When the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic in March 2020, the Tamarack Institute had been celebrating Canada achieving the lowest level of poverty in the country’s history. It had seemed like the end of poverty was in sight.
Instead, 2020 and 2021 reversed many of the successes around poverty and inequality made in the last several years.
Due to the lack of new information on Canada’s Official Poverty Line (Market Basket Measure) and complimentary population-level data from Statistics Canada, and due to members’ efforts being reprioritized from evaluation and reporting to emergency response, this second annual Communities Ending Poverty Impact Report serves as a COVID-19 update as opposed to a full impact report.