On Child Poverty

Late last year I wrote a post expressing my discomfort with the proliferation of foodbanks. Despite the fact that I volunteer at one, I can't escape the notion that it has become an enabler of government inaction on poverty in this country. As well, the fare available from foodbanks is generally of the canned and processed variety, high in salt and preservatives, hardly the basis of a healthy diet.

Over the years I have volunteered there, I have noticed that more and more of the clientele is not the chronically unemployed, but rather the chronically under compensated, those who are working at minimum-wage jobs that are wholly inadequate to meet their and their families' needs. I especially feel for the children who often accompany their moms on their monthly visits to our establishment.

While Ontario has made some progress in reducing child poverty, austerity measures and corporate tax reductions that have yielded few jobs have halted that progress. A story in this morning's Star paints a rather grim picture of what life is like for the 383,000 Ontario children still ensnared in rather dire living conditions:

In 1989, 240,000 Ontario kids lived in poverty, when the child poverty rate was 9.9 per cent. The rate in 2010 was 14.2 per cent, representing 383,000 kids.

One in 10 Ontario children in 2010 lived in households that couldn’t afford things like dental care, daily fruit and vegetables and “appropriate clothes for job interviews,” up 15 per cent from 2009.

35.6 per cent of kids in a household with a single mom lived in poverty in 2010.

92,500 Ontario kids living in poverty still have one parent who works full time, year-round.

In 2010, 7.1 per cent of children in the province lived in “deep poverty,” where household earnings amounted to less than Ontario’s median family income.

You can read the entire sad story here.

Sensible Taxation

If we lived in Dr. Pangloss's "best of all possible worlds," I suspect that I would be a fairly conservative fellow. After all, in such a world those who worked hard would always get ahead; poverty, other than the self-induced kind, would be non-existent, and we would all be well on the road to self-perfection.

Yet, with all due respect to the eternal optimists of this world, life is not like that for countless millions of people, a fact that, thanks to our wealth of news sources, most of us are well-aware of. However, thanks to the unrelenting propaganda of the far right, many of us, I suspect, are largely ignorant of the inequities built into our tax system.

Of course, most of us would like to keep more of our money, but the question ultimately becomes, "At what cost?" Is it a fair trade for us to have more tax breaks thanks to our station in life at the expense, say, of the working poor? Should our individualistic impulses trump the collective good?

A story in today's Star highlights a problem faced by many. Entitled Campaign 2000 urges Ottawa to eliminate child tax credits and use money to fight poverty, it discusses a campaign by a coalition called Campaign 2000:

On the 23rd anniversary of a unanimous House of Commons pledge to eradicate child poverty by the year 2000, the national coalition is once again calling for a federal plan with goals and timelines to get the job done.

With one in seven Canadian children — including one in four in First Nations communities — still living in poverty, this year’s progress report goes after Ottawa’s “inefficient” tax system

Among other things, the group calls for the elimination of certain tax credits and benefits that tend to favour the middle (or at least what's left of it) and upper classes, with the resources saved going toward boosting the National Child Benefit to a maximum of $5,400 a year, up from the current maximum of $3,485:

At $5,400, a single parent with one child who is working full-time at $11 an hour would be able to escape poverty.

More broadly, it would cut Canada’s child poverty rate by 15 per cent and lift 174,000 children out of poverty.

While people are so busy accumulating more 'stuff', it is easy to forget the struggles that define the day-to-day existences of far too many. Campaign 2000 at least has a plan to ease those burdens.