Single mothers are disproportionately poor, but a Vancouver group has federal funding to try to change that outcome. Three mothers share their stories.
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Surrey’s Jagdeep Hayre works one full-time and four part-time jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table for her two children.
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“When are you eating? When are you sleeping? When are you actually parenting, when all you’re trying to do is just work to get the basic needs met?” asked Hayre, who is part of an alarming trend of single mothers trying to survive financially in Canada’s most expensive province.
“Two-parent homes are struggling. How is a single parent supposed to make it work?”
Hayre, like all the single mothers who spoke with Postmedia News, is resiliently raising her kids in a stable home, and doing her best to make ends meet as the cost of living skyrockets. She routinely shops at budget grocery stores, and when food runs thin she feeds her son and daughter, but drinks only tea herself.
She has raised her two children, now 12 and 15, on her own for eight years, after leaving a marriage marred by domestic violence.
Once a stay-at-home mom, she now works full-time with an organization that supports parents of children with mental-health or substance-use challenges, and her four part-time jobs are in similar fields.
“I wish I could just have two jobs, instead of all of these,” said Hayre, 43.
She is one of 18 single mothers from across B.C. taking part in a new three-year project, funded with a $557,000 grant from the federal government, to begin lobbying officials in 2025 for policy changes that will benefit one-parent families.
“When we do better, our kids do better,” Hayre said.
In January, the project will launch a social-media campaign and send letters to provincial cabinet ministers to request meetings. Rather than hearing from lobbyists or advocates, the government will learn directly from these 18 single mothers, who have now received public speaking and media training, about their struggles and their ideas for solutions.
“They are living the realities right now,” Ellis said. “What needs to change?”
The single mothers identified 16 changes that would improve their lives:
• Hasten the creation of affordable housing, particularly for families with incomes below $90,000;
• Bolster the B.C. Family Benefit payment for low-income families;
• Have mental-health counselling covered by MSP;
• Raise income and disability rates;
• Remove earning exemptions from disability recipients;
• Expand $10-a-day child care spaces and prioritize access for low-income families; and
• Expand extended health benefits from employers.
‘Tugs at the heartstrings’
Family poverty rates in B.C. started to improve around 2015 and dipped significantly during the first year of COVID-19 due to emergency government supports. But they have risen steadily since those supplements ended.
The First Call report found 38 per cent of children in lone-parent families were poor in 2020, but that jumped to 40 per cent in 2021 and more than 45 per cent in 2022.
Statistics for the last two years aren’t yet available, but evidence suggests the situation has continued to worsen: subsidized housing waiting lists are up, food bank use has escalated and government support payments haven’t kept up with inflation, said First Call executive director Adrienne Montani.
In 2022 in B.C., there were 76,190 children living in poor lone-parent families, a higher number than impoverished children in two-parent families — even though the vast majority of B.C. kids are raised by couples, First Call found.
The median after-tax income for two-parent families with two children in 2022 was $128,260, compared with $58,500 for single parents of two kids.
First Call examined 28 B.C. communities and found the poverty rate for children in single-parent families was highest in Prince Rupert at 54 per cent. Other areas with alarmingly high rates include Duncan, Chilliwack and Abbotsford-Mission.
Victoria had the lowest rate at 38 per cent. Other cities with lower rates include Trail, Courtenay and Squamish.
Vancouver and Kamloops were the middle of the pack, with poverty rates of 44 per cent for kids raised by single parents.
First Call has produced a child poverty report card for 28 years, but for the first time this year included the stories of five single mothers. Montani hopes this will grab the attention of decision-makers.
“I hope, of course, it tugs at their heartstrings. And their policy strings,” she said. “This is the most vulnerable group of kids, the highest risk of poverty.”
‘The worst time in my life’
One of the women profiled in the First Call report is Roxanne W., who has a full-time job in data entry and has worked hard to make a good life in Vancouver for her four children, ages three to 17.
Expanding child care and providing better support in schools for children with disabilities are among the policy changes most important to her.
Roxanne was born to a single mother, a residential school victim who struggled to raise her three young kids. She and her siblings bounced between schools and foster homes across Metro Vancouver.
Roxanne was scared when she became pregnant at age 17, but her mother, who was fatally ill, wanted her to keep the baby.
Roxanne’s mother died when the baby was just six months old, leaving the teen without emotional or financial support, as most of her relatives lived in the remote Fort Babine Nation north of Smithers.
“I ended up homeless after she died, with the baby,” Roxanne said, tears welling in her eyes. “I looked so young. No one wanted to rent to me.
“It was the worst time in my life.”
A worker from the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre helped her find a place to live, even if it was a windowless, illegal basement suite with no bathtub to bathe her baby.
A “life-saving” program at another non-profit group taught her skills to be a good parent, such as household budgets and cooking. Society, she argues, needs more of these programs to give vulnerable lone parents a chance at success.
“Single mothers feel alone. They need encouragement,” she said. “It keeps you going, no matter how much you are suffering.”
To that end, she gave a supportive shout-out to other women in similar situations.
“Things will get better. Stay strong. Be proud of yourself because parenting is so hard,” said Roxanne, who asked that her last name be confidential.
Things are better today for Roxanne, who is raising her four children with her longtime partner. Money, though, is still tight.
Her partner can’t work because the couple is unable to get their seven- and nine-year olds into before- and after-school care, and until recently they were on long daycare waiting lists for their toddler.
The couple uses coupons while grocery shopping, avoids expensive items like beef and sometimes relies on credit to pay their bills.
“I will not stop buying food because we don’t have the money,” Roxanne said. “My kids never go hungry.”
Higher minimum wage, free transit
To address the lived realities of struggling parents, the First Call report, like the Lone Mothers’ Economic Inclusion project, also makes a long list of recommendations. They include increasing the minimum wage, free transit and ensuring everyone qualifies for parental leave benefits regardless of work status.
Some of the calls for change are personal for Hayre. For example, she wants counselling included in MSP coverage, after being unable to find help for mental-health challenges during COVID.
Hayre and the other 17 mothers are divided into four regional committees from across B.C., who will push politicians in Victoria as well as those closer to home, such as at school boards or city halls, to implement solutions that will make them more financially stable.
Included in the 16 suggested changes is creating a task force that looks out for vulnerable populations during extreme emergencies, such as during COVID when some poor single mothers were thrown into crises. Ellis knows of some mothers who fled untenable home lives in 2020, but became homeless, often with babies and toddlers, when shelters closed due to the restrictions at the time.
“It was that breakdown in social services that we have to get better next time,” Ellis said.
‘It’s really hard to get ahead’
The 18 single-mother advocates, who will be paid for about six hours of work a month until the project ends in March 2026, will host online webinars and do other public engagement to promote their ideas for change.
One of those women is Michelle Ferris, 33, who is raising her four-year-old son Mason on her own in subsidized housing in Victoria. Before fleeing a relationship made toxic by drugs and domestic violence, she suffered a permanent brain injury.
She is employed as a support worker for other women with brain injuries, and has two additional jobs. But Ferris’s financial situation is still “very, very difficult.”
The provincial government restricts her to making just $16,000 a year from her jobs. If she makes more, they will reduce her disability payments. This leaves her trapped under the low-poverty line.
One of the recommendations in the economic inclusion project is to ease those earning exemptions, to allow lone parents with an injury the greatest chance of achieving prosperity for their family.
Another of the project’s goals is to have employers give parents up to five paid days off work when their kids are sick. That would also benefit Ferris, who worries about how to afford necessities if she can’t go to work when her son is ill.
“Then I really have to budget and think about where all of my money is going. Where it’s going to bills. How much groceries I have to buy. … Can I afford produce? Can I afford all of the meat? Can I afford all of these things,” she said.
“It’s really hard to get ahead.”