Nova Scotia’s Minister of Community Services believes a spike in child poverty rates is an anomaly.
However Kelley Regan agrees with her deputy minister’s assessment that new numbers from Statistics Canada are “really troubling”.
Regan says poverty rates for children and seniors had actually been trending downwards.
She says they’ve reached out to Statistics Canada for a better understanding of the numbers, which she says flies in the face of what the department knows.
“During 2017, we had a full year of the Canada Child Benefit, we also saw a trending down of unemployment rates. We didn’t see any just one item that would make us say oh, that’s what’s causing this.”
Regan says her staff will talk with StatsCan about the numbers.
“This is from 2017 and we began rolling out a number of programs, so those things would not be reflected. The new measure is a market basket measure and that measures your ability to purchase things.”
She says some of the province’s programs don’t come in the form of actual income.
(Reported by Gary Nickerson)