New report highlights how poverty exists in each one of Calgary’s 14 wards

CALGARY — From the suburbs to the downtown core, poverty exists in each one of Calgary’s 14 wards, and with an upcoming election, one Calgary community group is showing how it thinks the new council can better address it.

Vibrant Communities Calgary is an organization that works to create long-term solutions to poverty in the city.

For the past six months, executive director Meaghon Reid, and her team have been working on the Calgary Municipal Ward Poverty Profiles — a publication that informs people on the reason’s poverty exists in their ward.

“So you can go into the ward poverty profiles and you can click on your ward. When you click on your ward what you’ll see is a comparison of how people in your ward are doing to the rest of Calgary,” said Reid. “So, you can see what transportation looks like, how many calls somebody made to 211 to get food resources.”

Poverty profiles aim to help voting Calgarians, and candidates, understand their surrounding area better.

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“We’re hoping that all candidates will take a look at this and say well what can I do in this ward if I am elected to make sure that we’re still moving the needle on poverty reduction. And then to think in the election, how does this inform my choice when voting is this something I want my candidate to be looking at?”

According to a Stats Canada metric, coming into the COVID-19 pandemic, 189,000 people in Calgary were living in poverty.

Vibrant Communities predicts that an additional 77,000 Calgarians fell into poverty as a result of the pandemic. The numbers have Reid hopeful that those who are not impoverished will care enough to vote for candidates who prioritize long-term solutions to poverty.

“So in COVID we all experienced this shock where all of a sudden very little was in our control, a lot of people lost work and that obviously wasn’t planned, these are realities that a lot of people in poverty face, a lot more of us faced in COVID. I think that’s created a huger community passion and empathy that will make people care about this when they go to the polls. Absolutely.”