Pandemic hits Manitoba’s poor hardest

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/04/2020 (1715 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SOME might say the middle of a pandemic is an odd time to release a report on child poverty in Manitoba. After all, we are busy with slowing the spread of the coronavirus and trying to protect individuals and families from its economic impacts.

But, the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, in collaboration with Campaign 2000 to End Child Poverty, released the report Broken Promise, Stolen Futures: Child and Family Poverty in Manitoba on April 8, precisely because of two factors related to the pandemic.

First, children living in poverty are at greater risk than children in more affluent families during the pandemic. They are more likely to have entered the pandemic with compromised health status, and to be experiencing food insecurity and chronic stress, which can affect their immune systems. Many of them live in crowded households, which do not have the resources to purchase supplies for frequent hand-washing and surface cleaning.

Similarly, many poor parents do not have the resources for home delivery of groceries. Some of these parents are essential workers involved in low-paying jobs in service industries, as home care aides and as cleaning staff and aides in health-care facilities. They are also more likely to rely on public transportation to get to their jobs, and therefore at higher risk of bringing infections home.

Second, in the recovery that follows the pandemic, poor children cannot afford a return to normal because normal was not very good. The report demonstrates there are 85,450 children living in poverty in Manitoba (census family low income measure, after tax for 2017, the latest data available). This means that one out of every 3.6 Manitoba children (27.9 per cent) is poor, the highest rate of any province and 8.3 percentage points above the national rate.

We need increased investment in poverty reduction, not cutbacks based on austerity to pay off pandemic costs.

There is something ironic about governments’ responses to the pandemic. Why are the benefits offered through the Canada Emergency Response Benefit more generous than the wages working parents of many poor children earn in normal times, and than the welfare benefits that support many poor families with pre-school children, parents with disabilities, and those unable to find work?

Poverty reduction was important in Manitoba before the pandemic, and it is doubly important now. Beyond our collective moral obligation to care for our children, there is strong evidence that child poverty impairs health status, limits educational attainment and is a barrier to success in the labour market.

A 2019 consensus report of experts assembled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in the United States has concluded that “The weight of the causal evidence indicates that income poverty itself causes negative child outcomes, especially when it begins in early childhood and/or persists throughout a large share of a child’s life.”

These impacts of child poverty generate costs in health care, social service, and educational and criminal justice systems, and also rob the economy of the optimum contributions of adults who experienced poverty as children. Poverty also stands in the way of achieving Canadian values of fairness and equality of opportunity.

Beyond the overall child-poverty rate, there are other indicators of the gravity of the situation in Manitoba. Children in single parent families (63.1 per cent), those under age six (31.6 per cent), Indigenous children and children of immigrants (29.1 per cent) all experienced higher child poverty rates than the general population. Among Indigenous children, First Nations children on reserve exhibit the shameful rate of 65 per cent, while more than half (53 per cent) living off-reserve are in poverty.

Children living in poverty in Manitoba live in much deeper poverty than in Canada as a whole. For example, typical lone-parent families with two children in Manitoba would need $15,749 just to reach the poverty line, compared to only $12,438 in Canada as a whole. The typical couple struggling in poverty with two children in Manitoba is living at $12,752 below the poverty line, while the Canadian average is $10,462 below.

Progress has been slow in Manitoba. In the 28 years from 1989 to 2017, the child-poverty rate in Manitoba decreased by only 1.1 percentage points. This amounts to an average decrease of 0.04 percentage points per year — a rate at which it will take another 697.5 years to eliminate child poverty in Manitoba.

We cannot say that child-poverty reduction can wait for more prosperous times. Poor children need an aggressive recovery — not only from the coronavirus pandemic, but from the ongoing poverty epidemic.

Sid Frankel is an associate professor in the faculty of social work at the University of Manitoba and board member for Basic Income Manitoba.