Lək̓ʔəŋən [LEKWUNGEN] TERRITORY / VICTORIA, B.C. — Leader of the BC Greens and candidate for Saanich North and the Islands, announced the BC Greens’ plan to end legislated poverty and address low assistance rates.
“Poverty is a political choice,” said Lowan. “In a province with immense wealth, it is unthinkable that one in 16 of us are living in deep poverty. The BG Greens believe that poverty is a systemic failure of government, and will take every avenue to address it.”
“The social and disability assistance rates are nearly $1000 below the poverty line, leaving vulnerable people in an even worse situation during a cost-of-living crisis,” said Lowan. “It’s time to address poverty at the root.”
The BC Greens will:
- Raise social and disability assistance rates to the market-basket measure of poverty and index them to inflation.
- Remove clawbacks to ensure people receive the full support that they need.
- Develop a poverty elimination plan tailored to Indigenous individuals, families, and First Nations, addressing the systemic impacts of colonisation and dispossession.
- Reduce bureaucratic barriers for non-profit service providers, ensuring they can effectively support vulnerable populations.
Please find our full Ending Legislated Poverty policy brief below.
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Media contact
Prym Goodacre, Media & Campaigns Officer
+778 650 0597
newsroom@bcgreens.ca
The BG Greens believe that poverty is a systemic failure of government.
Poverty is a political choice. The decisions that we have made in British Columbia have created systemic, entrenched poverty. We need only look around to see that there are too many of us without housing, without enough food, with bills unpaid at the end of the month. Homelessness, once rare or even non-existent in British Columbia, has been normalised. This is just one, highly visible, symptom of a social support foundation that is no longer capable of underpinning a strong and resilient province.
One in 16 people in British Columbia is currently living in deep poverty – assessed as living on less than 75 percent of the poverty line. 50,000 of those are children, whose early experiences of deep poverty will shape their future; poverty has been shown to impair the cognitive development of children, affecting their mental growth and future potential. This includes people receiving social assistance and disability supports, a form of legislated poverty; a single person receiving disability assistance currently receives $1,483.50 per month, $997 below the poverty line of $2,480 per month.
Indigenous poverty is particularly prevalent and particularly cruel in British Columbia. Canada’s Indigenous peoples are nearly twice as likely to be living in poverty as non-Indigenous Canadians. 33 percent of First Nations children living on reserve are living in poverty.
57.8 percent of homeless youth in Canada have been involved with the child welfare system, and a young person leaving youth protection is nearly 200 times more likely to experience homelessness than a young person who did not use these services. Investing in this particularly vulnerable group of young people is one of the most impactful investments that the province can make.
Poverty is hard for the people experiencing it, and expensive for the province. The failure to address poverty and the social determinants of health shows up in the provincial finances every year – in health spending, in the child welfare system, and in the carceral system especially. The cost of poverty to the provincial government is estimated at 3.4 to 4.7 percent of GDP, equating to $15.9 billion to $22 billion in 2026.
The BC Greens will:
- Raise social assistance rates to the market-basket measure of poverty and index to inflation.
- Raise disability assistance rates to the market-basket measure of poverty and index to inflation.
- Remove clawbacks to ensure people receive the full support that they need
- Create low-barrier access to assistance, eliminating intrusive checks that discourage individuals from seeking help, and making the paperwork accessible to individuals with disabilities
- Develop a poverty elimination plan tailored to Indigenous individuals, families, and First Nations, addressing the systemic impacts of colonisation and dispossession
- Fund Indigenous-specific services in social service areas, including reintegration programs for Indigenous women, addiction support and childcare
- Implement a new targeted basic income benefit for all youth formerly in care, equal to the market basket measure poverty line, until age 25
- Reduce bureaucratic barriers for non-profit service providers, ensuring they can effectively support vulnerable populations