Andrew MacLeod, TheTyee.ca
…. Several of the candidates to lead the BC Liberal Party had been talking about how to support families, but the suggestions were things like lowering taxes, raising the minimum wage, spending more on playgrounds and giving everyone an extra day off.
None were likely to address the kind of poverty described in Fragile Lives, Fragmented Systems from Child and Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. “The lack of a coordinated and responsive government approach to poverty is … a significant concern in this review,” said the report, which looked at the short lives of 21 infants who died before their second birthdays….
The families in this review, particularly the Aboriginal families, were often stuck in chronic, deep poverty.”
The report noted that B.C. continues to have the worst after-tax child poverty rate in Canada and that Turpel-Lafond has been advocating for a “comprehensive provincial poverty reduction plan.”…