Poverty Awareness in York Region

Deb Matthews, lead minister on the province's poverty strategy, and George Smitherman presented their report called "Breaking the Cycle" at a press conference in Toronto Dec. 4, 2008.


Anti-Poverty Strategy

Focus on kids a good start, but breaking down stats by race called key to knowing who needs help

Dec 07, 2008

Tanya Talaga
Queen's Park Bureau

Ontario's $1.4 billion anti-poverty strategy must take a hard look at the "colour of poverty" and include indicators used to measure who is poor that are broken down by race, gender and disability, some advocates say.

Ontario's ambitious poverty reduction strategy, released Thursday, aims to cut child poverty by 25 per cent in five years.

The strategy also includes a $10 million investment to crack down on unscrupulous employers who take advantage of workers, and support for an array of community initiatives such as after-school programs in low-income neighbourhoods.

While the strategy is hailed as a welcome first step, race-based numbers need to be collected and analyzed, according to the Colour of Poverty Campaign, a province-wide group.

The issue of collecting race-based statistics is something the government has to look at carefully, said Children and Youth Minister Deb Matthews, who is in charge of Ontario's poverty reduction strategy.

"Ontario is in the midst of a social experiment here in that our level of diversity is quite extraordinary.

"We need to show the rest of the world that it works," Matthews said in an interview.

"When certain groups are not thriving we need to recognize that and get to work at it. Because our strategy really focuses on kids living in poverty, and racialized (people of colour) groups are disproportionately affected, this strategy will disproportionately affect those kids."

As the strategy is implemented, a further breakdown of indicators used to measure poverty will be considered she said, adding the link between poverty and race is acknowledged in the strategy report entitled Breaking the Cycle.

Some poverty indicators Ontario will use are birth weights, high school graduation rates and housing affordability. The campaign wants to see indicators broken down by race and ethnicity, gender, aboriginal status and disability, said Avvy Go, of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic and a campaign member.

The Roots of Youth Violence report, commissioned after the death of Toronto high school student Jordan Manners in May 2007, pointed to racism as a problem in Ontario, she said at a Queen's Park press conference.

"We are here to remind the government (that) in order to close the gap between rich and poor they have to close the gap between racial minority groups and the rest of the population," she said. "We want the government to expand its anti-poverty plan in order to include targeted measures that will address this particular issue."

Many things were missing in the poverty report, said NDP MPP Michael Prue (Beaches-East York). "There were no programs for the homeless, the aged, aboriginals. No programs or statistics collected that are race based."

The focus was only one key issue – eradicating poverty in children.

"They narrowed the focus to such an extent that they left out literally everyone," he said. It is also a mistake to pin hopes on a $1.5 billion cash infusion from the federal Conservatives in order to help break the poverty cycle, he added.

"I despair."