By Kendall Worth!
With Christmas now behind us, we are into the last week of December, and it is time for my annual Year End Review.
I began writing this “Journalism for What Matters” blog in November 2021, and have made it a practice to wrap up each calendar year with a review of the year just completed, and then add a few thoughts about the year just ahead.
To be clear: my work as a journalist pre-dates this BLOG by many years. I first started writing about my community through the Halifax Media COOP. This was followed by several years of writing for the Nova Scotia Advocate where my articles focused on the lives of Nova Scotians living in poverty and their struggles with our province’s Income Assistance programs.
My previous year end reviews provide a useful measure of how the issues our community faces and my critiques and proposals have changed – or not – over the years. For readers curious to trace this evolution, here are my year end reviews for 2022, 2023 and 2024.
I realize that this may not be a popular opinion, but in my mind there was one major event in 2025 that has had by far the most significant impact on our community: the resignation of Justin Trudeau as Canadian Prime Minister. While there were many aspects about Trudeau that annoyed and angered many Canadians, I think we have to be fair and say that his departure from political office was a sad loss for Canadians living in poverty.
I wrote about this at the time of his announcement (actually late in 2024), highlighting Trudeau’s key role in securing the Canadian Disability Benefit which made a big difference in the lives of many people in our community. Once Mark Carney was selected to replace Trudeau as Prime Minister, I immediately wrote an open letter to our new PM, making the case for improved benefits for low-income Canadians and most particularly the disabled in this time of high inflation and growing poverty.
But so far the signs have not been encouraging. We have heard nothing positive from the Carney Government related to improving the Canadian Disability Benefit and apart from the initial celebration when the Trudeau funded benefit was launched – and the province agreed not to claw it back - the general impression is that the new Liberal Government will be an austerity government. This is never good news for low income households.
Speaking of the Provincial Government, 2025 has been a year of considerable disappointment. There have been no major improvements to the level of benefits paid out under the different Employment Support and Income Assistance (ESIA) programs, or in terms of their various eligibility criteria and conditions. Over the year, I have made multiple proposals for policy changes and improvements in my BLOGs, but the rates remain far below the poverty levels and in these days of rising costs, provide barely enough for basic survival.
Surely we can all agree that the basic IA rate of $1,005 a month is simply not enough money to live on, and as I have discussed in multiple blogs through the year, many IA recipients do not even receive that full amount.
A further factor of major concern to low income Nova Scotians is the ongoing housing crisis. While various new housing projects have been started in 2025, housing prices and rents continue to rise and there is good reason to expect that the number of homeless people will also continue to rise through 2026. As I wrote in my BLOG only a month ago, the situation continues to get worse in HRM. Daily updates from across the province as well as personal experiences can be accessed in the Facebook group Helping the Homeless in Nova Scotia.
For anyone who doubts the severity of the housing crisis for low-income households, - just do the arithmetic. The agreed financial standard is that a household should spend no more than 30% of its income on housing costs. So, if you receive the basic IA benefit of $1,005 a month, that means you should be paying no more that $301 for rent. SHOW ME ONE PLACE IN NOVA SCOTIA WHERE THIS IS POSSIBLE!!
A second HUGE issue for low income households in Nova Scotia is the cost of electricity. Nova Scotia Power was once a public utility, but 26 years ago, it was sold to private interests by the (PC) government of the day. I have been writing for some time in my BLOG how NS Power has been problematic for low income households. The situation seems to have deteriorated drastically over the past year and power bills have shot through the roof for people living on IA benefits. This is just not sustainable. And as I have written about extensively over the year, these economic issues have a direct and dramatic impact on the social well-being and mental health of many, many Nova Scotians.
With all that being said, I think that as a caring and concerned community, our goals for 2026 should be for activists to continue advocating for:
· an increase in the Income Assistance
rates to a livable amount and the pursuit of a Basic Guaranteed Income.
·
fast-tracking
more affordable housing.
·
the
Federal Government to increase the Disability benefit amount and expand the
criteria for eligibility;
·
expanded
and creative solutions to the issue of social isolation;
And perhaps most
significantly, to get a Social Prescribing Organization
established in HRM to support and engage the many people living on the margins
of our community.
Let me end this BLOG by wishing all my readers a Happy New Year. I look forward to continuing my work in 2026 and to your continued interest and support.
Kendall Worth is an award-winning anti-poverty activist who lives with disabilities and tries to make ends meet on income assistance.
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