[CivicAccess-discuss] G&M - Two decades on, child poverty persists with no solution in sight

Mon Nov 23 08:26:09 EST 2009

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   Two decades on, child poverty persists with no solution in sight
[image: Scene from the film Four Feet Up.]

Scene from the film Four Feet Up. Nance Ackerman

Why is it that nearly 10 per cent of Canadian kids live below the poverty
line, even as parliament pledged to end child poverty?

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   -

   Joe Freisen

>From Monday's Globe and Mail Published on Sunday, Nov. 22, 2009 8:29PM EST Last
updated on Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 3:10AM EST

Twenty years ago this week Parliament voted unanimously to eliminate child
poverty within a decade. It didn't happen. Ten years on, it still hasn't
happened.

The most recent statistics, taken in 2007 before the recession hit, show
637,000 children, or 9.5 per cent of all Canadian kids, living in poverty.
Why has Canada failed where other wealthy countries succeeded? In part
because voters and governments have balked at aggressively redistributing
wealth. But that's only a small part of the story. More significant,
according to sociologist John Myles, is a sea-change in Canadian work and
family life.

Parents can be poor for a host of reasons, but the two most powerful
predictors of a slide into poverty are the loss of a job or the breakup of a
marriage.

The past three decades have seen higher divorce rates and a near doubling of
the proportion of single-parent families, from 6 per cent to 11 per cent. As
Mr. Myles argues, this is significant because family formation is unlikely
to respond to public policy.

When parents suddenly becomes single parents, they lose the economies of
scale associated with a partnership: shared costs of accommodation and food,
for instance, as well as the insurance of having a potential second earner.
Of all families living in poverty, more than 40 per cent are led by a single
parent.

Another growing trend is for highly educated (and high-earning) women to
marry highly educated men, creating super-earning families at the top of the
scale and stagnation at the bottom. In 1980, Prof. Myles said, the top
earning women were married to men in the lower-middle income bracket. Today
the top-earning women are married to the top-earning men, and the
lowest-earning women to the lowest-earning men.

As Mr. Myles points out in a recent article, an online dating service to
introduce university grads to high school drop-outs is probably not on
Ottawa's policy agenda, so this trend is unlikely to slow.

“If we're really concerned about child poverty we have to be concerned about
young adults and the kind of labour market opportunities they have,” Mr.
Myles said. “We have an economy that's out of sync with the biological life
course. People have kids when they're young. But the economy rewards people
when they're old.”

The majority of children under six are being raised by parents under 35. But
the earnings of workers under 35 have fallen or remained the same in
relative terms over the last 30 years, which is blamed on the decline in
manufacturing, growth of the service sector and drop in the rate of
unionization among other factors. Young people also stay in school longer,
so it takes longer to establish a career, he said.

Another factor is that recent immigrants earn substantially less than their
Canadian-born counterparts, despite their higher levels of education. The
poverty rate for immigrant children under 15 in 2005 was 33 per cent,
compared to 12 per cent for non-immigrants. Among First Nations people
living off-reserve, the rate was 34 per cent.

Poverty is not a life sentence, however. People move up and out of poverty
all the time, although there is a minority stuck at the bottom of the scale,
according to a recently published study by economists Shelley Phipps and
Peter Burton. The 10-year study found that 5 per cent of children stayed in
the bottom quintile of income over that decade, forming a small but
significant chronic poverty group.

They also found that a child whose primary caregiver becomes a working
single parent is 21.5 times more likely to slip to the bottom 20 per cent of
the income scale.

Ms. Phipps said it's surprising that Canadians governments, cited abroad for
addressing poverty among seniors so effectively, have failed in targeting
poverty in the very young.

“We just haven't put enough resources into tackling poverty among kids,”
Prof. Phipps said. “If you look at the track across time senior poverty just
fell and fell, largely because of programs put in place such as Canada
Pension Plan, Old Age Security and the Guaranteed Income Supplement.”

The persistence of poverty is a theme touched on in Nance Ackerman's
National Film Board documentary *Four Feet Up* , which will be screened
across Canada on Tuesday. The film follows Jennifer Justason, her
10-year-old son Isaiah and their family through a year in a New Minas, Nova
Scotia trailer park.

Ms. Justason discusses going for days sometimes without eating, to ensure
there's enough food for her kids. Isaiah says he knows he's “less
fortunate,” although he has no idea what that means.

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  KA_UN<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/?userid=60132342&plckUserId=60132342>

11/23/2009 8:14:45 AM
 I have no doubts that there is enough federal land which Canadian
Government can grant to the poor and needy. Let’s not forget that ranching
was Canadian way for many years.
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  CanucksAbroad<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/?userid=60154087&plckUserId=60154087>

11/23/2009 8:13:38 AM
 So to reduce child poverty we (collectively) can make couples stay married
if they have children; make it illegal to drop-out of school before high
school graduation; make it illegal to have a child out of wedlock; get
Natives off the Reserve and into integrated public schools from an early age
until adulthood; stop the immigration to Canada of uneducated workers and
their co-dependents; and generally live in a police state where government
is not only in the Nation's bedrooms, but intrusive into peoples' private
affairs.

Or we can accept that if people are allowed to make decisions then some will
make better decisions than others - like marrying a college grad instead of
a high school drop-out - and that no amount of wealth distribution will
eradicate child poverty, so long as it is flawed adults making those life
decisions for those children.

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  pcstar<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/?userid=10934798&plckUserId=10934798>

11/23/2009 8:08:11 AM
 This thing about poor immigrant's children not having enough to eat is a
hoax! I know many immigrants who are receiving benefits due to low family
income reported in Canada, yet live a very well-to-do life, due non other
than their income and assets in their homeland that are not known to the
authority. Granted there are poor immigrants - why did we take them in in
the first place? but there are many others that are taking advantage of the
hardworking tax paying Canadians. The government has let us down yet again.
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  handyandy<http://www.theglobeandmail.com/community/?userid=14498098&plckUserId=14498098>

11/23/2009 8:05:14 AM
 Just an additional comment : my wife does voluntary work for a charity
which provides (among other things) food vouchers for the poor. They visit
applicants before agreeing to provive vouchers. Just last week she visited 3
new applicants. Between them they had 9 cats, 3 dogs and a ferret, yet they
cannot feed their children.

Priorities, or what?!
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-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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