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

Tracey P. Lauriault tlauriau at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 08:26:45 EST 2009 

Sorry all!  Sent to the wrong persons!

t

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Tracey P. Lauriault <tlauriau at gmail.com>wrote:

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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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>    Latest Comments
>
>   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.
>   0
>  0
>  Report Abuse
>
>   CanucksAbro​ad<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.
>
>   1
>  0
>  Report Abuse
>
>   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.
>   1
>  1
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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
>



-- 
Tracey P. Lauriault
613-234-2805
https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault
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