[4] According to a 2019 study by researchers at the Assembly of First Nations and the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), nearly 50% of Indigenous children in Canada—both on and off reserve—were living in poverty.
[5] Other groups that are at a higher risk of experiencing poverty include children living in single-parent households and recent immigrants.
On November 24, 1989, all Canadian Parliamentarians had unanimously voted to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000,[2] in response to the final speech before his retirement, made by Ed Broadbent, then leader of the NDP.
Broadbent had called for a resolution raising concern "for the more than one million Canadian children living in poverty.
[12] A 2013 Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) report said that, the average Indigenous child poverty rate was about 50% compared to 17% for all children in Canada in 2013.
[14] The report stated that families living on First Nations reserves all across the country were faced with "substandard housing, unsafe drinking water, poor health, high suicide rates, and intergenerational trauma".
[14][15] According to the authors of this report, David Macdonald and Daniel Wilson, the rate of childhood poverty seems to imply that Canada's allocation of funding designed to assist Indigenous children is failing to match the severity of the problem.
Schools on reserves provided inadequate education as they lacked necessary resources as the ratio of applicants far outweighs the funding that they receive.