Thank you for the opportunity.
Campaign 2000 is a cross-Canada public education movement of more than 110 organizations. We're pleased to have the opportunity again.
Nearly a generation has passed since the House of Commons unanimously committed to end child poverty by the year 2000. Clearly, 2000 has come and gone, but family poverty is unfortunately with us. We remain committed to pressing for implementation of that commitment, and we join with our partners in Make Poverty History, who I know were here this morning, to press for poverty eradication in the developing world as well.
It's time for Canada to become a leader in overcoming child and family poverty, not remain a laggard. With almost 1.2 million children and their families living in poverty—almost one child in every six—Canada ranks 19th, worst, out of the 26 OECD nations. That's far from acceptable, I think many would agree. Let's join the U.K. and Ireland, who have set targets and taken a determined approach and have had some success in ratcheting down the numbers.
Quebec and Newfoundland here in Canada have demonstrated admirable leadership by committing themselves to a defined strategy to reduce poverty. Newfoundland is just beginning, but after several years, Quebec is having some evident success. The rate of child and family poverty is decreasing in Quebec more quickly and steadily than anywhere else in the country. By strange contrast, it's going up and is stubbornly high in B.C., of all places.
If we're going to seek a social inclusion agenda, which I submit we must, since we're relying on immigration to refill, if you will, and support our population growth and labour force development, we have to be an inclusive society. We have to also deal with growing inequality, whereby the incomes of the richest top quintile rose by 10% between 1990 and 2000, while those of the poorest 20% remained stagnant.
The poverty rate tells half the story. We also have the average low-income family living $7,200 below the poverty line, and a stubborn figure of more than 40% of food bank users are children.
We think Canada can and should adopt a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy. It's affordable; it's achievable. It will require significant investments, but we made some important decisions for seniors in the 1970s that have brought our rates down to the lowest in the OECD for seniors in this country, and we can do the same for children. Minister Flaherty recently spoke of the government's determination to make “practical progress on the crucial economic, geopolitical and social infrastructure priorities”. We think that includes a poverty reduction strategy.
I'll cut to the recommendations.
With regard to the tax measures, I guess we will make this strong statement and urge you to reject the blunt instrument of general tax reduction, either through income taxes or the GST reduction. We've had that. It certainly has benefited some, but not as significantly people in the lower 10% or 20%.
Instead, focus on the Canada child tax benefit; increase it to $5,000 a year. We're about two-thirds of the way there. If a lone parent in this country could earn $10 an hour, work full-time, and get a $5,000 child benefit—a balance of a labour market measure and a public investment measure—many or most of those families would be able to lift themselves out of poverty.
Along with that, these parents and other parents need high-quality early childhood education and care. You must return to it. We support the private member's bill introduced by the NDP, and supported, as I understand it, by all the opposition parties.
We need a national housing strategy. I just came from the release of a new blueprint for housing for the city of Toronto. They've calculated that if the federal and provincial housing programs had not been cancelled, we would have had 27,000 more units than we have now.
I know my time is running out here. Let me just say that we also, on an emergency basis, must continue the support of the communities partnership initiative and the residential rehabilitation assistance program. We're not going to have secure populations to fill our labour force or schools if we don't have housing.
We also have to improve EI, and we hope that as a federal government you will take on reinstituting the federal minimum wage and put it at $10 an hour as an important symbolic measure.
Thank you.