T he worst is yet to come when measuring British Columbia's record on child poverty, say children's advocates.
For the sixth consecutive year B.C. recorded the highest rate of child poverty among Canadian provinces at 18.8 per cent, according to the National Poverty Report Card released today by First Call: B.C. Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition.
The national child poverty rate is 15 per cent with Prince Edward Island recording the lowest rate at 8.3 per cent.
B.C. Representative for Children and Youth Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, whose sole task is to improve services and outcomes for B.C. children through advocacy, accountability, and review, said the crisis is deeper and broader than the report, which uses statistics from 2007.
"This doesn't fully capture the recession and the breadth of child poverty," she said.
The province social assistance caseload for two-parent families increased 80 per cent between Sept. 2008 and Sept. 2009, said Turpel-Lafond.
To escape this dubious distinction British Columbia must adopt hard child poverty reduction targets, as Ontario did when committing to reducing child poverty by 25 per cent in five years, to put children on a path to succeed, Turpel-Lafond said.
"We're not coordinating our resources in the areas that most count," she said. "We're also not taking into account strategies that are working elsewhere."
Another obstacles Turpel-Lafond sees is the vast economic divide between well-off familes and families in B.C..
First Call recommends the province reduce the child poverty rate by 2013 to 14 per cent and to seven per cent by 2020.
"Their recommendations are modest," Turpel-Lafond said. "I think we need to have a strong target and we need to actually do something."