Madam Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Halifax.
In this budget speech I will focus a good deal of my remarks on child poverty, a subject I campaigned on in 1997 and spoke about in my initial speech in the House in the fall of that year. It is something I know Canadians feel very strongly about, as I do.
Last week, in response to a question by the member for Winnipeg--Transcona, the Minister of National Defence talked about star wars being a 1980s concept just like Ed Broadbent. I want to say, through you, Madam Speaker, to the Minister of National Defence that child poverty was also a 1980s concept. In fact, Ed Broadbent moved a motion in 1989, which the House unanimously supported, that we would eliminate child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. We did not make that deadline and we are not even close to making that deadline. I think that is one of the reasons that Ed Broadbent is running again to come back to active politics. I think one of the reasons he will be elected in Ottawa Centre is that too many Canadians are appalled at what has not happened in the area of child poverty since that motion was passed unanimously by all parties in November 1989.
How is it, after all the hand wringing, the outpouring about child poverty that has been expressed and the lip service by probably all parties in the House, that we have seen so little in the past decade and a half? How is it that countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland have found ways to reduce poverty rates well below 5%, while English speaking countries, like Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and the United States, have poverty rates in excess of 15% and as high as 22.3%?
The answer from the experts is two-fold. First, a lack of a government investment, depending on our perspective, high investment by a government to reduce child poverty. Second, minimum wage. Low minimum wages almost certainly guarantee child poverty and Canada has a terrible track record, second only to the United States when it comes to low minimum wages.
Those are the main differences in child poverty levels when we look at it across the world.
In this country, low income families with children remained far below the poverty line throughout the 1980s and the 1990s. There are different categories of low income families, and lone parent families headed by a female is one category. The average gap between the median income and the poverty line is $9,000 per year, and 46% of families headed by a lone female parent live in poverty.
Children with disabilities is another crucial area because of financial stresses, first, due to the disability, and second, probably having one of the parents needing to quit his or her job, more often her job, in order to look after the disabled child.
The third category is immigrant families. Members will be interested to know that in 1980, less than one-quarter of immigrant families were living in poverty. The number has risen to nearly 36% in the intervening 20 years. It used to take 10 years for a newly arrived immigrant family to have a median income with their Canadian counterparts. That has now grown by 50% to 15 years. Forty per cent of immigrant children, where both parents are recent immigrants, are living in poverty, and the pressures are most profound in our largest cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver.
The fourth category is our aboriginals. They have one of the highest rates of child poverty. Of aboriginals living off reserve in 2001, 41% of those children live in poverty.
In my home city of Regina, aboriginal people are more than three times as likely to be in low income in the general population, as in the census of the metropolitan area of Regina. The census data showed that almost 6 of every 10 aboriginal people in Regina were living in low income in 2000.
In metropolitan areas the low income rate included three groups: the lone parent headed by a female, immigrants and aboriginals. In the 1980s most metropolitan area residents, regardless of their income, shared in economic growth to a certain extent. It is true that higher income families increased greater, but everybody got a larger piece of the economic pie. Contrary to what the parliamentary secretary said in his speech this morning, in the 1990s the growth was concentrated among high income families.
This is not NDP group think. This is from the Statistic Canada report of April 7, 2004. The two areas that are singled out are Toronto and Vancouver. It directly counters the parliamentary secretary's feel happy argument that wealth and health have both been enhanced in the country since the miracle of October 1993 when his party came to power.
The solution to child and family poverty is a structural systemic reality, and it has to be dealt with in that way. The problems are caused by a low wage economy on the one hand and inadequate income security on the other. Neither provides assurances in our country or lifts families out of poverty, nor establishes a solid income floor to ensure that they stay out of poverty. Unless and until structural sources of child poverty are addressed, there will always be new vulnerable groups that will fall into that trap, such as the immigrant parents and families, which I referenced a moment ago.
Economic growth by itself is not enough. We need instead a comprehensive package that includes labour market income security, early learning and child care and a housing program that concentrates on social programs. We know that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has not built a stick of social housing in the past decade.
The second area is the fact that Canada is, whether we like it or not and I do not, a low wage country, second only to the United States. Therefore, we need a significant increase in our minimum wage. People who have looked at child poverty say that we need a $10 an hour minimum wage. I realize that will result in cardiac arrest for the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. However, if we are to do something about child poverty, we have to put our money where out mouth is. These experts are saying that we have to come up with not 10¢ an hour or 25¢ an hour, but a significant increase in our minimum wage laws.
I realize my time is winding down, but I want to make a brief comment or two about the phoney debate that continues to take place in the House by members of the official opposition and the government about who is scarier and who will do what to whom. The reality has been that tax rates have been flattened over several years because the official opposition proposed them. The government opposed them but then introduced those flattened tax rates and reduced taxes.
If we recall the debate prior to the 2000 election, the then Canadian Alliance was going to reduce taxes by $65 billion. The government trumped it and made it $100 billion. That is the reality. We just introduced on January 1, $4 billion in corporate tax reductions.