Children’s Advocate Bob Pringle. Photo courtesy Johnson Shomoya Graduate School of Public Policy.
Before the election writ is dropped, Saskatchewan’s children’s advocate is taking the opportunity to critique the Sask. Party’s recently-released poverty reduction strategy.
Saskatchewan’s child youth advocate, Bob Pringle, said he’s had to look hard to find things to be happy about with the strategy, which aims to get half of Saskatchewan’s poor above the poverty line before 2025.
The goal itself, has left something to be desired for Pringle. He said if the province put resources into the ideas laid out in the plan, we could achieve that goal within five years instead of nine or 10.
He commends the province for making adjustments to the advisory group’s recommended six priority areas. The province combined the related issues of “Education, Skills Training and Employment” and added “Vulnerable Families and Individuals” as a priority area.
“It drew attention to the urgent need to address interpersonal, family violence. But the problem is, these are down for future initiatives ‘as we can afford them,’” Pringle said.
“The idea of waiting to have additional family violence programs ‘when we can afford it’ given that we have the highest family violence, interpersonal violence rate in the country seems short-sighted to me.”
Now five years into his job as a non-partisan officer of the province, Pringle said it’s become clear that poor children on reserve are the most vulnerable in Saskatchewan.
Taking a look at recent food bank statistics, Pringle said it’s even more obvious that a lot of the 100,000-plus poor people in Saskatchewan are children in aboriginal families.
Despite these numbers, Pringle points out the glowing language used in the poverty reduction strategy.
“If we were doing so well why did the food bank numbers jump way up this past year?” Pringle said. “I’m not saying the government’s not truthful in their report, I just think they’ve cherry-picked some of the things that have gone well, but having said that, let’s have some movement.”
And he says it’s time for the province to address the elephant in the room.
“Let’s call it as it is. We don’t like to talk about systemic racism because anyone in the government can say ‘well, there’s no policies that focus on being racist or discriminating,’ but it’s inherent in the structures and the systems. And in many cases we don’t even recognize it,” he said.
The provincial strategy isn’t an action plan, and for the most part is it’s just a repackaging of things we’ve already done as a province, Pringle said.
“The contemplated actions are vague, they’re really without specifics or timelines,” he said.
He understands that forest fire measures, oil prices, and other economic factors are affecting the money available to invest in provincial programming. However, he said the government priorities laid out in the poverty strategy have left him unsatisfied.
“I guess the question is, who’s going to pay the price for those? And I don’t think it should be children and I don’t see a lot of help for children in the short term, especially vulnerable children,” Pringle said.
His goal is to point out both the positive and negative. Pringle notes that in the first three years of his tenure the government made a lot of progress on child welfare initiatives.
He commends the strategy’s mention of transition supports for at-risk youth and youth in care, and mention of extending the age of eligibility for wards of the province to receive support for continues education.
Pringle says we need solid goals as a province, and consistent ways to measure how our people are doing when it comes to poverty.
The provincial election is set to be called any day now.
Recently, the government announced that Pringle’s term as Children and Youth Advocate will not be renewed for another five years. He’s agreed to stay on for an additional 10 months, and has three more reports to release before October.