June 5, 2025

Hello Committee Members and thank you for your time.

I’m Adrienne Montani, Executive Director of First Call Child and Youth Advocacy Society.

Along with our Affiliate network of over 100 member organizations– including non-profits, professional and industry groups and unions–we are dedicated to advocating for the welfare of children and youth in BC.  This year, First Call is celebrating 30 years of doing this work—and we know that child and youth issues are on everyone’s radar. I’ll go straight to our three key budget recommendations for 2026.

Recommendation 1: Targeted Poverty Reduction

BC’s child poverty rate rose by 26% between 2020 and 2022 — a deeply concerning trend. Children in lone-parent families face a shocking 46% poverty rate. Indigenous, racialized, and newcomer families are also especially vulnerable, as are families living with disabilities and youth transitioning out of care.

Yet, we know what works: government transfers, such as the BC Family Benefit and Canada Child Benefits that we championed, helped lift 99,000 BC children out of poverty in 2022. But we find that, once again, we are falling behind.

We urge the province to:

• Strengthen income supports like the BC Family Benefit and social assistance rates and ensure these keep pace with inflation.
• Expand portable rent supplements for low-income working families.

I invite you to read all 24 recommendations in our 2024 Child Poverty Report Card, which touch on living wages and housing policy, among other issues, and watch for our 2025 report at the end of this year.

Recommendation 2: Invest in Early Childhood Intervention

A third of BC children start kindergarten with developmental vulnerabilities — an urgent signal that we’re under-investing in the early years.

Proven, cost-effective programs like Family Resource Programs, Child Development Centres, and Young Parent Programs are starved for funding, despite their impact.

Access to quality, affordable, inclusive child care, which is a critical poverty reduction measure, for both single parent and couple families, is in dire need of greater investment in Budget 2026. Early childhood educators need decent wages so they can afford to stay in this profession.

We urge:

• Increased and sustained funding for drop-in family support programs to support parents and increased funding to child development centres to eliminate wait times for access to early interventions such as speech and physical therapies.
• Increased funding for high quality, affordable and inclusive child care, including raising wages for Early Childhood Educators to address recruitment and retention challenges.
• Expanded supports for urban and on-reserve Indigenous families, including Aboriginal Infant and Supported Child Development Programs for children with disabilities who families find are often excluded from child care programs.

Recommendation 3: Strengthen Public Education

In the public school system we find a chronic shortage of the additional staff needed to support students and classroom teachers. School staff are stretched thin.

This underfunding is harming children’s learning. Some students with disabilities and unique learning needs are being sent home due to a lack of support or waiting years for educational assessments.

Many parents have told us that the lack of access to school-age child care means they can only work during school hours, trapping them in poverty.

Growing school districts are paying for portables while they wait for capital investments in new classrooms.

We urge:

• Funding for more Education Assistants, especially in primary classrooms, and for a counsellor in every school.
• Expansion of before- and after-school care, preferably on school sites, to support working families.
• Continued investments in healthy school food programming, not just to help meet the nutritional needs of low-income students, but also because of the multiple benefits these programs have on children’s learning and social development.
• Immediate capital funding for growing districts to relieve overcrowding.

Thank you for your attention. I welcome your questions.

Adrienne Montani

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(Please see our media release on Adrienne’s presentation to the committee)