Two of SaskForward’s founding coalition partners, Poverty Free Saskatchewan and the Regina Anti-Poverty Ministry, work directly with people navigating income insecurity every day. Their presence in the coalition reflects a simple truth: budget decisions made in the legislature land hardest, and most immediately, on Saskatchewan residents already living closest to the edge.

Poverty is sometimes discussed as though it were primarily a personal or individual circumstance, disconnected from provincial policy choices. In practice, income support levels, minimum wage policy, affordable housing investment, and the availability of accessible public services all shape, directly and measurably, how many Saskatchewan residents experience poverty and how difficult it is to escape.

What the safety net is supposed to do

A social safety net exists to catch people during periods of job loss, illness, disability, or family crisis, providing enough support to meet basic needs while a person stabilizes their situation. In Saskatchewan, that safety net includes income assistance programs, disability supports, and a range of provincial and municipal services that people rely on when their income alone is not enough to cover housing, food, and other essentials.

When income assistance rates fail to keep pace with the actual cost of housing and basic necessities, the safety net stops functioning as intended. Instead of providing a stable floor that allows people to stabilize and move forward, it becomes a program that keeps people in a state of continuous, grinding insecurity, unable to build any margin for unexpected expenses.

The housing affordability squeeze

Housing costs represent the largest single expense for most low-income households, and Saskatchewan’s rental market has faced significant affordability pressure in recent years, particularly in Saskatoon and Regina. When income assistance rates and minimum wage levels do not keep pace with rising rents, low-income residents are forced into increasingly difficult trade-offs between housing, food, and other basic needs.

Renters of Saskatoon and Area, another SaskForward coalition partner, has highlighted how this affordability pressure affects not just people receiving income assistance, but working renters more broadly, including people employed full-time who still struggle to find stable, affordable housing within their income.

The cycle that traps people in poverty

Poverty is often misunderstood as a simple problem of insufficient individual effort, when in practice it frequently functions as a structural trap that is difficult to exit without external support. A person living in poverty may face a combination of unstable housing, unreliable transportation, limited access to affordable child care, and health issues that go untreated due to cost, each of which makes it harder to secure and maintain stable employment.

Cuts to public services intended to help break this cycle, from subsidized transit to accessible health care to affordable child care spaces, tend to reinforce the very trap that anti-poverty advocates are working to dismantle. Every reduction in support makes the path out of poverty marginally steeper for the people already furthest from stability.

The overwhelming consensus from our consultation was a widespread desire to protect the programs and services that ordinary people in Saskatchewan rely on.

Poverty across the province, not just in the cities

While poverty is often discussed primarily in an urban context, rural and northern Saskatchewan face distinct and often more severe poverty challenges, compounded by limited access to services, fewer employment opportunities, and greater distances to travel for support programs that do exist. Indigenous communities, both on and off reserve, face disproportionately high poverty rates rooted in historical and ongoing structural inequities that require sustained, dedicated policy attention rather than generic province-wide programs applied uniformly.

A genuinely effective anti-poverty strategy for Saskatchewan needs to account for this geographic and demographic diversity, rather than assuming that policies designed around urban circumstances will translate effectively to rural and northern contexts.

What an evidence-based approach looks like

Organizations like Poverty Free Saskatchewan have consistently advocated for income assistance rates tied to the actual cost of living, rather than rates set through a political negotiation disconnected from real housing and food costs. They have also pushed for a living wage framework that reflects what workers actually need to cover basic expenses in their specific community, recognizing that the cost of living in Saskatoon differs meaningfully from the cost of living in a smaller northern community.

These approaches share a common thread: grounding policy in the actual, measurable cost of meeting basic needs, rather than treating poverty reduction targets as an abstract policy goal disconnected from the concrete financial reality facing low-income Saskatchewan residents.

Why this work requires a coalition

No single policy change eliminates poverty. Meaningful progress requires coordinated action across income assistance, housing policy, health care access, child care availability, and labour standards, which is part of why anti-poverty organizations have found natural alliance within a broader coalition like SaskForward, rather than working in isolation on a single narrow policy lever.

Addressing poverty in Saskatchewan is not a matter of finding one clever solution. It is a matter of sustained, coordinated commitment across multiple areas of public policy, informed by the people and organizations working directly with those most affected, and backed by budget decisions that treat poverty reduction as a genuine priority rather than an afterthought.