Open Letter to Party Leaders
Dear provincial party leaders
We are writing to you as a newly established, but continually growing coalition of community organizations across Newfoundland and Labrador. We share a deep commitment to the people and communities of our province. We also share a desire to see government take real steps towards the kinds of policy change that would address the root causes of the challenges we support people through—especially poverty.
Our organizations advance social and economic justice across many areas of work. We help people access basic needs like food, housing, and child care. We also work to address the many structural barriers faced by Indigenous people, women and gender-diverse folk, the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, new Canadians, migrants, and racialized people. Collectively, we are working to solve many problems, but there is a common thread running through them: the devastating impact of poverty in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Despite its magnitude, poverty is also a challenge with many proven and publicly-supported solutions. Our organizations support people and communities facing a rising cost of living, wages and social assistance rates that have not kept pace, and a record chasm between the wealthy and the rest of us. We are committed to poverty reduction because the need is clear and our response is necessary. But we cannot do this work alone; we ask for your commitment to work alongside us in this essential task.
The Provincial Government can take many evident and direct actions as a commitment to poverty reduction. In particular, our coalition advocates for raising people’s incomes as a proven means to meaningfully impact the intersecting crises facing Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. Lived expertise, stories of everyday struggles, evidence and modelling by policy experts all point to the overwhelming need for strong policy interventions that put more money in the pockets of people living on the lowest incomes. Policy interventions to increase incomes are a powerful and necessary first step to a more resilient and just Newfoundland and Labrador.
Newfoundland and Labrador has already made important strides forward. In 2022 the province released a 10-year “Heath Accord” that recommends a Guaranteed Basic Income (GBI) as the means to address costly downstream effects of poverty through moderate upstream investments in household incomes. We now have targeted basic income projects to support youth receiving residential services, seniors aged 60-64, low-income families with young children, and people with disabilities. Currently an All-Party Committee on Basic Income is studying a GBI program that could lift all Newfoundlanders and Labradorians out of poverty.
We applaud the implementation of these recent changes, and ask for your commitment to strong, focused measures on poverty reduction, should you be elected.
Specifically, our coalition urges you to commit to implementing some critical policy changes:
Income supports for working-age adults:
Raise Income Support rates so that recipients no longer live in poverty. At the bare minimum, Income Support should bring recipients to or above the poverty line. This change can be understood and quantified through the Market Basket Measure.
Index benefit programs to inflation (especially Income Support). Without indexing, the real value of benefits falls every year. This is an enormous challenge for the lowest income Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. When combined with some of the Income Support reforms announced in the Poverty Reduction Plan, indexing benefits to inflation would provide a much more sustainable long-term approach to poverty reduction.
Raise the income thresholds for access to the NL Child Benefit and Child Nutrition Programs. The recent expansion of these programs was welcome news, but the thresholds for access mean that many households in poverty (and many more near poverty) will receive very little support. Raising the thresholds at the very minimum to the Market Basket Measure poverty line would be a significant improvement.
Raise the minimum wage to a living wage. At the bare minimum, a person employed full time at a minimum wage job should make an income that is above the Market Basket Measure poverty line.
Guaranteed Basic Income:
Table the report from the All-Party Committee on Basic Income in the next sitting of the House of Assembly. We are excited to see the work of the All-Party Committee on Basic Income proceed, and we understand that a report from the Committee is imminent. This report must be tabled and made publicly available at the most immediate opportunity available.
Invest in a Basic Income Guarantee. We urge the provincial government to implement a Basic Income Guarantee that would ensure no Newfoundlander or Labradorian falls into poverty. There are a range of costed models for a provincial Basic Income that would have a significant impact on poverty. At the lower end of this range are models that the provincial government could afford and implement without federal investment or additional costs for the average tax payer.
However, in the absence of federal investment, this may need to be a targeted program. We suggest that a targeted program nonetheless be implemented fully, evaluated accordingly, and resourced appropriately through annual budget cycles. This will avoid harmful patterns of temporary pilot programs conducted elsewhere.
Engage in dialogue with the federal government to implement a Basic Income Guarantee. We urge the provincial government to engage in dialogue with the federal government to implement a full and robust Basic Income. We suggest building off the results of existing targeted basic income programs, and any additional basic income programs implemented as a result of the work of the All-Party Committee on Basic Income.
Without a prompt, substantial, and cross-party commitment to reducing poverty, the well-being of Newfoundlanders and Labradorians will continue to decline. Income is a social determinant of health that has significant downstream effects on our population’s educational achievement, workforce participation, healthcare costs, and overall well-being. We also know that poverty reduction has positive impacts for crime reduction, social cohesion, and community sense of safety and trust.
Transformative changes are needed, and our coalition hopes to work closely with the next provincial government to help make them happen.
