Hello, and thank you for inviting me to appear today.
My name is Leila Sarangi and I'm the national director for Campaign 2000, which is a coalition of over 120 organizations working to end child and family poverty.
Today I'll be highlighting several recommendations we've made in our budget 2022 submission and our latest child poverty report card, which found that more than 1.3 million children continue to live in poverty. That's nearly one in five kids, but the rates are much higher for indigenous children, racialized or immigrant children, children with disabilities and children in lone mother-led families, among others marginalized by systemic barriers. These families are living in deeper poverty, and inequalities are growing. While the national rate of child poverty reduced slightly in the last year, when we looked by province and territory we found that it actually increased in several of those subjurisdictions.
Today I'm going to focus on two areas, income benefits and child care, although we address many other essential areas in those documents.
The first is the need to budget for a full CERB amnesty. Funds that have been earmarked in the fiscal update to repay seniors who lost GIS must be released now. We've been hearing from seniors who've lost their housing, who are living in their cars, and who can't afford their food and their medications. Many have contemplated suicide because of this hardship, and too many have already lost their lives. We implore you on their behalf to pay an emergency $2,500 to those seniors now and to create a new $100-million housing fund to help keep all clawback victims housed.
The CERB has interacted with other federal and provincial benefits. In addition to losing GIS, people with low and moderate incomes have lost child benefits, worker benefits, GST credits, social and disability assistance, housing supplements and other provincial benefits such as those for energy and child care costs, which they depend on to get through these extraordinarily difficult times.
A full CERB amnesty would mean that all clawed back benefits would be returned, and it would mean a stop to pursuing low- and moderate-income individuals for repayments of pandemic benefits. It would ensure that pandemic benefits would not negatively interact with income benefits in this or future tax years. It would immediately increase the current lockdown benefit to $500 a week and maintain that amount until EI is reformed.
We also recommend using the Canada social transfer to ensure the adequacy of income programs by increasing investment by $4 billion and tying funds to adequacy standards, making sure that provincial and territorial programs are meeting human rights obligations.
Our last two annual report cards have found that the Canada child benefit is losing its power. It needs significantly more investment into the base amount so it can reach children who are left in deep poverty. Repealing the section of the Income Tax Act that ties eligibility to immigration status will enable access to people who have precarious immigration status but are considered residents under the Income Tax Act.
We support the recommendation of disability communities to speed up the design and implementation of the new federal disability benefit, and we recommend a federal disability benefit for children as well.
While the tax system is broad and ongoing activities to bring more people into it are important poverty reduction initiatives, it will never be a universal system. We need a parallel benefit distribution system that is federally funded and works with local charities in communities to get benefits to people who are outside the tax system. This kind of work is already happening informally across the country, and there are jurisdictions that have formalized programs around the world that we can learn from.
Lastly, on child care, a national system has the power to be transformational if designed with low-income families in mind. Our recommendation is a sliding-scale, zero to $10 per day model that reduces fees through funding of operational costs, not through an individual parental fee subsidy model, which we know from experience hasn't worked for families and doesn't actually reduce fees. Operational funding must also factor in decent wages for staff, and provincial and territorial wage grids will be an essential piece of that funding policy.
Thank you for your time today. I look forward to answering any questions.