Thank you very much for the opportunity to make the case for the next federal budget to be a budget to make poverty history.
The Canadian Make Poverty History campaign has the support of over a quarter of a million Canadians and of over 800 organizations that have signed on to our platform calling for more and better aid, trade justice, cancelling the debt, and ending child poverty in Canada.
The next federal budget could make a significant contribution to making poverty history by increasing Canadian aid by 18% annually and committing to a plan to meet the internationally agreed target for aid spending of 0.7% of gross national income by the year 2015.
More than 800 million people go to bed hungry and 50,000 people die every day from poverty-related causes. I know the government has many priorities to consider, but I would really ask you to search your hearts and say whether or not poverty reduction should be at the top of the agenda. How many other things stack up against the kind of death and misery that poverty is responsible for?
It doesn't have to be this way, and that's what makes it so terrible. If we choose, if we have the will to act, we now have in our hands in this world the technology and the resources that would enable us to make poverty history.
Former Canadian prime minister and Nobel peace prize laureate Lester B. Pearson was instrumental in setting the 0.7% of GNI target for international development assistance. This target was reaffirmed recently by the United Nations when it adopted the millennium declaration and the millennium development goals.
Other donors have stepped up, but Canada lags far behind. We are currently giving only 0.32% of our GNI, or less than half of what we should be giving. I would like to note that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made an election promise, during the election campaign, to match the OECD donor performance average, which was 0.42% of GNI in 2005. At a minimum, we believe the next federal budget needs to deliver on this election promise, and there needs to be a longer-term commitment to a plan for how Canada can meet the 0.7% aid target by 2015.
But more aid by itself is not enough. We also need better aid, and that is why the Make Poverty History campaign supports Bill C-293, the Development Assistance Accountability Act. I see that Mr. McKay has just left to be part of the debate today in the House of Commons. We urge the government and members of Parliament from all parties to support speedy passage of this bill.
I also want to note that just increasing our multilateral aid to the World Bank would not, in my opinion, meet the test of better aid either. I was very interested to hear today that the U.K. government has actually announced it will withhold its contribution to the World Bank because of its serious concerns about the quality of aid.
In 1989 the House of Commons unanimously resolved to eliminate poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. More than fifteen years later and five years after the deadline of the year 2000, what's happened? One in six Canadian children is still poor. We must end child poverty in Canada. The federal government could take a big step towards this goal by increasing the Canada Child Tax Benefit to $4,900 per child. In fact, since Make Poverty History established that as a goal, several years have passed, and a number of organizations are now saying it should be $5,000.
Ending child poverty is an important first step, but ultimately we need to find a way to ensure that no one is poor, and that is why the Make Poverty History campaign in Canada is calling for the federal government to involve groups where poverty is predominant, such as aboriginal people, women, minorities, and youth, in the design and implementation of a domestic poverty reduction strategy.
The governments of Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador have taken the lead in developing comprehensive poverty reduction strategies, but provincial governments do not have the jurisdiction over all the policy tools required to reduce and eventually eradicate poverty. That is why we need leadership from the federal government working with other levels of government to develop a national poverty reduction strategy for Canada.
The federal government could take leadership in areas of its jurisdiction by implementing a national housing strategy for social housing, implementing a national child care and early childhood education program, improving employment insurance programs so that more of those who really need it can qualify, reinstating a federal minimum wage and setting it at $10 an hour to ensure that someone working full-time will be able to escape poverty, creating a national pharmacare plan, and implementing the aboriginal poverty reduction measures that were part of the Kelowna accord between first nations and other levels of government.
Investment in poverty reduction and supporting participation in the labour market through positive incentives will yield many economic and social benefits, including boosting productivity, improving population health and lowering the cost of health care, and boosting labour market supply to help address looming labour shortages that could arise from an aging workforce.