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HAY RIVER
A comprehensive document outlying anti-poverty strategies in the NWT has been met with mixed reactions in Hay River.

The Hay River Soup Kitchen served 3,562 meals to the end of October. - Myles Dolphin/NNSL photo

The Anti-Poverty Strategy for the Northwest Territories, a document more than three years in the making, was put together by the Poverty-Free NWT Steering Committee. Members of that group include representatives from the federal government, the GNWT, the NWT Chamber of Commerce and a student who has experienced poverty first hand.

Over 140 individuals, representing almost every community in the NWT, attended a number of roundtable talks in Yellowknife, Hay River and Inuvik, and a set of priorities and strategies were determined from those meetings.

Information from a number of reports – 'No Place for Poverty', 'What We Heard from Northerners about Poverty' and 'Action on the Ground', for example – has also contributed to the creation of the latest document.

Father Don Flumerfelt of Assumption Roman Catholic Church in Hay River said the document is encouraging in several ways.

“One of the things I’ve seen over the years is so many government branches working independently of each other without sharing information,” he said. “This document shows there are members of cabinet on the steering committee and, as a result, the discussion on poverty is taking place within the government. Furthermore, there is a wider community group in the NWT, much like our local inter-agency committee, that is causing there to be many inter-disciplinary groups sharing information on the same issue. It’s very promising.”

Flumerfelt said he is also pleased to see one of the strategies address the issue of equity, noting that, all too often, there is judgment made as to who is worthy of receiving services and who isn’t.

The priest was referring to the strategy's subtitle: “NWT sustainable communities managing their own human, natural, and financial resources to meet current needs while ensuring that adequate resources are equitably available for future generations.”

Laura Rose, president of the Hay River Soup Kitchen, was less enthusiastic about the report.

She said it’s another shining example of the GNWT creating an attractive document, and doing nothing about its objectives.

Rose pointed out nothing has improved since 2009 when the process was first initiated by Poverty-Free NWT.

“Things are getting worse and my numbers have actually increased steadily since 2009,” she said.

According to Rose’s statistics, the Soup Kitchen served approximately 3,596 meals in 2011. This year, the number was already at 3,562 without taking into account November or December.

“The biggest thing would be to increase the income support to take in the cost of living. That hasn’t changed since 2007,” she noted.

That year, Charles Dent, then the minister of Education, Culture and Employment, announced changes to the income assistance program in the hopes of allowing more low-income residents to keep the money they receive.

One of the healthy living and self-sufficiency objectives in the new document is to ensure improved support is provided to people transitioning to work. One of the anticipated outcomes of that objective is that “youth and adults on income assistance receive sufficient allowances to meet their basic needs, regardless of where in the territory they live.”

The recommended timeline is one to three years.

Suzanne Desfosses, the NWT Housing Corporation's district director for the South Slave, said Hay River currently has 53 people on the public housing waiting list, with 36 of those looking for bachelor units.

“We used to see larger families making up most of the waiting list,” she said.

With help from the Territorial Rent Supplement Program – which provides a rent subsidy of $500 per month for up to two years to low-income families – Desfosses said Hay River is doing better than many other northern communities.

Hay River has 171 units in public housing and she said the corporation is looking at different ways to get the public and private sectors to work together in an effort to house as many people as possible.

“Ideally we want everyone to be housed,” DesFosses said. “When people are more successful, they have a higher income and we hope to see them transition into the Homeownership Entry Level Program.”

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