The New Brunswick Common Front for Social Justice wants to see an increase in social assistance rates across the province.
They would like to see amounts rise $100 a month for a total of $1,200 per year for every category of social assistance recipient.
Provincial Coordinator Abram Lutes says, “There is an urgent need to raise the rates for social assistance, especially as the impacts of the pandemic continue to impact people’s ability to get by. Making sure that social assistance recipients have enough to get by is a direct responsibility of the government, but by not adjusting the rates for nearly a decade, the province has effectively cut income from recipients.”
The Common Front recently sent a letter to Social Development Minister Bruce Fitch and met with him the same day on behalf of forty other groups.
Lutes says inflation has meant lost revenue for those on social assistance and this needs to be addressed, “We’ll be trying to meet with Minister Ernie Steeves and staff from the Department of Finance and Treasury Board to really push this as a budget issue and hopefully seeing some movement on it in the budget in March.”
He adds without this increase, more people are going to go hungry, “This is really going to affect the development of children. We know that a little under a quarter of children in New Brunswick grow up in poverty and this will have long-term ramifications on their quality of life even if they manage to get out of poverty at a later stage in life.”
Based on the Market Basket Measure, there were 74,000 people in New Brunswick living in poverty in 2018. Lutes says this has likely increased as a result of the COVID-19 recession.
New Brunswick also has the lowest median household income in Canada, according to Statistics Canada.