moved:
That, in the opinion of this House, the government should consider the advisability of reaffirming its commitment to seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000.
Mr. Speaker, as you have indicated, the motion that I seek approval for today is that the government should consider the advisability of reaffirming its commitment to seek to achieve a goal of eliminating child poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000.
On November 24, 1989 the then member for Oshawa put forward a motion essentially in the same terms as follows: "That this House express its concern for the more than one million Canadian children currently living in poverty and seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000".
That motion received unanimous support from this House. All members present voted in favour of that motion. They voted to commit this country to eliminating child poverty by the year 2000.
That gave rise to Campaign 2000, a group of organizations fighting for the implementation of this motion, fighting to ensure that our most precious resource, the resource which will provide for our future, receives some attention in Canada today.
As many will know, the number of Canadian children living in poverty has increased since that time, now amounting to some 1.3 million children. Not only have we not brought a downward trend in child poverty, but in Canada it has increased.
Canadians who care about children and children themselves will be watching Parliament's response to this motion. Does this Parliament care about children as it did in 1989? Does it want to reduce and move to eliminate poverty among Canadian children, our greatest resource? Does this Parliament view child poverty as an emergency situation, which surely it is in Canada today? Or will it try to turn a blind eye and a cold heart to those 1.3 million poor children in Canada?
At the end of my speech I will seek unanimous consent to make this motion votable, as it was in 1989, in the anticipation that this Parliament is as committed as the Parliament in 1989 was to Canadian children. We may believe there are different ways to eliminate child poverty in Canada. We have different philosophical and economic perspectives on how to achieve this most important and laudable goal.
It would be remarkable if anyone in this House would not support a motion to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000.
As I said, since 1989 child poverty has worsened in Canada and I would like to give some indication of how deep and how serious this matter is by quoting some statistics. I will do that at some length because I am sure many Canadians are unaware of how serious this problem is in Canada. They may have a sense of the numbers involved but I do not think many have a sense of how deep and how serious this problem is and how important it is in the long term for Canada because of the economic and social costs which are incurred as a result of not addressing this very serious social problem today.
The high school dropout rate for children from poor families is 2.5 times that for non-poor families; children in families with incomes in the bottom 20 per cent of the population were twice as likely to be living in inadequate housing than in families with incomes in the top 20 per cent, and 1.4 times more likely than children living in middle income families.
The infant mortality rate is twice as high among families at the lowest income level as it is among families at the highest level. Low birth weight is related to poverty as well; it is 1.4 times more common among babies born in the poorest families than children born in the richest families. Children from low income families are 1.7 times more likely to have psychiatric disorders than children from other families and almost twice as likely to perform poorly in school and twice as likely to develop a conduct disorder, a behavioural problem.
Teens in low income families are almost twice as likely as teens in higher income families to smoke and to have alcohol problems, and 1.5 times more likely to use drugs.
Children who grow up in low income families are less healthy, have less access to skill building activities, more destructive habits and behaviour, live more stressful lives and are subject to more humiliation. In short, they have a less stable, less secure existence and as a result are likely to be less secure as adults.
It is sometimes thought that people are poor because they do not work. Yet half those who live below the poverty line in Canada do work. Half of Canadians who are poor work to earn a living and still cannot sustain themselves above the poverty line.
The total number of poor households has grown substantially over the last two decades. The number of poor families increased from 700,000 in 1973 to almost one million in 1992, a jump of 41 per cent. Similarly, the number of poor unattached individuals grew by 79 per cent. The total number of poor households in 1992, the last year for which numbers are available, was 2.36 million, an increase of almost a million since 1973.
A family is five times more likely to be poor if the head of that family has not worked during the year. One earner families face four times the risk faced by two earner families. Twenty-five per cent of the heads of poor families and 15 per cent of poor unattached individuals work a full year, but in spite of this they are still poor.
What distinguishes poor families from other families is on the whole lower levels of formal education and lower levels of employment.
Let me say a brief word about aboriginal peoples because it is there where we find the greatest level of poverty. The incomes of aboriginal peoples tend to be lower than the incomes of other Canadians; almost one-half have incomes well below $10,000 compared with one-quarter of other Canadians. Almost three-quarters of aboriginal peoples have incomes under $20,000 compared with only 50 per cent of other Canadians. The proportion of aboriginal people falling below the poverty line is increasing and is about 20 per cent higher than the Canadian population at large.
Let me also say a word about persons who are disabled in Canada because that is another group that is over-represented in the poverty group. Those with disabilities are 25 per cent more likely to be poor than Canadians of the same age.
Part of this problem is because income distribution in Canada is getting worse. The gap between rich and poor is increasing and is at around 1951 levels. The top 20 per cent of Canadian households, the richest 20 per cent, receive about nine times the income of the bottom 20 per cent. That gap is increasing in spite of some measures taken in the 1970s and 1980s.
The number of poor families in the 1980s and 1990s increased by 18 per cent. One of the most significant increases was among younger families. We have essentially addressed to a large measure the problem of poverty among seniors because we cared that seniors who had provided so much to the country should be able to live their last years in dignity. We addressed the problem of poverty among seniors because we had the political will to do so.
We sometimes hear from the government that more education is the answer to the problems of poverty that people face or the inability of people to participate effectively in the marketplace. Over the last decade it has become clear there is a large increase of families living in poverty whose heads have post-secondary degrees. The number of poor families where one or more of the adults held a post-secondary degree almost doubled in the decade of the 1980s. Therefore higher education is no guarantee against poverty but it is clearly an important element of the fight against poverty.
Unless employment and the income picture improve, the poor will increasingly represent a larger portion of our population. We know about the incidence of poverty among single parent families. We know too that it is increasing.
We also should bear in mind that the poverty gap, the gap between what people need in order to live at the poverty line and the money they actually receive from income and from other government supports is increasing. Indeed the increase in that gap was almost $3 billion in the decade of the 1990s due largely to an increase in the number of poor.
The numbers go on and on and they are be depressing enough for everyone and should be enough to make us feel urgently of the need to address this important issue.
The numbers of people living in poverty, the numbers of children living in poverty are growing. The gap between what they receive in increment and support systems and what they need in order to survive at a moderate level of dignity is increasing. The numbers of people working full time and nonetheless poor are increasing.
Without an effective strategy to deal with this problem Canadians will continue to suffer with the second highest child poverty rates in the world. As we all know, only the United States has a worse child poverty rate than Canada and yet as we see with the suggestions for social security reform the government is proposing that we move to a more Americanized social security network. We need to do something about our tax system. We need to do something about our economic system so
that there are adequate jobs for those who need them to raise their families.
It is not a question of people not wanting to work, not being able to work. It is a question of insufficient jobs to provide income through the traditional workforce for all who need it.
In making a few suggestions for where we should proceed let me just say that children who just happen to be born to poor parents, and after all children do not choose to whom they are born, if they are unfortunate enough in terms of economic opportunity and social depravation to be born to poor parents, on average, they will be born with lower birth weight. They will be sick more often and when they are sick they will be sicker than those richer children. They do less well at school. They will be more likely to drop out of school. They will have more accidents. They are more likely to be unemployed. When they are unemployed they are more likely to be unemployed for longer than children of richer parents. They are more likely to experience behavioural problems and they will die several years younger than their richer counterparts. That is the legacy we present, that we enable to take place, for poor children.
We should be ashamed of what we have done in this country with regard to children of those who are less well off. It is not the case that this is the only solution. In particular, if we look at the northern European countries, Norway, Sweden and Germany, certainly West Germany before the joining of the two, those countries had child poverty rates of about 5 per cent. We have child poverty rates of about 25 per cent, five times as high as countries who have committed themselves to solving this problem.
The so-called solutions of the past have not worked. Child poverty and poverty in general have increased while over the last 20 years federal governments have cut social programs, cut taxes to the rich and large corporations, built up enormous deficits and engaged in trade, monetary and fiscal policies which have sucked jobs out of the Canadian economy. At the same time little has been done to address the structural problems of the economy which has led to the second highest child poverty rates of rich industrialized countries.
As I said, while the U.S. has the worst poverty rates, the government is setting out this week to further the Americanization of Canada's social programs, continuing in the Mulroney tradition.
The only solution to poverty and child poverty, and I want to stress that, is to make it a matter of national urgency to address the apparent inability of the Canadian economy to create the jobs required to enable those four million Canadians who are not presently part of the paid workforce to find work, four million Canadians who want to be in the workforce so they can feed their families.
Further cuts to social programs can only make matters worse and yet that is what the government intends to do. Training can only help if there are jobs to do when that training has been received.
The real problem is not social programs, but unemployment. As a country that is what we should be focusing on. If the government had committed the resources both human and in dollar terms to the job side of the equation that it has instead committed to social program review, we would be in a much better position to show hope and opportunity for those 1.3 million children presently living in poverty. They would have a much better chance of breaking that poverty cycle.
Two further brief points. As a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canada recognizes: "the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child's physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development".
Canada by this article is obligated to take and again I quote: "appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programs particularly with regard to nutrition, health, clothing and housing".
We have not done that. We have not lived up to our international responsibilities. As a country we have not lived up to our responsibilities to our children.
Last I would like to go back to the point I raised at the beginning. I know all members will regard this matter as a serious one and one of considerable importance. I believe that everyone in the House believes that we should work toward eliminating child poverty and assisting Canadian children and their future.
I would now ask if there is unanimous consent to make this motion a votable motion, to recognize the critically important part that children will play in our future and our critically important responsibility to children we have today. I would like to seek unanimous consent to make this motion votable. If that was available I am sure we could choose a time to do that.
