The road to good intentions

Today, something remarkable happened.

And, as remarkable as it is, it shows us how far behind Canada has fallen from its ideal self as a beacon of fairness, social justice and equality.

Today, 20 years after a unanimous federal government motion to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000, which it failed to make good on, Parliament has unanimously agreed to try again.

HUMA, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills, and Social Development and the Status of Persons With Disabilities, acknowledged the previous failed motion and committed "to develop an immediate plan to eliminate poverty in Canada for all".

The motion is a moral victory for many who have worked tirelessly toward a federal government commitment to tackle poverty, not the least of whom is Campaign 2000 [2], which reports today that child and family poverty remains a blight on a nation as affluent as ours.

On a day such as this, it would be easy to berate Canada's parliamentarians for failing to make good on its original promise.

It would be easy to castigate short-sighted politicians for giving away billions of dollars in tax cuts to really well-off Canadians while ignoring the poor during some of the best economic years in our nation's history.

But I'd prefer to concentrate on the task at hand.

Canada is knee-deep into recession and if any of its last two recessions are a predictor of the future, a full economic recovery is many years away.

After the 1990s recession, Canada's GDP bounced back fairly quickly but it took seven years before Canadians had access to the same level of full-time jobs that were available pre-recession.

Canada's federal and provincial governments made terrible mistakes following that last recession. They cut public services at a time when the economy was relying on public sector growth to pull the nation back into recovery. They ushered in punitive social assistance rules that deepened the experience of poverty for Canadians and made it harder for someone who falls on hard times to crawl out of the gutter.

When the economy finally started firing on all cylinders, Canada's senior levels of government, and much of the electorate, were lured by vote-getting tax cut promises and failed to use the nation's prosperity to significantly reduce poverty.

Today, Campaign 2000 released a report that shows Canada's after-tax child poverty rate was 9.5 per cent even before recession took root a year ago. In 1989, the year Parliament first committed to eliminate poverty, Canada's after-tax child poverty rate was 11.9 per cent.

In a nation as prosperous as Canada's - it is the ninth largest economy on the planet - there is no good excuse for such high rates of poverty.

One in 10 children still live in poverty in Canada. It's worse for children living in First Nation's communities: one in four grow up in poverty.

There are more working poor in Canada today: 40 per cent of low-income children live in families where at least one parent works full-time year round, up dramatically from 33 per cent in the 1990s.

Meanwhile, the gap between rich and poor has widened: On average, for every dollar families in the poorest 10 per cent had, families in the richest 10 per cent had almost 12 times as much ($11.84) in 2007.

What's heartening is that six provinces in Canada have signaled their intention to reduce poverty in their jurisdiction. It's time for the federal government to stand with them.

What we learned from the 1989 motion is that good intentions alone do not resolve the problem. Political will, backed by solid public sector investments in social programs proven to reduce poverty, is what's needed.

There is no time to waste.

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