People in poverty need policy solutions, not a report card 

Last week, the BC Government released the first update to the Poverty Reduction Strategy since the inaugural plan in 2019. As organizations long committed to ending poverty in BC, we hoped to see plans for how the government would achieve the targets that they set in the spring—reducing the overall poverty rate in the province by 60% over the next 10 years. Unfortunately, the 2024 Poverty Reduction Strategy is less of a strategy and more of a report card on the work already happening.

Context

CCPA-BC has been advocating for a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy in BC since 2008 and co-founded the BC Poverty Reduction Coalition (BC PRC) in 2009 to push the province to develop one. CCPA-BC is also a co-founder of Living Wage for Families BC, a program born out of work on reducing child poverty.

British Columbia was one of the last provinces to implement such a strategy, with its first poverty reduction plan introduced in 2019. The Poverty Reduction Strategy Act mandates the government to develop and update a poverty reduction plan every five years and produce annual reports on the strategy’s progress, overseen by an independent advisory committee.

What has been achieved to date

It is important to recognize and give credit for the meaningful changes that have lifted many individuals out of poverty and kept others from slipping into poverty over the past five years. 

These include reforms to archaic and stigmatizing welfare rules that delayed and denied access to assistance, the introduction of free post-secondary education for former foster care children, the Get On Board program, which provides free transit to kids 12 and under, improvements in access to legal aid, substantial investments in child care affordability, increases to the minimum wage, and notable increases in the BC Family Benefit and the BC Climate Action Tax credit for single individuals. The list of accomplishments in the report is extensive, and the impact of these changes should not be understated.

New targets

In March 2024, the government announced new targets to reduce poverty by 60%, child poverty by 75% and a new target to reduce seniors’ poverty by 50% by 2034. We are glad to see the new focus on seniors’ poverty and attention paid to what will surely be an increasingly pressing issue.

Although we welcome these targets, they should have been more ambitious with clearer short-term targets alongside long-term goals. We advocated for a strategy that would ensure all residents of the province have incomes and supports that reach at least 75% of the official poverty line. Unfortunately, the 2024 strategy does not include any concrete plans to reach this bar.

Statistics Canada data shows that half of Canadians living in poverty are in deep poverty, yet there remains no target for reducing deep poverty in the province. The strategy also lacks  attention to single individuals without children who represent the largest group experiencing poverty. 

Further, the rates for social assistance, though raised incrementally over the past five years, remain well below the poverty line and will continue to keep people there. People on assistance still have to navigate clawbacks and complex income restrictions that make exiting poverty nearly impossible.

Good ideas, vague on detail

The 2024 Poverty Reduction Strategy presents a comprehensive picture of the cycle of poverty, its systemic causes, and key interventions to break this cycle. This poverty reduction plan pays increased attention to important areas for intervention, such as Indigenous sovereignty, food security, issues faced by people with disabilities, and the role employment can play in lifting people out of poverty.

The 2024 plan articulates a strong understanding of some of the systemic root causes of poverty. It explicitly includes the need to address racism, discrimination, and colonialism as essential components of poverty reduction.

Indigenous Sovereignty

It is an important step forward for the poverty reduction strategy to put clearly that colonization is at the root of Indigenous poverty. The plan acknowledges that the ongoing violence of settler colonialism is at the core of the persistent and disproportionate poverty rates for Indigenous people and reaffirms a commitment to Indigenous self-determination and self-government, including also Indigenous Food Sovereignty measures. Addressing the recommendations from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMWIG)  Final Report could also have significant positive impacts if fully implemented.

However, it would have been good to see more specific targets around land back, as well as an Indigenous-specific Poverty Reduction plan for the province, given the deepened impacts and higher rates of poverty for Indigenous Peoples. 

Persons with Disabilities

The plan acknowledges that people with disabilities are more likely to experience poverty. However, until the disability rates are raised, most people with disabilities in BC will continue to experience deep levels of poverty. The existing clawbacks on Persons With Disabilities (PWD) also impede opportunities to earn a living wage. The strategy indicated that the Ministry is considering removing the spousal cap and indexing the rates for inflation. Both would be excellent if implemented, but more immediate, substantive support for persons with disabilities is needed to tackle deep poverty.  

Food Security

Food security is a particularly pressing issue right now, given the accelerated rates of access to food banks and other non-profit food hubs. Hunger and the cost of grocery prices remain a challenge for tens of thousands of families in BC right now. To date, the government has used food banks as a tool to address food insecurity, when this is a band-aid to a bigger and more systemic issue. The investments in Indigenous food systems, food security, and additional non-profit food hubs are critical and acute measures to keeping people fed. 

Transit for rural communities

We also welcome the commitment to improving transit in rural areas. This will not just make it easier for people to get around but could also save lives, as heard in the MMWIG report. However, expanding the BC Bus Program to all families on all social assistance, including income assistance, and expanding the Get on Board program to include teens up to 18 would be an impactful strategy not yet realized. Further, inter-community transportation options remain limited, and more must be done to address the shortages of public transit infrastructure across BC.

Access to Employment

One of the critical action areas the strategy points to for breaking the cycle of poverty is to provide people with pathways to employment. It is vital that any new job from this scheme is a job that pays a living wage and provides stability for workers. This is particularly important for addressing the intersection of race, gender, immigration, and low wages. 1 in 3 workers in BC don’t earn a Living Wage, and the majority of these workers are women and racialized workers. 

We welcome the tying of the minimum wage to inflation; however, BC’s minimum wage remains far below a living wage. 

We can’t afford to wait  

There were several measures that we were hoping to see in this year’s strategy, specifically a clear plan to:

• raise social assistance to the poverty line,
• remove earnings exemptions and other clawbacks so that people with disabilities are not discouraged from earning a living wage,
• make public transit fare-free for teens and available across BC, and
• close the gap between the living wage and the minimum wage

Though the new strategy’s vision is commendable, without these tangible, immediate measures, hundreds of thousands of people in BC will continue to be needlessly trapped in a cycle of poverty, unable to afford the very basics for themselves and their families. 

The Minister claims that the strategy is light on concrete detail because the initiatives need to be tied to a budget. We agree. This strategy was supposed to come out in the spring when it could have been tied to Budget 2024. Instead, Budget 2024 paid little attention to poverty. The strategy was delayed, and now we must hope that the election will provide some promises to help lift more people in BC out of poverty.

But people in poverty can’t afford to wait for the next election, the next budget, the next round of consultations. Single mothers are struggling today to put food on the table for their families. People with disabilities are struggling to pay for care costs. And Indigenous women in the north are risking their lives every day because there is no affordable and reliable inter-city bus service for them to use. 

In a province as wealthy as BC, poverty is preventable. A poverty-free BC is possible now, and given the challenging times we are in, people in poverty deserve no less. 

Topics: Poverty, inequality & welfare