An astounding 47 per cent of Status First Nations children in Canada live in poverty, two-and-a-half times above the national average, says a new study on child poverty.
Some 122,400 — or 53 per cent — of those on reserves live below Statistics Canada’s after-tax low-income measure, compared to 131,660, or 41 per cent, of their off-reserve peers. The low-income cutoff for a family of four was $44,266 in 2016.
“Child poverty rates on First Nations reserves are deplorably high for a country as rich as Canada,” said report co-author David Macdonald, senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, which is jointly releasing the study on Tuesday with the Assembly of First Nations and Upstream, a non-partisan national think tank aimed at building a healthier society. “What’s worse is that these rates haven’t shown any improvement since 2005.”
Using census data from 2006 to 2016, researchers tracked poverty rates among Status and Non-status First Nations children on-and-off reserve, their Inuit and Métis counterparts, as well as recent immigrant children and non-racialized, non-Indigenous kids. Status First Nations people are registered members of a band that signed a treaty with the Crown and can take advantage of the rights and benefits under the Indian Act.
Overall, Status First Nations child poverty rates have fallen from 52 per cent to 47 per cent in the last decade, but the decline is largely due to the proportion of those children living off reserve.
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