Thank you very much, Mr. Chairperson.
Members of the committee, ladies and gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be here talking on behalf of the SCIC, the Saskatchewan Council for International Cooperation.
In your finance committee's recent document “Canada's Place in a Competitive World”, you refer to the fact that Canada, as a small open economy, depends significantly on other countries for our economic health and prosperity. This recognition of the need for cooperation and working with other countries is commendable; however, we also understand that we depend on one another not only for economic prosperity, but also for global peace, global public health, and the protection of the global environment. Without these things, no country can prosper and no country is safe.
Because of our prosperity depending on others and also on the basis of cooperation within our own country, we need to invest in health, education, and infrastructure for Canadians, but not only for Canadians, but also the rest of the world if we want to live in peace. Right now, it is our belief that poverty now affects 3 billion people, half of the total human population. It's not only morally intolerable to Canadians, it's also a threat to the peace, health, and stability of the world in which Canadians must go about their business—in other words, our own self-interest.
During his election campaign, the Prime Minister promised that we will match the average OECD donor performance of 0.42%. We recommend that we should exceed the average of the OECD and should aim for 0.7%, which was a goal set by one of our own prime ministers a few decades back and was taken up by the world as a goal to reach. In order to do that by 2015, we recommend that Canadian aid be increased by 18% annually and that the government commit to a plan to meet the target of 0.7% of our gross national income. It's very important that we take the rest of the world along with us.
More aid by itself is not enough. We also need better aid, that is why we support Bill C-293, the Development Assistance Accountability Act. We urge the government and members of Parliament from all parties to support speedy passage of this bill.
Of course, we recognize that the Government of Canada is also directly concerned with the well-being of Canadians, their health, education, and standard of living, as your brief discusses. On this topic, we would like to point out that far from being able to adopt new technologies and seize market opportunities, many Canadians currently live in poverty, affected by poor nutrition, illiteracy, and institutional racism. Statistics tells us that one in six Canadian children are poor. Every month, 700,000 people in Canada use food banks. In Saskatchewan, the unemployment rate for aboriginal people is more than double the rate of non-aboriginals, and working aboriginal people have an average income almost 50% lower than the average income of non-aboriginal people.
In order to ensure that our citizens are healthy and have the right skills for their own benefit and for the benefit of their employers, the government must take action against poverty in Canada. A big step toward this goal would be increasing the national child tax benefit. The government also needs to get serious about developing a poverty reduction strategy for Canada that includes positive initiatives in housing, population health, and labour force development. Investment in poverty reduction will yield many economic and social benefits for us and everybody else.
I would like to draw your attention to the pitfalls of recent failed government cutbacks to the programs of literacy, court challenges, the Law Commission, Status of Women, reducing smoking among the aboriginal communities, and other programs. The negative impact on skills development, health, and protection of rights is fairly obvious.
Mr. Chairman, the document “Canada's Place in a Competitive World” recognizes that we face an uncertain, rapidly changing future, for which we must be prepared and proactive. SCIC would go one step further and say that in many ways the world is poised at the edge of environmental, social, and political disaster. Focusing solely on improving the competitiveness of Canadian business will not avert this disaster. In fact, shifting social and environmental costs away from business might make them more competitive today—