The official opposition party at City Hall, Ensemble Montréal, is urging Valérie Plante’s administration to review the criteria it uses to claim funds from Quebec for the fight against poverty, at the time where galloping inflation increases the needs of thousands of low-income Montrealers.
Ensemble Montréal will table a motion to this effect at the next meeting of the city council, scheduled for January 23. This specifically asks the City to base itself on the “viable income” index established by the Institute for Socioeconomic Research and Information (IRIS) to negotiate its next funding agreement with the Ministry of Labour, Employment and Social Solidarity. This must be concluded this year in order to renew the funding of organizations fighting against poverty throughout the island of Montreal.
Currently, the IRIS assesses the viable income of a single person without children in Montreal at $29,577 per year. This is approximately $5,000 more than the threshold currently used by the City to determine that a household is in poverty, based on the market basket measurement index. Thus, by using the calculation made by IRIS, the City could considerably increase the number of people considered to be served by organizations offering, in particular, food aid or community services to low-income people, and therefore negotiate an increase consequence of their funding from the Legault government, argues Ensemble Montreal.
“What we basically want is for the Plante administration to have a clue to allow it to double the funding that the City currently receives,” summarizes Mr. Langevin, who thus hopes that the organizations of the metropolis will be able to improve their services to meet growing demand.
Currently, the City receives under its agreement with Quebec about 10 million dollars a year to fight against poverty on its territory.
Take inflation into account
The opposition party also believes that it is particularly important to improve the funding of local organizations on the island of Montreal helping low-income people in a context where they have been hit hard for months by inflation. , which particularly affects their grocery cart. Across Quebec, food prices rose an average of 11% last year, the highest increase in Canada.
Rising rental prices are also hitting low-income households hard at a time when nearly one in four tenants – precisely 24% – devote more than 30% of their income to housing, according to a recent study carried out for the account of Centraide of Greater Montreal and the Foundation of Greater Montreal. One in 10 Montrealers allocates more than 50% of their income for this purpose.
“We have inflation, we have an increase in the level of demands in community organizations and we use the same poverty analysis tools that forget a large segment of the population,” deplores Benoit Langevin.
A possibility already studied
The possibility of using the IRIS viable income index, which takes into account not only basic needs, but also the resources necessary for a person to enjoy “an adequate standard of living to flourish in society, has already been evaluated by the City in the past.
In 2019, the Montreal Commission on Social Development and Diversity, made up of elected municipal officials, considered the interest of using this index to negotiate funding agreements with the Government of Quebec in the fight against against poverty. In its final report, the municipal commission showed itself to be in favor of this prospect, while recommending that the City first collaborate with IRIS to improve this index, which then seemed to it to be incomplete.
In response to this report, the City’s Executive Committee indicated in August 2021 that it was “in favor of the best available resources being used to support the City’s arguments during representations to the various levels of government”, adding that the revenue sustainable “may be included in the selected indicators, in the same way as other reliable and recognized measures of low income”. However, the executive committee argued at the time that the IRIS index still needed to be “worked on” before it could meet the City’s expectations.
“What we are saying is that it makes no sense that four years ago, we made the request, it went before a public commission and that to this day, we have not still not adhered to this way of addressing poverty, to this way of making our demands with Quebec, ”insists Benoit Langevin, who had presented a similar motion in 2018.
The office of the mayoress of Montreal, Valérie Plante, did not want to comment on this motion, which will be debated during the next meeting of the city council.