Prince William and Kate release photo of daughter Charlotte to mark ninth birthday
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
As provincial governments hand out one-time cash payments to help residents cope with inflation, anti-poverty advocates say the efforts are a missed opportunity to help those most in need.
Doug Pawson, the executive director of Newfoundland-based anti-poverty group End Homelessness St. John's, says that while every dollar helps, the one-time nature of the payments mean they don't address people's enduring needs.
"It's strikes me as a bit of lazy policy in the sense that you could really target these funds to be to have more impact, and meaningful impact," he said in an interview Sunday.
The Newfoundland and Labrador government announced last week it will send $500 cheques to all residents who made less than $100,000 last year, with those earning up to $125,000 getting smaller cheques -- a plan that echoes similar programs in Quebec and Saskatchewan.
The initiative is expected to cost nearly $200 million.
Pawson said that at a time when an "unprecedented" number of people and families in St. John's are experiencing homelessness, it would be better to offer sustained support to help people who are struggling to pay for utilities, food and basic living expenses.
"It's a lot of money that's being put out and there's nothing meaningful that's going to come from it, in the same way that targeted investments into housing, for example, could have had," he said.
The Newfoundland and Labrador finance department said the measure is just one of several intended to help people deal with inflation.
"We have one of the most responsive sets of cost-of-living measures relative to other Canadian provinces," spokeswoman Victoria Barbour wrote in an email. "Many of these cost-of-living initiatives focused on the most vulnerable. These included increases to the income supplement and seniors' benefit, as well as a one-time payment to those on income support."
Other provinces have taken similar steps. Saskatchewan has said it will give all residents who completed a tax return last year a one-time payment of $500, while Manitoba is giving all families with incomes up to $175,00 a $250 cheque for their first child and $200 for each additional child under 18.
In Quebec, where the provincial government sent $500 cheques to most residents earlier this year, a second round of inflation payments are planned for December. Those will see all residents who earned less than $100,000 in 2021 get $400, with those earning less than $50,000 getting an additional $200.
The cost of that second payment is estimated at around $3.5 billion.
Tasha Lackman, the executive director of The Depot Community Food Centre in Montreal, said her group has seen requests for emergency food assistance double since the spring as people on fixed or low incomes struggle to keep up with the rising cost of groceries.
"Those kinds of measures are not long-term solutions, they're band-aid solutions," she said in an interview Sunday. "These band-aid solutions are not addressing the major issues. We need stable income floors, that nobody can fall below; we need social housing, or affordable housing, and access to those housing programs, and that's not what we're seeing."
Ewan Sauves, a spokesman for Quebec Premier Francois Legault, said the rising cost of living is affecting everyone and that the December payments will be "more generous for lower-income individuals and families."
Sauves wrote in an email the Quebec government has also committed to spend $1.8 billion on the construction of new social and affordable housing, help more than 7,000 households pay their rent and provide $20 million in infrastructure funding for food banks.
Dan Meades, the provincial co-ordinator of the Transition House Association of Newfoundland and Labrador, said in an interview Saturday that while inflation is hurting everyone, higher income families have the ability to make choices about their spending that aren't open to someone making $15,000 a year.
"I don't disagree that everybody is having a hard time, but it can't be government's job to care for those of us that have the most, it has to be government's job to care for those of us that are most vulnerable and have the least, first," he said.
Prince William and his wife Kate released a picture of their daughter Charlotte to mark the princess's ninth birthday on Thursday.
A Canadian restaurant lowered its prices this week, and though news of price tags dropping rather than climbing sounds unusual, the business strategy in this case is not, according to experts in the field.
Inspections are underway at more than one Loblaws location in Ottawa after complaints were filed about tall Plexiglas barriers.
Canadian baseball player Tyler Black made a major splash in his first-ever big league game for the Milwaukee Brewers on Tuesday night.
Scientists studying a Neanderthal woman's remains have painstakingly pieced together her skull from 200 bone fragments to understand what she may have looked like.
The makers of Ozempic say their weight-loss drug Wegovy will be available to patients in Canada starting Monday.
Archeologists have unearthed the skeletons of five people, missing their hands and feet, at a former Nazi military base in Poland.
The trusted traveller program between Canada and the United States is extremely popular and almost two million Canadians have a Nexus card.
In an effort to balance the profitability of Mother's Day with the pain it causes some people, some brands are offering customers the choice to opt out of Mother's Day email advertising.
A group of SaskPower workers recently received special recognition at the legislature – for their efforts in repairing one of Saskatchewan's largest power plants after it was knocked offline for months following a serious flood last summer.
A police officer on Montreal's South Shore anonymously donated a kidney that wound up drastically changing the life of a schoolteacher living on dialysis.
Since 1932, Montreal's Henri Henri has been filled to the brim with every possible kind of hat, from newsboy caps to feathered fedoras.
Police in Oak Bay, B.C., had to close a stretch of road Sunday to help an elephant seal named Emerson get safely back into the water.
Out of more than 9,000 entries from over 2,000 breweries in 50 countries, a handful of B.C. brews landed on the podium at the World Beer Cup this week.
Raneem, 10, lives with a neurological condition and liver disease and needs Cholbam, a medication, for a longer and healthier life.
The lawyer for a residential school survivor leading a proposed class-action defamation lawsuit against the Catholic Church over residential schools says the court action is a last resort.
Mounties in Nanaimo, B.C., say two late-night revellers are lucky their allegedly drunken antics weren't reported to police after security cameras captured the men trying to steal a heavy sign from a downtown business.
A property tax bill is perplexing a small townhouse community in Fergus, Ont.