“It’s time for a plan to end poverty in Canada,” bluntly states the National Anti-Poverty Plan, released recently by the Dignity for All campaign.
The plan was made available to the public on Feb. 3 and is a collaboration between the Centretown-based organizations Citizens for Public Justice and Canada Without Poverty.
CWP is a federally incorporated, non-partisan charitable organization. CPJ is a non-profit religious organization, funded through the donations of members, church communities, religious organizations and other supporters.
“In a country as wealthy as ours, 4.8 million people struggle to make ends meet: to pay their rent, feed their families, and address basic needs,” the 48-page plan says.
Janelle Vandergrift, policy analyst for Citizens for Public Justice, says the plan is a comprehensive anti-poverty model that contains recommendations that the federal government could begin implementing almost immediately in order to eradicate poverty in Canada.
The plan covers six areas: income security, housing and homelessness, health, food security, jobs and employment and early childhood education and care. Under each area there are a number of recommendations made.
Under income security, for example, a recommendation is made that Canada increase the National Child Benefit to $5,600 annually for eligible families.
The Dignity for All campaign began in 2009 and has three major goals: The creation of a comprehensive federal plan for poverty eradication that would complement territorial and provincial plans, the implementation and legislation of this plan as an Act, and finally the collection and allocation of sufficient social security for all Canadians.
A few organizations — including CPJ and CWP — came together in 2009 and did consultations with more than 50 groups involved in poverty work to discuss what was needed to eradicate poverty. Through these consultations the Dignity for All campaign was formed.
Vandergrift says Canada has been called on multiple times by the United Nations, the Senate, and a House of Commons standing committee to develop an anti-poverty plan — but the current Conservative government has yet to do it.
“Poverty is complex and we believe it requires a complex solution,” Vandergrift says. “There is no silver bullet to eradicating poverty.”
Elspeth McKay is the executive director of Operation Come Home, another organization based in Centretown. It started in 1971 and works with at-risk homeless youth aged 16-29. OCH’s main focus is to assist young people in finishing high school, finding jobs and getting the overall support they need in order to be successful.
“I think there’s a serious lack of affordable housing in the city of Ottawa,” says McKay. “There is no national housing strategy, there is not enough emphasis put on builders that are developing new housing to incorporate affordable housing in the mix, and there’s been a tremendous amount of cuts to the social welfare system.”
She says there are some initiatives in place, such as the Housing First project — which provides a new strategy aimed at helping people experiencing homelessness and those with addictions or mental health issues.
Housing First, under the Homelessness Partnering Strategy, helps clients find and maintain permanent housing, along with providing services that help assist clients work towards recovery and reintegration into the community.
But Nick Falvo, doctoral candidate at Carleton University’s school of public policy and administration, says the federal government today is spending considerably less on homelessness than it was in 1999.
HPS came from the National Housing Initiative, which started in 1999 as a three-year initiative worth $336 million in current value. The Harper government introduced HPS in Dec. 2006 to replace the NHI. It is now worth $135 million annually, or 35 per cent of NHI’s original value, according to Falvo.
“I think that one of the biggest challenges right now is that senior levels of government like to talk about housing first as their philosophy,” Falvo says.
“This gets confusing for many of us, however, because the same governments that profess their philosophical support for this approach are not offering to fund the housing needed for such a strategy.”
He says he does not think the current government has much interest in adopting a national anti-poverty plan.
Leilani Farha, executive director of Canada Without Poverty, says nothing like the anti-poverty plan has been produced in the past 15 years.
“It’s a pretty major accomplishment (and) it’s just the beginning,” Farha says.”It’s important that Canada meets its international human rights obligations and do so for the most vulnerable people, who in this country are certainly those who are impoverished.”
Since the campaign started, more than 15,000 people, six organizations and 130 Members of Parliament have signed on, advocating that Canada should develop the anti-poverty plan.
“Politicians always say it’s complex and it’s expensive,” Farha says. “Well, it’s complex and it’s expensive to allow poverty to continue unabated.”