Campaign 2000, a coalition of faith groups and social agencies, released its annual look at child poverty the same day as Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced his government would use an expected $7.2-billion surplus to pay down federal government debt. The surplus is really just a failure to spend money on policies to raise Canadian families out of poverty, said Michael Polanyi, KAIROS' social development project co-ordinator.
"It's a budgetary surplus, but it's creating a current and a future deficit by not providing families and children with the basic supports they need to develop into productive and compassionate citizens. That's the legacy of deficits that we're setting up for the future," Polanyi said.
Rosalie Hall executive director Alan Nicholl told The Catholic Register that while the surpluses pile up in Ottawa, the federal government has become the missing link in efforts to deal with poverty among the young mothers who turn to his Scarborough centre for young parents.
"We need an ongoing and consistent approach to the issues of poverty and homelessness," Nicholl said. "We need our three levels of government working together — federal, provincial and municipal."
While the city and province have stepped up to the plate with funding to keep young parents in school and adequately housed, the federal government is starving those efforts of cash, he said.
Rosalie Hall provided 782 young mothers with housing, parenting skills and counselling, and worked with another 3,554 through outreach programs last year. The statistics contained in the Campaign 2000 Report Card are borne out in the everyday reality of working with homeless, single young mothers in Canada's biggest and richest city, said Nicholl.
"This costs society — even in terms of production, in terms of the wealth of our communities. We suffer if we don't invest in our children and youth," said Nicholl.
The 2006 Report Card found that:
- one in every six children in Canada lives in poverty;
- we have a total of 1,196,000 poor children;
- one-quarter of aboriginal children living on reserves are poor;
- 34 per cent of poor children live in families with at least one parent working full time;
- as a percentage of gross domestic product Canada spends the least on child care of any country in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development;
- there are enough regulated child care spaces for less than 16 per cent of Canadian children;
- the average single-parent family living below the poverty line would need another $9,400 a year just to get to the poverty line.
If Canada is ever going to make meaningful progress in reducing child poverty it needs to create a national strategy with timetables and clear targets, said Polanyi. He points to the United Kingdom as a country that set poverty reduction targets and then began to make progress, lowering poverty rates by 23 per cent.
Basic elements of the British plan, including raising minimum wages, investing in child care and raising welfare rates, need to be part of a Canadian strategy, said Polanyi.
The churches have been there for the poor in the 17 years since Canada's Parliament unanimously passed a motion to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000, said Polanyi. Campaign 2000 takes its name from the target set by the 1989 motion.
"Churches have done a lot in terms of standing with low-income people, hosting many Out of the Cold programs, many food banks. So they've done a lot, and that's important work," he said. "The next step is to get rid of the need for these programs through policy change."
KAIROS is the ecumenical social justice agency supported by 11 of Canada's largest church organizations.