Child poverty in Belleville still high despite drop in national rate
BELLEVILLE – The overall child poverty rate in Canada has gone down slightly since the last recession.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story when it comes to Belleville.
Susanne Quinlan, director of operations at Gleaners Food Bank, says that the number of children in Belleville requiring their services has increased.
“We have had 7597 children through this year so far” she said.
In 2012, the total number of children requiring services was 7307.
According to Statistics Canada, the child poverty rate in Belleville is almost double the rest of Ontario at 34.1 per cent. The provincial average is 18.4 per cent. The Canadian average is 21 per cent.
This means close to one in three children in Belleville live in homes where the family income is less than 50 percent of the median income of $68,197, which equals $34,000.
However, UNICEF released a report Tuesday saying about 180,000 children climbed out of poverty during the economic downturn from 2008 to 2011, bringing down the national average by two per cent.
Roughly a quarter of those children were from Ontario.
Communications specialist Tiffany Baggetta, of UNICEF Canada, said although this decrease represents a large number of Canadian children coming out of poverty, she warns the numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“Overall, child poverty in Canada has decreased but children who were the most poor to begin with have slipped further into poverty,” she said.
The report adds,”poor children today are further away from average living conditions than poor children were at the start of the crisis.”
It goes on to say that families with more than two children, indigenous children and migrant children were more likely to be poor.
Print This Post
