Mr. Speaker, I hear a Conservative colleague saying that it is not true, but I am citing a Conference Board of Canada report.
Poverty today affects three million Canadians. That includes children, seniors, indigenous persons, people living with disabilities, single parents, and recent immigrants. These are the groups of people who are more likely to be living in poverty, and today 967,000 Canadian children are living in poverty.
Canada ranks 15th out of 17 peer countries when it comes to child poverty. Once again, I am stating the Conference Board of Canada statistics. It is imperative that we, as a have country not a have-not country, invest in our children. I spoke about the motion of November 1989 that was brought forward by the then NDP leader Ed Broadbent to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. In 1991, Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that every child has the right to a decent standard of living, clean water, nutritious food, a clean environment, and good-quality health care.
For 25 years, successive Liberal and Conservative governments have ignored the problem or have not done enough to alleviate it. As a result, today we have almost one million Canadian children living in poverty. In 1989, when this House made the promise to end child poverty, the LIMAT, the low-income measure after tax—which I will use as my comparator so that I am comparing the same numbers in 1989 to now—was 13%. The child poverty rate was 13% in 1989, and today it is sitting at 21%.
I have heard many members in this House saying that there have been many changes and improvements. That is wonderful, but the problem is that there are far too many children who continue to live in poverty, and that is a serious concern. It is a serious concern that we as parliamentarians and legislators need to make sure we are working toward the eradication of poverty in this country, especially among our children, because we have that responsibility to our children. We made a promise 25 years ago, but “We have been doing our best to keep that promise” is what I have heard.
My plea for my hon. colleagues in this House is that we have not been doing enough. We need to do better. We need to be investing in affordable housing, accessible child care, and child nutrition programs. We need to make sure they are sensitive to our different first nations communities and their cultural requirements. We need to ensure that we have measurable targets and timelines and that we actually act on them, because just making a promise is not enough; we need to keep the promises we make.