CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. — A public meeting will take place Monday in Charlottetown to highlight the lack of progress in ending child poverty.
The meeting will take place Monday, Nov. 25 at 1:30 p.m. at the Murphy Community Centre.
Mary Boyd, with the MacKillop Centre for Social Justice, says the meeting will mark the 30th anniversary since the House of Commons' unanimous all-party resolution in 1989 to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000.
The P.E.I. Coalition for a Poverty Eradication Strategy and the MacKillop Centre for Social Justice are sponsoring Monday’s meeting to talk about effective ways to get on with the task of eradicating poverty. The guest speaker will be economics professor Pavlina Tcherneva.
Tcherneva’s topic is: “Good Jobs for All: Fighting Poverty with a Job Guarantee.”
“Since 1989, little has been done to eradicate child and family poverty,” said Boyd.
“The latest report on poverty by federal riding dated 2017, shows there are even more children in poverty now at 1.4 million. When the 1989 resolution was passed, 1,066,150 Canadian children suffered from poverty.”
The Charlottetown riding’s 2016 poverty rate was 27.2 per cent, and dropped to 26.3 per cent, by the end of 2017, a reduction of 0.9 per cent. The Egmont riding rate dropped from 20.3 per cent to 18.9 per cent, a reduction of 1.4 per cent. In the Cardigan riding the poverty rate dropped from 18.7 per cent to 16.9 per cent for a reduction of 1.8 per cent and in Malpeque the rate dropped from 15.6 per cent to 13.7 per cent for a reduction of 1.9 per cent.
