Hon. Bernadette Clement: Honourable senators, my question today is for the Government Representative, Senator Gold. As a poverty lawyer and a proud member of the African Canadian Senate Group, I have keenly followed Canada’s progress in decreasing our poverty rates, particularly for racialized communities. Therefore, I was happy to see that in the 2020 Canadian Income Survey, poverty rates for people designated as visible minorities were included for the first time.

However, in reviewing this data, I had some concerns over the discrepancies between the poverty rates for racialized communities. The 2020 national poverty average is 3.6%. The poverty rate for persons designated as visible minorities was 8%, well above the national average. Within that, Black Canadians have a poverty rate of 7.5%.

My questions, Senator Gold, are: How has the government acted on this information to address the disparity between the poverty rates for visible minorities versus non-visible minorities, and what approaches, mechanisms or strategies has the government been using since the survey to specifically target poverty rates for members of racialized communities, like Black Canadians?

Hon. Marc Gold (Government Representative in the Senate): Senator, thank you for the question. It’s an important one. As you know, in 2018, this government made a historic commitment to reduce poverty and set some concrete targets — a 20% reduction by 2020 and a 50% reduction by 2030 — based on 2015 levels.

During the pandemic, the government introduced a whole host of measures to mitigate the effects of the pandemic and to keep Canadians with the means to carry on. These were effective in helping millions of Canadians. However, the government recognizes that all of these measures, which did lead to significant poverty reductions in 2020, masked the systemic inequalities that perpetuate poverty in Canada for those most marginalized. It’s not only populations of African Canadians, but 2SLGBTQ people, Indigenous people and persons with disabilities are also disproportionately affected.

I’m advised that the government recently made a number of commitments that will help to address the issue of poverty. This includes working with provincial, territorial and Indigenous partners to give all families in Canada access to building high quality, affordable, flexible and inclusive early learning and child care systems with investments totalling $30 billion over the next five years, and previous investments up to a minimum of $9.2 billion every year in permanent funding as of 2025-26. This is in addition to introducing child and housing benefits, expanding worker and disability benefits, increasing the Guaranteed Income Supplement, or GIS, and developing a national school food policy.

The government remains committed to working on these, and the hopes and expectations are that this will not only reduce poverty levels generally but also start to close the gap that you quite properly pointed out in your question.

[Translation]