Campaign 2000: End Child and Family Poverty has been tracking government progress to meet their all-party, unanimous 1989 goal to end child poverty by the year 2000. This year’s report finds that prior to the pandemic, over 1,330,000 children in Canada lived in poverty.  The child poverty rate declined less than half a percentage point between 2017-2018 from 18.6% to 18.2%, leaving nearly 1 in 5 children experiencing the harsh long-term consequences that poverty and discrimination have on social, mental and physical health and well-being.

The report finds a deepening relationship between growing economic inequality and social and health inequalities, which has impacted the ability of many vulnerable families to weather the pandemic. The new national report, Beyond the Pandemic: Rising Up for a Canada Free of Poverty, reveals troubling trends using the latest income data available, the internationally accepted Census Family Low Income Measure, After Tax (CFLIM-AT) calculated with taxfiler data. It finds that only 19,410 children across Canada moved out of poverty between 2017 and 2018, and that child poverty rates grew in several jurisdictions, including Nunavut, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Manitoba. Rates remained relatively unchanged in Alberta, New Brunswick and Saskatchewan, and declined modestly in Quebec, British Columbia, Ontario, Yukon and Northwest Territories.