Good morning.
Thank you very much for the opportunity to appear today.
Campaign 2000 is a diverse, non-partisan coalition of over 120 organizations working to end child and family poverty. Together we represent every province and territory across the country. We came about in response to the 1989 unanimous all-party federal resolution to end child poverty by the year 2000. For more than 30 years, we have been tracking progress towards that goal through our annual reporting and putting forward achievable policy solutions. Campaign 2000 has long advocated for a system of high-quality, universally accessible child care as a key component of a broader plan to end child and family poverty.
We celebrated the historic budget 2021 announcement to develop a Canada-wide early learning and child care plan, and we were similarly pleased when this bill was introduced in Parliament. It provides a good framework for the establishment and longevity of a national child care system. We are particularly pleased that it strives to develop a child care system that contributes to the implementation of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and to meeting the sustainable development goals, and that it advances Canada's international human rights obligations, including those under the Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Poverty is a violation of our human rights. Child poverty in Canada remains persistent throughout the country. In our most recent report card, we found that in 2020 nearly one million children lived in poverty. That's 13.5% of all children or nearly one in eight. These rates increase dramatically for children from systemically marginalized groups. For example, first nations children living on reserve have a child poverty rate of 37.4%. For children in lone-mother-led families, it is at 30%. It is 19% for immigrant children and 8.6% for Black children, to name a few.
Childhood poverty is a traumatic experience that has lifelong impacts. Research shows inextricable links between poverty and children's ill health and negative developmental outcomes. However, research has also shown that high-quality early learning and child care can act as a protective factor from the harmful effects of poverty and also as an equalizer, improving long-term developmental and employment outcomes for those kids. Access to child care that is affordable and flexible can reduce pressures on family incomes, enabling families to participate in work, education or training and reducing a family's poverty risks.
The concluding observations from the most recent review of Canada's implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, released just last year, found that the committee is “deeply concerned” about the discrimination against and the marginalization of children, and that Canada is very far away from meeting the needs of indigenous, racialized and migrant children and children with disabilities, among others. One of their main focus areas of the concluding observations was to ensure that low-income families have access to programs and services without discrimination.
We want to ensure that, as this system is built out, it happens in a way that is accessible to these families. This would include, as we've proposed in our report cards, a $0- to $10-per-day sliding scale child care model in which $10 a day is the maximum a family would pay. We propose this because a $10-per-day program is out of reach for the families who are working in low-wage, precarious work or trapped in our woefully inadequate social and disability programs. The average income, for example, for a low-income single mother with two children is $26,703, and $10 a day would work out to roughly one-fifth of her income.
In our submission to you, we offer four recommendations to strengthen the bill. I won't go through them in detail, because you'll have them. What I will say though is that we have thought very carefully about the language we've proposed to strengthen and enhance the guiding principles. Access to the new early learning and child care system without discrimination must be made explicit for children from these groups, including children with disabilities, children without permanent immigration status and all children from low-income families.
We have also made recommendations to strengthen accountability by introducing requirements to the advisory committee to also report publicly to both Houses of Parliament and to any committee as they see fit, and we have recommended that reports from the advisory committee and the minister be based on broad consultation and appropriate disaggregated data and summarize how the new system is concretely advancing human rights obligations.
Thank you for your time. I look forward to answering any questions.