Poverty remains a priority for voters ahead of Saskatchewan election

Poverty continues to be a top concern for many people in the Saskatchewan as they prepare to head to the polls.

Vote Compass, CBC News' civic engagement application, showed that when it comes to poverty, Saskatchewan people want more to be done.

• Use Vote Compass to compare the party positions ahead of Saskatchewan's election

Chantal Pek Pich used the online tool and said she was not surprised to see that people are prioritizing poverty-related issues.

"The majority, almost it looks like the majority, believes that we need to really look at this issue, that we need to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor in Saskatchewan," she said. "So it is a big issue and we need to put our money where our mouth is."

The online tool created by Vox Pop Labs, lets people find out where they fit in on the political landscape in relation to the Saskatchewan Party, the New Democrats, the Liberal Party and the Greens.

The latest reportshowed that most people believe that the government should spend more on low-income housing.

• Vote Compass: Saskatchewan is sympathetic to poverty issues

The report also showed that when it comes to shrinking the gap between rich and poor, 58 per cent of respondents said the government should do more.

"A lot of people form Saskatchewan, not just a small percentage, but quite a few think we need either a bit more, or quite a bit more, or much more [done]," Pek Pich said.

The report showed that 58 per cent of people in Saskatchewan also supported a higher minimum wage than the current$10.50 an hour.

Although poverty-related issues are a high priority to people in the province, Pek Pich said she doesn't feel it's been talked about enough on the campaign trail.

"I'm wondering if maybe they need to talk about it more and make it more of an issue, put it on the table and really show how this is something that needs to be looked at and not disregarded," she said.

About Vote Compass

Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement application offered in Canada exclusively by CBC News. The findings are based on 6,466 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from March 7 to March 14, 2016. Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected.

Similar to opinion polls, however, the data are a non-random sample from the population and have been weighted in order to approximate a representative sample. Vote Compass data have been weighted by geography, gender, age, educational attainment, occupation, and religion to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Saskatchewan according to census data and other population estimates.