Mr. Speaker, I rise in the House today to speak to the motion to recommit to eliminating child poverty in Canada by the year 2000.
What is poverty? The Oxford Dictionary definition is: Being poor, not having means to procure comforts or necessities of life, in deficiency, in want.
Distinction must be made between basic financial deficiency for which there may be economic solutions, and social deficiency where individuals are deficient in relation to others, emotionally or otherwise, and the deficiency is more than just simple finances.
Socially each individual may find themselves poor in some aspect of their life in relation to others, a situation which can never be helped. The purpose of government social programs is not to make people equal in every way.
There is however, potential for government to find solutions to long term financial hardship by reducing taxes, reducing debt and reducing spending. It must be clearly understood that there is a world of difference between poverty, which is a situation where the basic needs of life are not being met, and the situation in Canada where we have a portion of population living with low incomes relative to the majority.
These low income Canadians would be considered well off as an income group if compared to the citizens of most other countries in the world. However, because it is more common for us to compare ourselves to our neighbours to the south rather than to people in Brazil or Morocco, it is this comparison that forms the argument for the anti-poverty lobby in Canada.
There is at this time no existing fiscal definition of poverty. In Canada this is a general measure of low income that is widely misused by various advocacy groups as poverty line and it is called the low income cutoff of Statistics Canada.
Statistics Canada has publicly and consistently stated that the low income cutoff is not a measure of poverty. Based on the premise that any family with an income less than the low income cutoff is in poverty, the child poverty lobby has falsely concluded that over 1.2 million children, that is one in five, must be living in poverty.
Barbara Greene, the chairman of the House subcommittee on poverty in the 34th Parliament studying the issue, stated that the goal of eliminating child poverty is impossible to attain because the low income cutoff measure is a relative measure.
Because the low income cutoff is a relative measure we will never be able to eliminate poverty if it is defined this way because we will always have a similar percentage of Canadian families statistically described as low income.
As an example of how weak a substitute the term "poverty" is for low income consider that 18 per cent of the low income cutoff population owns their own home mortgage free.
There are some generalizations that can be made from studies done on low income earners. Low income can be attributed to youth, unemployed persons, recent immigrants, single parents and native communities. The first three groups, youth, unemployed and recent immigrants, will undoubtedly increase their average earnings over time as their employment opportunities improve with their skills and experience.
Single parents will clearly be helped by the reversal in family policy proposed by the Reform Party as family will be promoted through the tax system and the cycle of welfare dependency will be broken through the reform of social programs.
Native communities will benefit from Reform's commitment to abolishing the department of Indian affairs and a move to full participation in Canadian society.
I have described the confusion and have shown the distinction between real fiscal poverty and low income in Canada. Regardless of whether one accepts the premise that real poverty, meaning lack of food, clothing and shelter, is not a reality in Canada, we are debating the question of child poverty.
It is possible that some children have faced such desperate situations through no fault of their own, as a child is a dependent. As such, a child is not expected to have an income or provide for its own needs. Canadian law recognizes this fact and makes provision for this fact in the Criminal Code of Canada. Section 215 states that everyone is under a legal duty as a parent to provide necessities of life for a child under the age of 16. According to Canadian law failing to provide these necessities is not child poverty, but child abuse and neglect.
Child poverty advocates claim that they just want to help the hungry children but are there really 1.2 million hungry Canadian children as the advocates imply? Is there evidence of such a major crisis? Realistically there are children who are living in broken families and low income families but this does not mean that the basic physical needs of these children cannot or are not being met.
In Canada the generous welfare system already in place is more than sufficient for parents to meet the basic physical needs of their children regardless of employment or family status. The government can never meet all the needs of children. How could government ever provide love and affection? Government can, however, provide a non-intrusive economic climate in which families can grow and prosper.
Reformers believe that the state has no business attempting to raise the nation's children and that full responsibility for children must reside with their parent or legal guardian. The only time the state must intervene is in situations of clear neglect or abuse. Should parents find themselves in situations in which it is difficult for them to provide the necessities the responsibility to do so should remain with the parents. These parents may in these situations request help, first from relatives, but failing family support, private social service agencies and then as a last resort governmental agencies.
There may well be isolated cases of individual suffering on the part of some children due to neglect or abusive parents just as there are cases of child sexual abuse, infanticide and child pornography. This is of great concern to all Canadians. Reformers believe that the proper enforcement of existing law and the promotion of family values in society are the most effective ways to deal with this sort of tragedy.
Health researchers and others have correctly pointed out that statistically there are problems those in low income situations are more likely to have compared to those of higher incomes: problems such as greater school dropout rates, more domestic violence and higher health concerns. It is clear that these problems do not occur as a result of low income but as a result of family breakdown, illegitimacy, structural unemployment and a loosening of societal values.
However the child poverty lobby believes that low income itself is the problem. Low income or poverty, as they call it, is not a disease that people catch. It is a situation that is the result of other factors.
The child poverty lobby has proposed some solutions to the situation of low income earners. They want more day care, more welfare and more state intrusion in the lives of families. However studies by Dr. Doug Allen of Simon Fraser University show that 80 per cent of low income families do not collect welfare. Clearly for the large majority of low income families, more social programs are not the solution.
The Reform Party recognizes that low income is not the problem itself, but rather one symptom of a much deeper problem in our society. Broken families, divorce, illegitimacy and unemployment are many of the factors that lead to low income status. These problems have quickly increased during the past 30 years due to intrusive policies of Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments.
These are the tax policies that discriminate against stay-at-home parents or discriminate based on family type. These are welfare programs that provide disincentives for people to find work and that encourage and sustain illegitimacy. These are policies that fail to punish crime, especially youth crime, adequately and a massive debt that has led to structural unemployment in our economy.
What do we propose as the solution? We believe government must get out of the day care business. We believe in a tax policy that does not discriminate based on the type of family one has. We believe in a non-intrusive system of social programs that helps the truly needy. We believe in a tax policy that continues to recognize the costs associated with raising children. We believe in spending cuts in all areas to deal with the debt and the deficit. We believe long term tax relief must be achieved so that families may have more freedom to make their own choices.
Reformers are interested in promoting healthy Canadian families and in helping the truly needy. We do not believe more social programs are the solution to society's problems. We do believe in the promotion of the family as the best possible solution to the majority of Canada's social dysfunction.