Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 1: Establish a permanent Fair Wages Commission to examine issues related to low wages and precarity in BC to advise government on strategies that bring workers above the poverty line. Make sure all workers in BC are covered by the hourly minimum wage by the end of 2023.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 2: Governments at all levels should ensure their direct and contract employees are paid a living wage that allows them to meet their basic needs, properly support their children and avoid chronic financial stress.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 5: Ensure the Canada Child Benefit, in combination with other income measures, raises all families with children above the CFLIM after tax poverty lines calculated through tax filer data and ensure access to this and other federal benefits for families in population groups with higher rates of poverty.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 7: Enhance Employment Insurance to expand access, duration, and level of benefits to reduce inequity for lower-income workers and prevent and reduce child and family poverty, including establishing a minimum benefit floor.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 8: Ensure maternity and parental leave benefits are universally available to all parents (regardless of work status), increase the duration of leave and ensure the benefit levels are not less than the CFLIM after-tax poverty lines.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 9: Address growing income inequality and generate revenue for poverty reduction programs by eliminating or reducing highly regressive and expensive tax loopholes, closing tax havens, taxing extreme wealth and implementing an excess profit tax focused on corporate pandemic windfalls.

Targeted initiatives for groups over-represented in poverty data

Recommendation 11: Automatically enroll all young people transitioning out of care in an income support program that meets their basic living costs and ensures they have safe, secure and affordable housing.

Targeted initiatives for groups over-represented in poverty data

Recommendation 12: Review and enhance supports to grandparents raising grandchildren and other kinship care providers, including Child in the Home of a Relative care providers. Allow grandparents on CPP Disability who are raising their grandchildren to continue to receive the CPP children’s benefit after they turn 65 and remove administrative barriers to receiving the Canada Child Benefit for kinship care providers.

Lower barriers and improve lives through universal programs

Recommendation 17: Increase investment in public health initiatives aimed to support maternal and parental health and healthy infant development, as well as non-barriered, free, community-based programs and services for all families with young children to ensure these supports are available throughout the province and designed to reach families experiencing poverty and other threats to their ability to thrive.

Lower barriers and improve lives through universal programs

Recommendation 18: Scale up funding to build thousands of new social and affordable rental housing units and maintain existing affordable housing stock to reduce the number of families in core housing need and to eliminate homelessness. Tie rent control to the unit to remove the incentive for evictions of current tenants to raise the rent for new tenants.