Thank you very much for the invitation to present today.
As I travel across the country, encouraging Canadians to think more about promoting health rather than treating illness, more and more I say that boils down to thinking a lot like our national animal. Now, some have heard senators recently critique our national animal for being a dentally deficient rodent, but I think such critiques are all wet. Our beaver is a builder to be proud of, because when do we notice beavers? We notice beavers when they build dams. The thing is, no beavers live in those dams. Beavers build dams because the dams create reservoirs, and if those reservoirs are deep enough, then beavers gain efficiency because they can swim faster than they can walk on land. If the reservoir is deep enough, beavers gain security out of the reach of predators. And if the reservoir is deep enough, they also gain ample room to build woodsy little lodges as homes for their individual beaver families.
Then what happens when cracks appear in the dam? Well, like all good managers, beavers adapt. They come and repair the hole in the dam, not because any individual beaver stands to gain, but because the entire community of beavers depends on that dam to safeguard their shared standard of living.
I think that in Canada that kind of beaver logic has served us well for most of our history. By the 1970s we had spent a long time building our own national policy beaver dam. We had built public schools and universities, we had built veterans benefits, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance. In the sixties we put in place our old age security plan and our hospital insurance and capped it all off with a Canadian public pension plan and the Medical Care Act. It is a policy tradition we all must be proud of. You know it better than most Canadians, and I encourage all of us to remember it.
But as I travel across the country I also ask what we have done since. There is no doubt that we've continued to build our markets and expand our banks, and what not, which have allowed us to weather the global recession better than most countries. But on the social policy side, we also see two somewhat worrisome trends. If you look at municipal, provincial, and federal revenue as a share of GDP, it has gone down by about $90 billion since 1980. Simultaneously, our expenditures on medical care have gone up about $47 billion as a share of GDP, which then crowds out our ability to use policy to adapt to the declining standard of living for the generation raising young kids.
I can show you that decline in three simple facts. It turns out that for young couples in Canada, household incomes are stalled between 1976 and today. They are stalled even though we have far more young women contributing employment income today than we did a generation ago. With that stalled household income, they have to pay for housing prices that have gone up across the country by 76%—and in my province, 150%—which leaves the generation raising young kids squeezed. They are squeezed for time at home because they're having to devote so much more adult time to making a household income that is stalled; they're squeezed for money even when they're not technically poor, because of the rising cost of housing; and they are squeezed for services like child care, which grow instrumentally more important when you need two earners to make the same level of income that one often could a generation ago.
That squeeze is happening even though the economy has more than doubled in size, producing on average an extra $35,000 per household, which does help to explain why it has become easier—although not easy—to retire. For those age 55 to 64, across the country incomes are up 18%. Wealth is up because if you owned a home in the seventies and eighties, and they almost doubled in price, that is very helpful for your personal wealth. Poverty has been dropped among seniors from 29% in 1976 to less than 5% today.
While personal financial circumstances of people approaching retirement have improved, that group of people is leaving larger government debts than they inherited as young people in the seventies. The debt-to-GDP ratio has now doubled since 1976. We've made no progress on our carbon dioxide footprint per person in this country, even though the constraints of global climate change have become more familiar to us.
This brings me back to our national policy beaver dam. Because we have not managed to adapt to generation squeeze, there is indeed a huge hole in that national policy beaver dam. The reservoir is draining out. As a result, we have a generation raising young kids that is increasingly stuck in the mud, leaving almost one-third of our children arriving at kindergarten vulnerable, either physically, socially, emotionally, or in terms of their ABCs and one-two-threes.
And all of the research shows us that vulnerability when one reaches school contributes to far higher rates of school failure and/or incarceration as a young person or a young adult, and in their thirties, forties, and beyond to a range of health ailments, whether it's obesity, high blood pressure, mental illness. By our fifties and sixties it contributes to coronary heart disease and type 2 diabetes, and in our final decades to premature aging and memory loss.
That is a bad generational deal, made worse by the fact that organizations like UNICEF routinely, over the last decade, have ranked Canada among the worst industrialized countries when it comes to investing in families with young children. We are only going to overcome this poor international ranking if we move from a bad deal to a new deal for families, and ask for baby boomers across the country to get on board for that better deal for their kids and grandkids.
A new deal means getting back to some basics in Canada. It's about ensuring that we still have the family at the heart of Canadian values, while acknowledging the diversity of households that exist from coast to coast to coast. It's really about using public policy to encourage people to spend more time together and possibly less on stuff. It's about promoting genuine choices for women and men alike to be able to succeed in the labour market and at home, rather than talking about that balance being a possibility but leaving it a fiction for so many. It's about using policy to promote personal responsibility.
I believe we live in a country context where most of us think that Canadians should do all they can to pay for and care for their own, but here's the deal about the generation raising young kids today: those under age 45 work longer hours than any other group of Canadians. They then go home and perform more unpaid caregiving hours than any other group of Canadians. So by any traditional metric, their work ethic is impressive. But despite that impressive work ethic, they are still struggling to maintain a standard of living that often one person could achieve in the labour market a generation ago. We could never use public policy to remedy that in its entirety, but we could at least mitigate the new challenges.
I think that would require three public policy changes that need to compete with our approach to illness treatment through medical care for today's scarce resources. As public policy change number one, we need new mom and new dad benefits that would allow all parents--dads as much as moms, including the self-employed--to share up to 18 months at home with a newborn and to make that affordable, not cost the equivalent of a second mortgage from your disposable household income. Thereafter we need to make it affordable for moms and dads alike to have enough time in the labour market to deal with rising costs of living and stagnant wages. You do that by putting in place $10 quality child care services that make it affordable for people to rely on stimulating, nurturing programs that supplement and never replace what parents do at home. Last but not least, these two public policy changes need to occur in the context of a greater commitment to either flex time, or since we're all talking about when we should be retiring now, I'd call it let's have longer work lives, because we're living longer, but shorter hours of work per year. The typical Canadian works 300 more hours per year than the typical Dutch, Norwegian, or German citizen. We can change that in part by tinkering with our full-time employment norms, saying instead of it being 40-plus hours per person per week, can we get it closer to 35 hours? That extra five hours to ten hours a week can make a great deal of difference in terms of balancing the squeeze at home.
At bottom, it's a question of what kind of Canada we want. I ask Canadians to consider, is it one that ignores all of the negative health implications of a Canada that has a growing breach between those approaching retirement and those younger, or is it one that will once again commit to working for all generations?
Thank you very much.