Good afternoon, members of the finance committee. Thank you for inviting me to present today.
As was mentioned, my name is Leila Sarangi. I am the national director of Campaign 2000, a pan-Canadian coalition of over 120 organizations working to end child and family poverty. We take our name from the unanimous federal resolution to end child poverty by the year 2000.
For 30 years we have been monitoring progress toward this promise and putting forward achievable recommendations. We have said for many years that poverty is not inevitable but that it is a choice that is made when policies that keep people poor are implemented.
Unfortunately, we believe that people in need will be left out of the emergency measures before you. Campaign 2000 has been hearing from member organizations as well as people living in poverty who have been impacted. We have been working with them to develop recommendations, which I am pleased to share with you today.
There are three recommendations that I will focus on, and they include CERB repayment amnesty, bolstering the Canada child benefit and making it more accessible, and providing an income benefit eligibility and distribution system for people who are outside of the personal income tax system.
We have many more urgent recommendations. We have outlined them in our national report card, which was released a couple of weeks ago, on November 24, and shared with all of your offices. They include addressing growing inequality; providing income support; creating a $0-to-$10-per-day child care model that meets the needs of low-income families and is secured in legislation; and creating decent work, housing and health care.
Before I get further into my recommendations, I'll quickly set the context as we know it.
We used the latest tax filer data available and found that despite federal promises, strategies and programs like the Canada child benefit, more than 1,313,000 children are living in poverty in Canada. That's 17.7% of all children, but those rates skyrocket for indigenous, racialized or immigrant children, children with disabilities, and children in lone-mother-led families because of the systemic barriers they face.
In our year-over-year analysis we found that only an additional 24,000 children were lifted out of poverty according to the low-income measure, and that at this rate it would take the federal government an additional 54 years to meet its goal to eradicate child poverty.
A riding-level analysis shows significant rates of child poverty in every single riding across the country. Children are also living in deeper poverty, with the average single mother's income being $13,000 away from the low-income measure, and the inequality gap is widening.
The top 10% of families own as great a share of the income as the bottom 50% do. It is these individuals and families who have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and the related economic fallout, and there is an opportunity before you to start closing the gaps in our support systems that these folks have been falling through.
Our first recommendation is a CERB repayment amnesty for all low-income people. For us this means the following: Immediately cease pursuing repayment for the CERB and ensure no repayment is sought for the CRB, the Canada recovery benefit, from low-income people.
The CRA is getting ready to send their letters out right now, as they did last December, and we believe this should not happen. Immediately cease treating CERB and recovery benefits as taxable income. This is why they have been interacting with other low-income benefits. Refund all clawed-back benefit amounts and enact legislation to ensure that there will be no future pandemic benefit-related clawbacks for income programs including social assistance, rent subsidies and federal benefits.
Your government has encouraged the provinces and territories not to claw back federal pandemic benefits, but it is doing essentially the same thing with GIS and CCB reductions. Immediately reinstate the CRB at the full amount of $500 weekly until employment insurance is reformed.
Second, the Canada child benefit is known to have substantial positive effects for children in poverty who can access it. Our recommendations there include investing in the base amount so that it reaches those families in deep poverty and extends the pandemic top-ups to all children under 18.
Repeal the section of the Income Tax Act that arbitrarily ties eligibility to caregivers' immigration status. They are considered residents by the Income Tax Act. They pay into the income tax system and often have Canadian-born children.
Remove bureaucratic barriers to prove eligibility for families that are in informal and kinship care arrangements.
Last, there are many people who don't file taxes. They are often low-income, precariously housed, underbanked or unbanked.
In other jurisdictions across the world, there are income security programs that are supported by governments and delivered through trusted charities in communities. There's a large one in South America called Bolsa Familia. These mechanisms are in place informally through our networks here across the country, and the federal government should look to formalizing and investing in them.
This kind of holistic approach that is aimed at closing gaps in our society in a time of emergency will make sure no one is left behind.