The Canada Child Benefit (CCB), introduced in 2016, is widely considered to be successful in reducing child poverty, with research finding that it reduces income poverty.

Going beyond that, Canada’s first child material-deprivation scale enables a more comprehensive evaluation, demonstrating that the benefit also reaches households with children experiencing adverse outcomes associated with a poverty level standard of living, despite the family being over official income poverty thresholds.

With the recent federal government announcement of the new Canada Groceries and Essentials Benefit, along with its continued investments in other programs such as the CCB, adopting a material deprivation lens is crucial to designing and evaluating the success of these and other programs to address the full scope of poverty.

Beyond income as proxy for well-being

Key to the CCB’s success is that it involves much more generous benefits than previous programs, with a maximum amount of $7,787 per child per year, and that its benefits are tapered only gradually at incomes of more than $36,000 annually.

However, both the program’s design and the measures used to estimate its effect on poverty assume that income is an acceptably accurate proxy of a family’s true level of material well-being.

The CCB is an income support program, administered through the tax system and its benefits are income-tested, meaning they are lower when a family’s income is higher. Moreover, Canada’s official poverty measure, the market basket measure, is income-based, as is the also commonly used low-income measure. However, income is only one crude proxy for a family’s level of material well-being. Other factors are its non-income financial situation (such as savings, assets, debts), its specific basic needs (such as a chronic illness or disability) and the costs of meeting its needs in its specific circumstances (such as paying a much higher rent after renoviction).

Material deprivation indicators provide an alternative measure of poverty through the tracking of adverse outcomes that arise due to a lack of money. Though they focus on outcomes, material deprivation indicators capture a family’s material well-being more broadly than income-based poverty indicators.

A recent study by two of the authors of this commentary, Notten & Sène (2025,........

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