St. Albert residents can get a better grip on poverty this month through a free lecture series at the city library.
The City of St. Albert’s Poverty Talks series launches March 14. The free talks, three of which will be in person at the St. Albert Public Library’s downtown location, offer guests a chance to learn more about the effects of poverty on St. Albert and what they can do to alleviate it.
Tricia Boonstra, community development co-ordinator with the City of St. Albert, said the city has organized this series partly in response to the results of its 2023 Community Social Needs Assessment, which, among other results, found that affordability was the weakest contributor to quality of life in St. Albert.
“Poverty does impact a whole community," Boonstra said. "It can’t reach its full potential if some are struggling.”
Boonstra said these talks aim to help residents understand the scale and causes of poverty in the city and how they might help address it.
Poverty lives here
St. Albert might seem affluent, but about 4.9 per cent of its residents (about 3,343 people) are considered low-income as defined by Statistics Canada, Boonstra said. About 19 per cent of the city’s four-person households earn less than $60,000 a year, putting them below or barely above the low-income threshold for such households ($54,704).
“A lot of people, because of the [cost] of utilities, housing, food, are more and more finding it harder to makes ends meet,” Boonstra said.
Boonstra said she will provide an overview of poverty in St. Albert at the March 14 talk, and lead guests in an exercise where they will go through the daily decisions faced by families at various income levels. The Housing Coalition of St. Albert will speak March 21 on affordable housing, and the St. Albert Mental Wellness Table will address mental health on April 4.
Living wage
The Alberta Living Wage Network will give an online talk March 28 on living wages as part of the series.
The living wage is a measure of what a person needs to earn to cover basic expenses and participate in a community, said Ryan Lacanilao, economist for the Alberta Living Wage Network.
As of November 2023, the living wage in St. Albert was $23.80 an hour, which was higher than both Edmonton’s ($22.25) and Calgary’s ($23.70) and one of the higher ones in Alberta. Lacanilao said St. Albert’s higher living wage was mostly because of its housing costs, which for a single person in St. Albert rose 11 per cent to $19,030 this year.
Lacanilao said it is useful to compare the living wage to Alberta’s $15/hour minimum wage, which, unlike everywhere else in Canada, has not increased since 2018 despite inflation.
“It feels like we’re behind.”
While some argue increased wages simply increase costs, Lacanilao said real-life results show otherwise. Alberta’s low minimum wage did not protect it from the inflation now sweeping the nation, for example, and a 2019 study of Seattle found raising the minimum wage (as Seattle did in 2015-17 while its neighbours did not) did not increase food prices in Seattle compared to its neighbours.
Lacanilao said communities like St. Albert can address poverty by encouraging businesses to pay a living wage. Research suggests low-income earners who get a raise are more likely to spend that money locally instead of socking it away (as the rich tend to do) and less likely to quit their jobs, reducing turnover costs, increasing productivity, and creating more local customers.
“It’s a virtuous cycle,” he said.
The talks run from 7 to 8:30 p.m. on March 14, 21, 28, and April 4. Visit stalbert.ca/poverty to register for the talks.
