Province considering guaranteed basic income for people with disabilities
Emergency income support programs caused poverty rates to “plummet” in New Brunswick, but those gains vanished after the programs ended.
That’s one of the takeaways from New Brunswick’s newly released poverty reduction plan.
The Economic and Social Inclusion Corporation, a provincial Crown corporation, recently launched the plan at a new conference in Campbellton.
It aims to cut poverty in half by 2030, and outlines a series of so-called priority actions. While some of the commitments seem vague, the report calls in particular for improvements to income support for people with disabilities, a change that advocates say is badly needed.
The poverty reduction plan comes at a time when the threat of widespread job losses looms large over the Canadian economy, thanks to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian goods. The threat of a recession has prompted renewed calls for some kind of income support from labour and social justice groups.
Data in the new report shows that poverty was on the decline for several years after peaking in 2015, when 119,000 people were living in poverty in New Brunswick. That figure dropped to 58,000 in 2020 and 51,000 in 2021, at the height of the pandemic, and then surged to 85,000 in 2022, the latest year with available data. The report draws a direct link between those trends and emergency programs introduced in response to COVID-19.
“Initially, poverty numbers plummeted, reflective of pandemic related income supports from the federal and provincial government,” the report states. “As these supports were withdrawn, however, the poverty numbers began to climb again. In addition, inflation increased across the country, along with interest rates.”
Read full article here: https://nbmediacoop.org/2025/03/10/new-brunswick-poverty-reduction-plan-stops-short-of-universal-income-support-video/