Thank you for that question.
You had mentioned strong economic performance. Certainly in Alberta, since the late 1990s until about a year ago, we had a very strong economy. Probably that was the main contributor to some reduction in poverty in the first years of the 21st century. Having said that, I remind you that even at the height of the boom in 2006, we still had one in 10 children in Alberta living in poverty. That was an improvement. It got as bad as about one in five children in the mid-1990s.
So there was some improvement, and certainly the strong economy is probably the main reason for that. But also, as I had said, some reinvestment in social programs played a role. The provincial government stopped making cuts and even did some modest reinvestment in some of the social programs.
To give a little bit of credit to the federal government during this period of time, after the cuts to the transfers to the provinces in the mid-1990s by the federal government as well as the complete elimination of affordable housing dollars by the federal government, there were in fact—and to get back to my pitch here—some real increases in the child tax benefits that flowed starting in the late 1990s and through the early years of 2000, even beyond inflation.
We had some difficulty with some of them because much of those benefits, when they first started taking place, were kind of clawed back by the provinces by reductions in their social assistance payments. So the true benefit of those increases in child tax benefits weren't realized by low-income families. But the last couple of times there were real increases in child tax benefits, the province didn't do the clawbacks. I really think it's important not to.
There are solutions. There really are solutions to reducing poverty in this country, and I think one indicator of that is that every year we try to measure in Alberta the effectiveness of government income transfers. There's been some improvement. In the 1990s, only about one in four children--and families with children--were lifted out of poverty by government transfers. That's now improved to about 40%, four out of 10. So we went from one in four to about four out of 10.
I would actually say that the enhancements to the child tax benefit system have been primarily responsible for that improvement. That's why I think it's such an effective program. As federal government revenues recover from the recession, we need to get back to what we did around the turn of the century where each year we were actually increasing child tax benefits by more than even the rate of inflation, because it's a very effective way to reduce child and family poverty in particular. We need to get back to that.
I guess that's my pitch.