B.C. has worst child poverty
By Carlito Pablo
Georgia Straight
May 8, 2008

Marilyn McKee knows all too well who can come knocking on the doors of poor mothers raising kids on their own. A single mom of three boys, the 39-year-old East Vancouver woman recalls that she was visited in previous years by provincial child-protection officers.

“I’ve been investigated a lot of times for not having enough food for my children,” McKee told the Georgia Straight. Once, according to her, the family ran out of groceries and payday was just a couple of days away. Another time, one of her sons missed school for days because she couldn’t afford his anti-allergy medication.

She’s proud to have mostly worked two jobs to support her boys, two of whom are now young adults starting out on their own. The government didn’t take away her children, and for this she considers herself lucky.

“It was really scary, because you’re being investigated for something beyond your control,” McKee said. …And these people are just a few of thousands.

According to First Call, a coalition advocating for the rights of children and youth, British Columbia holds the dubious record of having the worst child-poverty rate in the country for five consecutive years, from 2002 to 2006.

The coalition… made this claim after poring over 2006 government data released on May 5 by Statistics Canada.

Steve Kerstetter, a member of First Call’s coordinating committee, explained to the Straight that the number of poor children in B.C. rose to 181,000 in 2006, compared to 175,000 in 2005. He also said that the B.C. child-poverty rate of 21.9 percent was well above the national average rate of 15.8 percent in 2006.

About 63,000 poor children are living with single mothers, Kerstetter also noted.

“B.C. has a huge number of low-wage jobs where people might be in the work force for the entire year [or] you might have a couple where both people are working the entire year and you still don’t earn enough money,” Kerstetter said.

On March 7, the B.C. Federation of Labour released a study prepared by UBC professors Gillian Creese and Veronica Strong-Boag indicating that women and children are among those most impacted by policies implemented by the B.C. Liberal government of Premier Gordon Campbell.

According to Still Waiting for Justice: Provincial Policies and Gender Equality in BC 2001-2008, aboriginal and recent-immigrant single mothers, as well as those of colour, are most likely to live in poverty. The study said this is “directly related to Liberal policies, including reductions in income assistance levels, low minimum wage rates, disappearing higher-wage jobs in the public sector, and reduced access to childcare”.

The Straight spoke with B.C. Liberal MLA Mary Polak, a member of the select standing committee for children and youth, on the day the B.C. Fed released the study.

Polak said that there’s a better way of helping poor people than by increasing wages or raising welfare rates. “That way is to reduce the amount that it costs them to live,” she said. … this has meant policies like the elimination of income taxes and medical-services-plan premiums for low-income families. She added that the government has also put rent subsidies in place.

“So do you take $2 billion and five years of time and build a bunch of housing, or do you say, ‘Oh, gosh, you’re already living in a place; your big challenge is that your rent is far higher than your income can support’? ” Polak asked. “So we’ll give you a subsidy, and then you can choose where you can live.”

Polak stressed that the government’s job is not to run people’s lives but to give them as many choices as possible.

Social-policy researcher Shelagh Day doesn’t buy into this, saying poverty doesn’t allow a person much choice in the first place. Day, who is the director of the nonprofit Poverty and Human Rights Centre, noted that most poor working moms can’t work full-time because they can’t afford full-time childcare.

“Often they are working in nonunionized places where they are not making enough money,” Day told the Straight. “One of the things that happened in the last decade is that we deregulated the labour force: we’ve cut back on labour standards; we’ve cut back on labour protection; this government has broken union contracts and put a lot of things into private-employment situations that used to be government unionized jobs.”

Based on gross income, 62 percent of single mothers in the province are living below the poverty line, according to Day. She added that a third of welfare caseloads involve single mothers.

According to Human Rights Denied: Single Mothers on Social Assistance in British Columbia, a 2005 study coauthored by Day, 65 percent of child apprehensions undertaken by the government are from single parents on welfare.

“It’s a double shame,” Day said. “We’re not giving them enough money to support their children properly, then we say they’re not taking [care] of them properly so we take them away.”