Mr. Speaker, I am delighted to participate in today's debate regarding the NDP motion calling on the House to implement a national anti-poverty strategy.
In a country as wealthy as ours, it is simply not fair that so many people must struggle constantly just to survive. One in six Canadians now lives in poverty and they are defying the stale stereotypes of the poor. About 1.2 million of those living in poverty are children. Many others are adults facing tough barriers to employment while a quarter of poor families have someone working full time for low wages.
In a recent survey half of all working families said that they are just a couple of missed paycheques away from falling into poverty themselves. Poverty denies people freedom and hope, and it is the biggest single factor contributing to ill health.
When NDP members of Parliament defend good paying jobs and affordable training, we are defending ordinary people's freedom to thrive in good health. When NDP members promote affordable housing, we are standing up for two million families who cannot find shelter they can afford, and who must sacrifice other essentials or fall into homelessness. We promote fair security measures for vulnerable families, like secure pensions, adequate EI and decent social assistance.
At a time when even middle income families are feeling squeezed, New Democrats are working to make life more affordable, from laying a reliable foundation for affordable child care to ending unfair ATM fees. If we were not here in the House to raise these issues, who would be standing up to confront poverty?
Fighting poverty clearly does not fit the Conservatives' ideology, but if the Conservatives are the problem, the Liberals are not the answer. During their 10 years in power, when push came to shove, the Liberals cut corporate taxes and left our social safety net in tatters. They ended the federal role in welfare by cancelling the cost shared Canada assistance plan. They gutted employment insurance so that two-thirds of workers no longer qualify for benefits and they axed the world recognized affordable housing program New Democrats helped to create.
Moreover, the Liberals cut billions from education transfers, even as they wasted billions on corporate tax cuts. These cuts impoverished both students and the Canadian economy.
Canada's prosperity depends on how well we can equip today's young people with the skills they will need for tomorrow's economy. So it is both unfair and unwise to let soaring tuition costs push education and training out of reach of so many ordinary families.
Post-secondary education can open doors but it can also be a debt sentence. The average debt for university students at graduation last year was $24,047. Just yesterday I met with two medical students from McMaster University who told me that the average debt among their peers was over $100,000.
That kind of debt can choke young people's freedom to buy a first home, to start a family, or to pursue specialized training. Even the prospect of crippling debt can dissuade students from pursuing advanced education. Our kids should not have to mortgage their futures to get the skills they need to get decent paying jobs.
The solutions are right here in front of us. We need to create a system of needs based grants to offset student loans, replacing today's patchwork of tax credits and saving schemes that disproportionately benefit the wealthy. We need to overhaul the Canada student loans program to be more flexible, fair and responsive to the needs of every day students.
We need to ensure stable, adequate federal transfers for education and training by passing the NDP's post-secondary education act so every province can lower tuition and invest to improve education.
These are concrete steps to ensure that ordinary students will not continually be squeezed by the compounding pressures of rising tuition fees and jobs with an inadequate minimum wage.
However, concrete action is not a forte of this government. While it pays lip service to supporting a whole range of issues that would help financially challenged Canadians, in the end its rhetoric is not matched by action.
Therefore, I bet at the end of today's debate we will find all parties of the House supporting our motion to establish a national anti-poverty strategy, just like all parties supported a motion in 1989 that was introduced by former NDP leader, Ed Broadbent, calling for the eradication of child poverty in Canada by they year 2000.
Yet, today there are still 1.2 million children who are looking to their government to provide them with more than rhetoric. That figure includes an appalling one in four children in my home town of Hamilton.
Similarly, the House passed my seniors charter in June of last year. One of its guarantees was income security for seniors. Yet in Hamilton, one in four seniors still lives in poverty. Again, the government has been all talk and no action.
The Conservative government chooses whom to help by its own criteria of who is deserving and who is undeserving in its electoral universe. That record is not good enough. Confronting poverty is not optional, it is the essential recognition of the human dignity in everyone.
The NDP has proposed some concrete steps to address the growing prosperity gap in Canada by making life more affordable for low income and middle income Canadians.
First and foremost, we must repair the social safety net for vulnerable families, including more affordable housing and fair social assistance. We also need to repair employment insurance so it will work again for working families. We need to secure and improve public health care for today's families. We need to lay a permanent foundation for affordable child care. We also need to ensure we do not drive students into lives of poverty, by easing student debt and making education and training affordable for ordinary students. We need to end unfair ATM fees and address predatory credit card interest rates. We need to restore the federal minimum wage.
I know I only have a few minutes left to speak on the broad based motion before us today, but allow me to focus, in the time remaining to me, on one last item, and that is the restoration of the federal minimum wage.
How absurd is it that in a country as strong and vibrant as Canada we have people we call the working poor? No one who is working full time should be living in poverty. A living wage in Hamilton requires an hourly wage of over $12, and yet we still have people balking at the very notion of raising the minimum wage to even $10. Canada has a strong economy, yet internationally we are considered a low wage country with high rates of poverty. It is time for the federal government to show some leadership.
The federal minimum wage was eliminated in 1996 under the Liberal government. The argument then, as now, was that an increased minimum wage would hurt the economy and cost jobs. In fact, study after study has proven that there is no correlation between the loss of jobs and raising the minimum wage, nor of a detrimental effect on the economy.
David Card and Alan Kreuger's “Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage”, and Goldberg and Green's “Raising the Floor: The Social and Economic Benefits of Minimum Wages in Canada” are but two examples of many studies that have proven this.
As Nobel Prize winner Robert Solow confirmed that the:
main thing about the research is that the evidence of the job loss is weak....And the fact that the evidence is weak suggests the impact on jobs is small.
We can also look to Australia, where the minimum wage is $13, or France, or England or Ireland to prove that raising the minimum wage helps, not hurts, the economy. It has been proven over and over again that poverty keeps countries and provinces poor, both economically and morally.
That leads me to the ultimate reason to raise the minimum wage. It is ethical and moral. We know that poverty is associated with lower life expectancy, worse health, impoverished chances of advancement and crime and violence in our neighbourhoods, all extremely costly to our economy and children.
Studies have shown us that we can afford to raise the minimum wage. The real question now is, can we afford not to?
Canada is an extraordinary place to live. Our economy is strong, our public service is respected, our charitable organizations are remarkably diverse and active. Our country is one of the world's robust multicultural societies. We are internationally regarded as a caring, inclusive and progressive society. It is time we live up to that reputation and commit to a Canada without poverty.
