Thank you, Chair. I certainly appreciate the opportunity to appear before the committee.
My name is Mary-Lou Donnelly, and I'm president of the Canadian Teachers' Federation. The federation is the national voice for teachers in Canada on education and related social issues. We represent upwards of 200,000 teachers across the country, through 16 provincial and territorial teacher organizations.
Our presentation and brief will focus on an issue that Canadian teachers have pursued before this committee and other House of Commons and Senate committees for the past two or three years. It demands the immediate attention of the Canadian public and all levels of government, and it is child poverty.
Many of the recommendations contained in our short brief will be familiar to some of you.
Too little has changed over the past 20 years to positively address the issues that children in this country face on a daily basis.
On November 24, 2009, marking and mirroring the twentieth anniversary of a similar event, the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion resolving that the Government of Canada develop an immediate plan to eliminate poverty in Canada for all. We believe that was a commitment by Parliament to a federal plan for the elimination of poverty.
There were promising pieces of the poverty puzzle that were addressed in the report of the 2009-10 House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance entitled, “A Prosperous and Sustainable Future for Canada: Needed Federal Actions”.
One of the key problems for low-income families is the care of young children, both from the perspective of the parents' availability for employment and the opportunity for the child to have access to early educational development through quality programs. The committee recommended that the federal government implement a national child care plan providing high-quality, affordable, and inclusive child care services. Other recommendations included significant improvements to the employment insurance program and a recommendation that programs for aboriginal Canadians be designed to address, among other things, education, housing, and early childhood development and care. All of these support the proposals that CTF made last year, and that it continues to make this year.
We need consistent recommendations of this nature from the finance committee if Canadians are to realize, in the 2011 federal budget and subsequent budgets, the kind of federal programming and assistance that is necessary to address poverty reduction in a meaningful fashion.
We were extremely pleased that early in 2010 the Senate adopted the report “In From the Margins: A Call to Action on Poverty, Housing and Homelessness”. Among the 74 recommendations in the report are those that address increases to the minimum wage; significant improvement to the employment insurance program; increases to the national child benefit; affordable housing initiatives; assistance for first nations, immigrant, and refugee children, and their families; additional support for access to post-secondary education; and a national federal-provincial initiative on early childhood learning. Again, these are recommendations that are supported by the CTF brief.
While the government's response to the report does a good job of outlining what it was doing under programs that are directed toward poverty reduction, unfortunately it does not specifically address any of the recommendations in the Senate report. We believe this committee should carefully review the Senate report and incorporate elements that support a coordinated effort to reduce and eliminate child poverty in Canada into your suggestions for the 2011 federal budget.
The child poverty rate remains essentially at 1989 levels, just over 11%. Nearly one in every nine Canadian children lives in poverty. Child and family poverty rates are at double digits in five out of ten provinces. One out of every two children living in a family that recently immigrated to Canada lives in poverty. One in two aboriginal children under the age of six who are not living in first nations communities live in a low-income family. The use of food banks since the 1989 unanimous House of Commons resolution to end child poverty has increased by over 80%.
The Canadian Teachers' Federation has extensive policy on children and poverty. It is based on the fundamental premise that all children, regardless of circumstances or family income, have the right to the full benefits of publicly funded education. In supporting this, teachers and their organizations participate in the development of educational and public policies designed to reduce the incidence and impact of child poverty. Our policy stresses the importance of child care and early intervention and the role of government in addressing that concern.
Teachers, probably better than most, are able to see the evidence of poverty in their classrooms when students change schools frequently during the year because the family does not have enough money to pay rent, when they shrink from shame or lash out from anger because of the stigma of poverty, and when they can't afford to buy books at the book fair or go on school trips with the other kids.
We know what the problems are. We know what needs to be done. What we now need is to determine how the research and the recommendations fit in a national strategy, how they are connected, and how best we can focus our energies to make good things happen.
Finally, we believe that education and training must be protected from cutbacks that may be generated as a result of exit strategies from economic stimulus spending put in place during the recession. There is a well-established correlation between socio-economic status and children's academic performance, and there's also a direct relationship between economic prosperity and how children and youth fare in schools.
Thank you.