisions in Nova Scotia seeing an increased child poverty rate between 2021-22, Shelburne, Digby, and Annapolis saw the largest.
- There’s a wide range in smaller geographic divisions, meaning rural routes and postal areas. One-third of the postal areas reported child poverty rates of 30% and higher, but the range spanned from a low of 3.7% in Upper Tantallon to a high of 66.7% in North Preston.
- Higher child poverty rates in certain areas of urban Nova Scotia “are disguised” by wide variation within neighbouring Halifax and Dartmouth postal code zones.
- “Substantial” increases in child poverty rates between 2021 and 2022 in some areas, including rural communities in Western Nova Scotia like Meadowvale (99.5% increase), Wilmot (88.5% increase) and Barrington (80.5% increase).
- Similar to the CCPA-NS report card from last year, the child poverty rate for children under 6 was higher than for all children, at 26.4%
- One in two children living in lone-family households experienced poverty, versus one in nine for children in couple families.
- “Gender matters,” the report notes, as Census data previously analyzed by the CCPA-NS determined that “85% of lone-parent families are mother-led, and mother-led families had higher rates of child poverty than father-led families…underscoring the gendered nature of poverty.”
- Also drawing from the 2021 Census data, the report notes that low income among new immigrant children is just shy of one in three versus just shy of one in six for non-immigrant children.
- Based on 2022 tax filer data, the report notes that “there are higher child poverty rates in postal geographies for census profiles reporting high populations of African Nova Scotian children,” including in North Preston at 66.7%, East Preston at 40.9%, Bay View/Digby at 41% and Halifax’s North End at 34.9%
The report uses data from yearly tax filings, the Census and the annual Canadian Income Survey to measure family incomes for 2021-2022 and compares them with Canada’s official poverty measure, the market basket measure. The MBM compares a families income to the cost of goods and services needed to meet their basic needs, like food, clothing, footwear, transportation and shelter, while keeping a modest standard of living and uses that to determine whether a family falls under the poverty line.
“The rise in child poverty was by design and predictable”
If you want to look for what prompted the jump in Nova Scotia’s child poverty rate, you can start with the pulling back of COVID-19 era financial assistance programs, the CCPA-NS report argues. In the report’s accompanying press release, co-author Lesley Frank—a Tier II Canada Research Chair in Food, Health and Social Justice at Acadia University— says that while child poverty was “swiftly and dramatically reduced” in 2020 because of “income security benefits sufficient to bring families over the poverty line,” the federal government’s decision to drop programs like the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and the Canada Recovery Caregiving Benefit “negated all progress.” In turn, the rise in child poverty was “by design and predictable,” Frank adds. Today, an estimated 71,000 Nova Scotian children live in food-insecure families—the highest number recorded in the province.
“The health burden on children is significant and long-lasting,” Frank says. “How high will this number have to rise before different policy decisions are made?”
The report recommends eight policy solutions to the problem, including the following:
- “Implement and fund a Poverty Elimination Plan for Nova Scotia with targets and timelines to end child poverty by 2031.”
- “Immediately establish the Child and Youth Advocacy Office and develop targets and timelines in a Wellbeing Strategy for Children and Youth.”
- “Fundamentally transform the child welfare and social assistance systems to achieve meaningful rights-based, trauma-informed outcomes.”
- “Significantly improve and prioritize income support to lift families with children out of poverty.”
- “Centre intersectional solutions, taking a pro-equity, anti-colonial, anti-racist approach to uproot all forms of discrimination as root causes of child poverty.”
- “Realize and protect children’s right to housing and food.”
The CBC’s Celina Alders has reported on the food insecurity crisis in Nova Scotia and how community workers are trying to help. Volunteers in Amherst are sending students home with food to eat over the weekend, and Feed Nova Scotia has seen a 68% increase in people accessing food support since 2021.
Christine Saulnier, another co-author of the report and director of CCPA-NS, adds in the report’s release that the findings show that Nova Scotian children “have suffered more than most” from the “failure to realize the promise made 35 years ago to end child poverty.
“We know what changes in policies and systems work. The current approach only softens the blow of poverty and props up community charity.”
Saulnier applauds the provincial government for indexing income assistance rates to inflation but urges the province to “go further” and raise the base rate, “ensuring that these families have enough income to provide for what their children need.”
This article appears in Dec 1-18, 2024.