Mr. Speaker, I would like to start by saying how saddened I was to hear of the passing of our hon. colleague, Ron Duhamel. He was a friend. He was an honourable and respected member of this chamber. I know we will all miss him very much.
Yesterday's throne speech and today's speech by the Prime Minister provide Canadians with an important road map for our journey through the next few years of the new millennium. They are important documents. I certainly commend them to all Canadians, who can check the Prime Minister's website or their own members' websites to read these importance words and guides for Canadians.
I believe that one of the most important themes in the throne speech is one that has been one with us for some time. It is the issue of child poverty, on which I would like to focus my comments today.
Poverty is one of the least understood issues in Canada. Advocacy groups call it child poverty and it tugs at the heartstrings of all caring persons. They have evoked images of children starving in the streets and they report that the problem has increased by almost 50% over the past decade. Who could possibly be against eliminating child poverty? The bold reality is that poverty in Canada is more a matter of social poverty, not economic poverty. I will explain that.
There is also a heated debate going on today in the backrooms of government on how to define poverty. The positions range from the deprivation of food, clothing and shelter to not being able to more fully participate in Canadian society. This debate is on absolute versus relative measures of poverty. Once we get this resolved, it will become the foundation of social welfare in Canada. It will also define the level of poverty that we are prepared to tolerate in Canada.
In the absence of an official poverty line in Canada, groups such as Campaign 2000 relied on LICOs, low-income cut-offs, as a measurement. The current data suggests that 17% of Canadians are significantly below the income of the average Canadian family. This is a relative measure and anti-poverty groups use it as a measure of who is poor in Canada. However, the measure does have a number of flaws. For example, 40% of the families considered poor under the LICO measurement actually own their own homes. Of those, one-half do not even have a mortgage. We have to ask ourselves: Is a family who owns its own home free and clear really living in poverty in Canada?
On February 11, 1999, Parliament debated the issue, as we did back in 1989, I believe, when there was that famous resolution to seek to achieve the elimination of poverty by the year 2000. The speeches covered the same range of relevant information but no one noticed. No one really noticed. Not only was the substance the same as the 1989 statistics, but the statistics were significantly more tragic. How is it that nobody cared? I begin to believe that maybe Canadians do not see poverty in their own neighbourhoods and do not believe it exists.
It is important that Canadians understand that poverty exists and what the characteristics of poverty really are.
Anti-poverty groups are growing in size and influence. They report annually on the growing level of poverty in Canada and fiercely lobby governments to act. More jobs, more social assistance, more social housing, more tax benefits for families with children, more money for health care and early childhood development, more employment insurance benefits, and more subsidized day care are but a few of the solutions offered by anti-poverty groups.
They universally accept LICO as the measure of poverty for one simple reason: It is an economic measure that calls for economic solutions. If they had to address the root causes of poverty, it would open up a Pandora's box that clearly no one wants to face.
Homelessness has also become the latest focus for poverty in Canada. In January 1999, a task force chaired by Anne Golden issued a report on the homeless in Toronto, declaring that there were workable solutions. They wanted to engage all levels of government to come up with these workable solutions and set up their responsibilities. However, if we were to look closely at the report, we would find some interesting statistics. Of the homeless identified in Toronto, 35% were mentally ill, 15% were aboriginals off reserve, 10% were abused women, and 28% were youths, of whom 70% had experienced physical or sexual abuse. In addition, the majority of these homeless were abusers of drugs and of alcohol.
In Toronto they found out that 47% of the homeless did not even come from Toronto. They had migrated from other centres. This is the urban magnet.
It is clear that Canadian cities right across the country are not doing their share to provide the services and the care for those who need it.
These are the causes of homelessness. They are the same causes of poverty. People who live in squalor on the streets in Canada, sadly, represent those whom no one loves.
Another point on this whole issue of poverty has to do with the family. Lone parent families represent about 15% of the families in Canada, but sadly they also account for about 54% of all children living in poverty. The rate of family breakdown is almost 40% in Canada. The incidence of domestic violence continues at record levels. Alcohol and drug abuse in our schools and our communities have escalated, with tragic consequences. Unwanted teen pregnancies continue to rise. Close to 30% of students drop out of high school and become Canada's poor in waiting. Nearly 25% of all children enter adult life with significant mental, social or behavioural problems. They represent the social poverty in our society and are the root causes of the vast majority of the economic poverty in Canada.
If poverty in Canada is a horror and national disgrace, then the breakdown of the Canadian family is the principal cause of that disgrace. Those who express outrage at poverty but do not express the same outrage about the breakdown of the Canadian family are truly in denial. However, in these days of political correctness, the family and its structure and condition represent a minefield through which few are prepared to tread. Anti-poverty groups have meekly sidestepped the social poverty dimension. However, if we are not prepared to address social poverty in Canada then we are effectively choosing to tolerate the very poverty that we seek to eliminate.
There are solutions, but the solutions must be to stabilize the situations of those who are unable to care for themselves or those who cannot care for themselves because of disabilities or other challenges that they have in life.
I believe that the solution has to do with dealing with those who have the problem now, with stabilizing their situation while we stop the creation of new poor. We have to stop the creation of new poor, which means that we have to raise one healthy, well-adjusted generation of children who have good social, moral and family values, and it means that our educators and legislators have to promote and defend those values that I believe children have. If we raise this healthy generation of children, it will then propagate another generation of children who have the same value system. They will propagate another generation of children who will not aspire to live on welfare, who will ensure that they get a proper education and who will ensure that they are going to be contributing members of Canadian society.
I cannot speak strongly enough about how important it is for Canadians to be engaged in the issue of child poverty. It is family poverty; it is not child poverty. It is not economic poverty; it is social poverty. There are very important reasons why Canadians should be engaged in defining what that poverty is, in addressing its current problems, and in spending less money on trying to provide sources of assistance after there is a problem and trying to mitigate the incidence of the problem in the first place.
Our children are a function of the society in which they live. Those who become our future poor do so because of our failure to put their interests ahead of our own.
Collectively we are responsible for the poverty that exists in Canada today. It is therefore our collective responsibility to resolve both its social and its economic causes.