Still below the poverty line, 20 years later

If Canada is still running a deficit in 2029, it will be a big deal. Right-leaning think tanks will lobby incessantly for balanced budgets and any political party that refuses to wield its red pen will face rejection at the ballot box.

Likewise, if Canada is still in Afghanistan in 2031 -- 20 years after its planned withdrawal -- Canadians will not take it lightly.

But there's one issue we've put up with for years, almost willingly. The end of November marked two decades that have come and gone since Canadian politicians voted unanimously to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000.

Despite their pledge, one in ten Canadian children still lives under the poverty line -- a number roughly equal to the population of Winnipeg. Amidst the unprecedented economic growth of the late 1990s and early 2000s, the poverty rate among children dropped a mere two percent, according to Campaign 2000, a cross-Canada movement dedicated to stamping out child and family poverty.

Using Statistics Canada's low-income cut off to measure poverty, Campaign 2000 [2] released a report card highlighting 20 years of broken promises on child poverty. In it, they note that while Canadian politicians were more than happy to cast their vote to end child poverty, they were loathe to implement any kind of concrete plan to make it actually happen.

So instead, they stood by idly as a national disgrace unfolded over the next two decades.

Today, children make up a disproportionate number of food bank users. Just 22 per cent of our population, they were 37 per cent of food bank users in 2008. As nine and ten-year-old children describe it in the Campaign 2000 report: "Poverty is pretending you forgot your lunch or being afraid to tell your mom that you need gym shoes."

Today, more than half of Canada's poorest children live in two-parent families and 40 per cent of poor children have at least one parent who works full-time.

And today, the face of poverty is increasingly racialized. Since the 1990s, recent immigrants have struggled with higher unemployment rates, lower earnings and greater challenges in securing employment.

Aboriginal children in Canada face "extreme poverty," says Shawn Atleo, Assembly of First Nations National Chief. Any plan to address this would "breathe life into the spirit of the apology" for Indian residential schools, he says, and could start by rectifying the $2,000 disparity in the per person expenditure on education for native and non-native school children.

The stubborn persistence of child poverty in Canada -- and the unwillingness of our politicians to take action against it -- makes us an international laggard. In the last decade, inequality between Canadian rich and poor has grown more than in any other OECD country, with the exception of Germany. Among our peers, we experienced the second-highest jump in child poverty between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s. And we rank dead last among 25 OECD nations when it comes to early childhood education, subsidized child care and parental leave.

What makes these statistics chilling is that the bulk of them are based on 2007 Statistics Canada data. The effects of the current economic downturn -- one that has left hundreds of thousands of Canadians without jobs -- have yet to be fully understood.

But now, Canadian politicians are trying again. On Nov. 24, 2009, the House of Commons passed a resolution to eliminate child poverty. This time they called on the federal government to develop "an immediate plan to eliminate poverty in Canada for all."

This plan must be informed by the measures laid out by Campaign 2000; increasing the child benefit from $3,400 to $5,400, investing in affordable housing, raising the minimum wage to $11 and instituting a national child care and early learning program. The plan must also find innovative ways of tackling the growing correlation between race and poverty.

"Ten years ago (former British prime minister) Tony Blair made a pledge to cut child poverty by 50 per cent in 10 years and he almost made it," Laurel Rothman of Campaign 2000 recently told the Toronto Star. "It happened because he had a plan and people in government responsible for it."

Canada can do the same. Armed with the experiences of other OECD countries, and suggestions from Campaign 2000, this time we must push our politicians to uphold their promises to Canada's most vulnerable.

After 20 years of inaction [3], it's the least we can do.

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