Poverty Report: Action Urged Now
November 18, 2024
The federal government needs to step up its efforts to end poverty, according to this year’s national poverty report card from Campaign 2000, a non-partisan coalition of 120 groups and individuals co-ordinated by Family Service Toronto.
It’s been 35 years since the federal government promised to uphold children’s rights by ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and passing a unanimous resolution in the House of Commons to end child poverty by the year 2000.
Campaign 2000 is commemorating this anniversary with the release of their suite of national, provincial, territorial and Toronto child and family poverty report cards.
The national report card titled Ending Child Poverty: The Time is Now found that in the last two years, Canada experienced record increases in the rates of child and family poverty, of nearly five percentage points in total. That means an additional 360,000 children fell into poverty – in total, nearly 1.4 million children were living in poverty in 2022 or roughly one in five children.
The report card – the last to be released before the next federal election – is a call to action and includes 58 bold but achievable community-driven recommendations spanning social and economic equity, income security, decent work, housing, childcare, public health and more.
Want to read more? Go to Campaign 2000 report card news page.