Key facts are related to poverty.
First, the goals on poverty. UNICEF released some poverty goals, about 25% reductions in five years. It appears this is going to be adopted by the Ontario government.
Second, the federal government, as all of you know, approved a goal back in November of 1989 to eliminate child poverty by 2000.
Third is an issue that Andrew raised around defining and measuring. There are a number of measures: the LICO before and after tax, the market basket measures, and a litany of measures. So there's a real issue around how one defines poverty.
Finally, to indicate the major risk groups--I think Sherri and Ken did a nice job on that: single parents, typically females, unattached, between 45 and 64; disabled, primarily those disabled who are work-limited; recent immigrants, primarily refugees, aboriginals; and those at risk to employment generally.
Right now we have four provinces with a plan on poverty, and we only have one province with a piece of legislation on poverty, and that is Quebec. In Quebec, in 2002, under Bernard Landry, they passed some legislation, and the plan that came about under Charest came out in April 2004. We did a report based on that. Two really important messages came out of the importance of that legislation. Putting aside the importance of legislation generally, there were two major pieces behind the introduction of that legislation, and that was major political motivation and political support. The government had lost a lot of its citizens' satisfaction—it had some of the lowest ratings at that time—and there was major public support; fully a third of Quebec citizens were supportive of poverty reduction.
I'm going to turn to the slides on trends in poverty to raise a number of points. This is all to get at the issue, some of which Andrew and Sherri talked about, and to make a few additional points.
First, interestingly, some of our highest poverty rates across the country were in about 1997, and since that time, we've had a pretty steady decline in poverty. Interestingly—and I think Andrew touched on this briefly—during times of economic growth we seem to have reductions in poverty and during times of economic downturns we seem to have increases in growth in poverty. This is a general statement. I'm not going to say we've done any randomized clinical trials or statistical analysis, but it is fairly indicative that as economies grow there's less poverty and as economies contract there is more poverty.
The question that was posed was, if I look at the line on poverty, what is the federal contribution to that? I haven't done the research to do that, but I want to indicate to you how to answer that question.
My next slide is around economic growth. This really does make the case that if you look at the trends around our economy, in particular the recessions in the eighties and nineties—and unfortunately the data doesn't track forward at this stage—you can see how recessions and subsequent recoveries line up very nicely with the lines around poverty.
The next point is around the trends in Canadian priorities. This is a very recent chart from Ipsos Reid, which looks at Canadians' priorities on a range of public policy issues. No surprise that the economy is Canadians' number one concern. Number two is health care, number three is the environment, and unfortunately, poverty is only in the top 10.
On my next slide I show you the levels of poverty, and right now the level of poverty as a priority for Canadians: the first choice is 2% and total choices are 4%. I want to raise whether or not we have the political context right now to bring about transformational change on this issue of poverty. Clearly the numbers we saw in the Quebec context, the importance of poverty put on that is significantly lower than the Canadian-at-large at this point.
In my slide on political motivation--I don't know that everybody has a copy--you can see that the trends around what sort of support various governments have raise a question about whether or not there clearly is a political context to deal with the transformational piece around poverty, such as thinking about legislation, for example.
Focused areas to reduce poverty--