Child poverty rose for third consecutive year: Campaign 2000 report

By Canadian Press on February 25, 2026.

TORONTO — An organization that campaigns to end child poverty says the number of children living in households that struggle to pay bills and buy food has continued to grow.

The 2025 report card from Campaign 2000 says 30,000 more kids fell into poverty in 2023, the latest national data available.

That means the child poverty rate climbed for the third year in a row, which the advocates say shows that efforts to reverse the trend are not working.

The report says 1.4 million kids lived in poverty in 2023, with single-parent households particularly at risk, according to family income data.

That’s a child poverty rate of 18.3 per cent.

It says 45 per cent of children in lone-parent families lived in poverty, compared to 10.1 per cent in couple families.

The organization says the child poverty rate increased from 2020, when the government’s pandemic benefits temporarily reduced it to 13.5 per cent based on the after-tax family income measure.

The report says kids are the most likely age group to live in poverty in Canada.

It says Nunavut had the highest child poverty rate in the country, with nearly 39 per cent of kids living in poverty. Saskatchewan and Manitoba also had higher-than-average rates, hovering around 27 per cent.

Yukon had the lowest child poverty rate of all the provinces and territories, at 12 per cent. The report says that’s because most Yukoners live in Whitehorse, where there are higher-than-average incomes and a stable job market.

It says those in rural and remote parts of the Yukon disproportionately face poverty, especially Indigenous Peoples.