Single working-age adults are experiencing the highest rates of poverty in Canada, according to a new study.
“Sounding the Alarm: The Need to Invest in Working-Age Single Adults” pushes back against the notion that a job is a pathway out of poverty.
The survey, done by Community Food Centres Canada (CFCC), highlights ongoing concerns about food insecurity.
It found that 22 per cent of working-age single adults live below Canada’s poverty line.
That’s nearly three times higher than the national average.
“Canadian households are being financially attacked, essentially,” said Sylvain Charlebois, director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University.
Working-age single adults represent half of the 1.8 million Canadians living in deep poverty and have an average annual income of $11,700. According to the report, the low-income threshold is $25,252 for a single-adult household.
Charlebois says food will cost an average family of four $16,000 this year.
“At the grocery store, well, you're looking at an inflation rate of nine to 10 per cent.. So an average household will likely have to spend over $1,000 to feed itself for the next 12 months,” said Charlebois.
He says that’s more than last year.
“That's a significant shift. It's a lot of pressure,’ said Charlebois.
Working-age single adults make up about 40 per cent of all food-insecure households in Canada.
“We're seeing more people working, visiting food banks all over the country, and that is something that we were seeing before, but not to that extent,” said Charlebois, who is on the board of Second Harvest in Toronto, the largest food bank in Canada.
Advocates blame inadequate income support programs and a labour market riddled with low wages and few benefits.
“We urgently need a national solution that responds to the realities that people are voicing in this report. If Canada is serious about making life equitable for everyone, then we need to find the political will to create income policies that take people out of poverty – not for a week, or a month, but for good," said CFCC’s CEO Nick Saul.
Experts would like to see the existing Canada Workers Benefit be enhanced into a refundable tax credit.
That would ensure that working-age single adults living in poverty would receive the supplement, whether they are attached to the labour market or not.