|
National Welfare Council Finds Canadian Welfare Incomes Meager & Shameful |
|
|
|
Written by Staff/Wire
|
|
Thursday, 24 August 2006 |
The National Council of Welfare has released their annual report, 'Welfare Incomes 2005' which paints a dismal picture, and one that is getting worse. 'Welfare Incomes 2005' estimates total welfare incomes for four types of households in each province and territory, for a total of 52 scenarios. The four household types we use are a single employable person, a single person with a disability, a lone-parent with a 2-year-old child, and a two-parent family with two children aged 10 and 15.
When adjusted for inflation, many 2005 welfare incomes were lower than they were in 1986 with Alberta and New Brunswick representing the lowest welfare incomes in 2005. Conversely, Newfoundland/Labrador and Prince Edward Island were the most generous two provinces. Most welfare incomes peaked in 1994 or earlier. Some of the losses between the peak year and 2005 are staggering, with one-third of households losing $3,000 or more.
In 2005, the income of a single employable person on welfare in New Brunswick amounted to $3,427-just 19% of the poverty line. Lone parent families in Alberta, Canada's richest province, received just $12,326-only 48% of the poverty line. All welfare incomes continued to remain far below the poverty line in 2005. With few exceptions, the day-to-day lives of over 1.7 million Canadians receiving welfare - 5% of the population - only became more difficult. Half a million of those on social assistance are children.
Over the past ten years, the system of federal and provincial child benefit programs has become incomprehensible to most people. And since these programs interact with provincial and territorial welfare programs, what was already a tangled safety net has become almost impossible to understand. Since 1996, five provinces have implemented their own child benefit programs that pay benefits for children outside the welfare system.
The federal government introduced the National Child Benefit Supplement (NCBS) in 1998. Most provinces clawed it back from welfare families, so they were no better off. As of early 2005, eight jurisdictions still claw back part or all of the NCBS. Newfoundland/Labrador, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec and Manitoba do not claw back any of the NCBS. Although the federal government has increased its spending on child benefits significantly since 1998, most welfare families with children have seen little, if any, improvement in their total income. Overall, most welfare families are seeing very little improvement in their total incomes despite the sizeable increase in federal spending on children.
The report concludes that welfare incomes were woefully inadequate in 2005, as they have been every year since 1986, when the National Council of Welfare started tracking them. Welfare recipients are among the poorest of the poor and have to subsist on incomes far below what most people would consider reasonable. And, hand in hand with their inadequate incomes, is the social deprivation that people on welfare experience. They are so poor that they cannot access the resources that many of us take for granted—resources such as adequate housing, employment, and recreational opportunities.
This "shameful and morally unsustainable" situation in a rich country appears to be of little concern for the most vulnerable in society. By allacoounts, it appears that governments and the Canadian public alike have turned their backs on the poorest of the poor.
The complete reports can be read at: http://www.ncwcnbes.net/
|
