Kendall Worth: “There need to be further increases in the income assistance allowances. Everyone, including income assistance recipients, should be able to shop in grocery stores rather than rely on the food banks.”
Kendall Worth: Earlier in the year I had the opportunity to interview Mariana. She did not want me to use her real name because she fears that she will be applying for welfare within the next couple of years.
Among the people who applied for the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) while being ineligible are some of the most poor and marginalized people in Nova Scotia. Now the federal government is considering demanding that money paid to ineligible applicants be returned, and poverty advocates fear this will push many into an even more dire financial situation.
A small ACORN Nova Scotia rally and press conference in downtown Halifax served to remind the three Liberal MLAs running to become the new premier of Nova Scotia that as far as low income Nova Scotians are concerned the current premier left the province in a terrible mess.
Kendall Worth: It is safe to say that the ESIA transformation is a major broken promise by our current Liberal government because even though some change has happened, the change that happened was very little.
The three Liberal leadership candidates recently talked about poverty. After 7+ years in government their promises to tackle poverty in this province are simply not credible.
COVID-19 has hit the very poor in Nova Scotia hard and left many of those living with mental health issues in a very precarious place. That was the urgent message delivered by staff members of the Nova Scotia division of the Canadian Mental Health Association to the Community Services Standing Committee.
What happens when a Mi’kmaw and settler university student share car rides on their way to university and other places? They talk, and the settler learns some hard lessons about colonial oppression, systemic racism and white privilege. “One Saturday afternoon when we happened to be together, Flo shared a very personal story about why she finds it difficult to eat when she is in a social food sharing situation.”
Olivia Katz on the challenges she and other poor people faced long before we even heard of Covid. “These are not recent discoveries, Stephen McNeil knows all of this, he just doesn’t care. These outcomes are a matter of policy, his policy.”
We have been reporting on the release of the Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Nova Scotia for many years now. And year after year the news is grim.
41,370 children, one in four, live in poverty in Nova Scotia. For children under six that number is actually almost one in three!
It’s hard to fathom how politicians can shrug off these horrendous numbers, especially given that we know that solutions exist, and all it takes is political will.