Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 3: Significantly raise income and disability assistance rates to bring total welfare incomes up to the CFLIM after-tax poverty thresholds and index them to inflation. Federal investments must support social assistance adequacy through the Canada Social Transfer and tie investments to adequacy standards.

Tax fairness and income support

Recommendation 4: Adjust income and disability assistance rates for families with children with disabilities to recognize the additional costs associated with raising children with extra support needs.

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 10: Collaborate with First Nations, Métis and Inuit governments and Indigenous organizations to address the factors leading to child and family poverty in order to prevent, reduce and eradicate child and family poverty in Indigenous communities. The federal government must comply with the rulings of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to provide adequate funding for child welfare services on reserve and ensure the full application of Jordan’s Principle for First Nations children. Federal and provincial governments must ensure culturally safe supports and public services are also provided to Métis and Inuit children and to other Indigenous children living off-reserve in urban centres not covered under Jordan’s Principle.

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.

Targeted initiatives for groups over-represented in poverty data

Recommendation 13: Intensify efforts to help immigrants and refugees adjust to life in Canada by enhancing employment assistance, removing long-standing barriers to foreign-trained professionals accessing jobs in their field, making more language training with child care available, and improving employment standards and human rights protections and enforcement.