Mr. Speaker, I would first like to congratulate the hon. member from Sault Ste. Marie for his motion to concur in the committee's sixth report, which I had the honour to table last Friday, November 20.
I will not quote many statistics. My colleagues who spoke before me did a good job of showing how we have failed to achieve the objectives of the unanimous motion to combat poverty that this House passed on November 24, 1989, 20 years ago today.
As the hon. member mentioned earlier, we can be happy that we have made some advances in the fight against poverty, especially when it comes to seniors, but I think that in terms of families, and particularly children, we have failed. That is distressing. The motion specifically said that we should try to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. We are in pretty much the same position as we were in 1989. In order to ensure that things improve, we cannot lie to ourselves. There are aggravating factors that lead to poverty. We must work under the assumption that where there are poor children, there are poor parents.
What is more, it should come as no surprise to us today that the government has not met its goals, because, in the two decades since the motion, it has made deep cuts to the measures that make up the social safety net.
One contributing factor is the shortage of adequate, decent housing. Between 1993 and 2001, the Canadian government withdrew its financial support for the provinces' efforts to build affordable housing. Funding was not restored until 2001, and then only at a fraction of what it had been. Then along came the deficit we have now. We inherited this policy, which is one of the worst there is.
Over the past few years, especially in the latest budget, the government has cut funding for programs that support gender equality in the workplace. Women are being denied legal recourse to fight for pay equity. The tragedy here is that anyone should be surprised that there has not been greater progress in the fight against poverty.
The same goes for literacy. Over the past five years, the literacy budget has been cut in half. Depriving people of knowledge, information and the ability to find out what they need to know and use their own knowledge to survive also contributes to poverty.
My colleague from Laval—Les Îles talked about how the government scrapped the Kelowna accord for aboriginal peoples. It is disconcerting. The federal government has a fiduciary responsibility toward aboriginal communities. There was supposed to be $5 billion made available to aboriginal communities.
In conclusion, I would like to touch on one last element. The government eliminated the program, and nobody should be surprised at the state of aboriginal communities. Yet the Canadian government has a fiduciary responsibility toward these communities. I also want to briefly mention the fact that the government made deep cuts to employment insurance benefits even though the money was there, and then used that money for other purposes.
All of these actions have prevented us from gaining ground in the fight against poverty.
I really hope that the House will unanimously pass the motion before us this morning.