The Truth About Canada (6 page)

One CAP researcher, Harry J. Holzer, described the results of their study to a House Ways and Means Committee hearing last January. He told the stunned Congressmen that the costs to the U.S. in crime, health care, and reduced productivity associated with childhood poverty amount to an estimated $500 billion a year.

What, then, can we say about our own politicians? Over and over again, Jean Chrétien talked about building a fairer society where no one got left behind, but every year the gap between rich and poor increased, with the rich getting much richer and the poor staying poor. On the issue of poverty in Canada, Paul Martin was one of the greatest hypocrites in the modern history of politics in this country. And Stephen Harper? Has he even mentioned the topic in a speech?

What does it say about Canadians and our political leaders when for decades we’ve had growing homelessness and a mushrooming of food banks across the country? And what does it say about us when our welfare rates for poor children and the disabled don’t come anywhere near the poverty line? And what does it say when, in the face of these facts, tax cuts for big corporations and the already well-to-do are top government priorities, leading to greater corporate concentration of wealth and much greater inequality of incomes?

And what does it say about the media in Canada when the issue of child poverty is either attacked, in the most strident terms, as being exaggerated or else receives so little attention? Carol Goar of the
Toronto Star
wrote about a press conference organized by the late June Callwood and three other children’s activists to draw attention to the issue prior to the 2006 federal election.

Only four journalists showed up, two from religious publications, one from Omni television and one from the
Star
.

The pile of press kits sat pathetically on a table. The childcare and church leaders who gathered for the event tried to hide their disappointment.

Callwood asked how countries such as Hungary and Poland — which ranked 25th and 28th on the global wealth scale — can afford to treat their children better than Canada.

Callwood’s colleague, Rabbi Arthur Bielfeld, said, “I believe in the decency of Canadian society, but I’m becoming increasingly restive. We are not responding to the despair around us. We’re not the lovely people we think we are.”
³

Poverty is not often mentioned in federal or provincial elections, in leadership contests, or in parliament. Even at the 2006 NDP national convention in Quebec City, the issue was almost invisible, as it was later in the year at the Liberal leadership convention in Montreal.

Have you ever visited a food bank in Canada? Or, better still, worked in one for even a day? It’s too bad that our extreme-right-wing poverty
deniers don’t have time to do so. They’d find that about 40 percent of the over 720,000 Canadians who were forced to rely on food banks in 2007 were children, and that despite our relatively affluent society, food bank usage has increased by some 20 percent over the last five years, and the number of children relying on them has almost doubled since 1989.

Many of those who have to rely on food banks are working men and women whose income just isn’t anywhere near enough to look after their families. Many are poor single mothers. Many are disabled. Others are poor students. In their November 2006
Hunger Count
report, the Canadian Association of Food Banks said that a major percentage of their clients were people who report that they are not able to get more than 25 hours of work in a week.

Food bank use in Canada has increased by almost 80 percent during the past decade. Increasingly, low-paid working poor and their children are using food banks. Why? In Toronto, people who use food banks are spending on average 73 percent of their total income on rent. Somehow only 22 percent of Toronto’s unemployed qualify for employment insurance benefits. And 70,000 people in the city are on waiting lists for affordable housing.

The average two-bedroom apartment in Toronto rents for $1,052 a month. A single mother with two school-age children gets a grand total of $1,184 a month in social assistance. After paying an average rent, that leaves $132 a month for food, for clothing, for school supplies, for utilities, for kitchen and bathroom supplies, for recreational activities, etc.,
etc.
That’s $132 per month for a family of three. The average poor family in Toronto is almost $10,000 short of adequate money for rent, food, and public transit, and the fastest-growing group using shelters is children.

Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government cut a massive $2-billion from federal housing programs. The Chrétien government did nothing to restore public housing and downloaded responsibility for it to the provinces. Then Paul Martin abolished the housing ministry.

In Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has announced a remarkable $17-billion affordable-housing plan that will produce 50,000 units of social housing a year for the next three years, with a goal of three million
new affordable homes by 2020. By contrast, a
Toronto Star
editorial correctly says that

In Canada there is no national housing strategy. Worse, there is a lack of political will to develop one, despite a growing homelessness crisis and huge waiting lists for subsidized housing across the country.

Canada is alone among the major industrialized countries in not having a national housing strategy. Only 5 percent of the housing stock in this country is social housing, one of the lowest levels in the world.
⁴

There are now an estimated 1,500 homeless in Vancouver, but if no additional low-cost housing is built, that number will likely increase to over 3,000 by 2010. One new estimate puts the number of homeless in British Columbia at well over 10,000. And while Ontario’s Liberal government under Dalton McGuinty promised 20,000 affordable housing units for that province, after three years in office only 6 percent of these were built.

In Ontario, over 122,000 households were waiting to get into affordable housing in 2006. The average household income of people on the waiting list is only slightly over $12,000 a year. While Paul Martin spoke frequently about poverty in Canada, if you were to add up all the affordable public housing units built in Canada during all the years that he was minister of finance, the total wouldn’t equal even a single year of public housing construction in the 1980s. In 1980, 24,168 affordable residences were built. In 1998 only 550 were built.

For those of us who have been concerned for many years about the very high levels of poverty in Canada, the publication of the 2006 edition of the
Hunger Count
report by the Canadian Association of Food Banks can only be described as dismaying. The first food bank opened in Edmonton in 1981. It was thought to be just a temporary measure. In 1989, there were 159 food banks in Canada. Today, there are food banks in every province and territory, 649 in all. In 1981, those who organized
the first food bank worried that while they felt a moral obligation to help the hungry, their actions might lessen the pressure on government to do something about the urgent problem. Unfortunately, their concerns were justified. Since the House of Commons promised to abolish child poverty, food bank usage in the same period has more than doubled.

Incredibly, in an era of unprecedented affluence, over one third of all food banks in Canada report that they have difficulty meeting the demand for food from hungry men, women, and children. An editorial in the
Toronto Star
reports that

The Foodpath food bank in Mississauga is in desperate need of help as it tries to meet growing demands for its services. That such a crisis exists in a 905 community may come as a surprise to those who believe poverty, homelessness and hunger are problems unique to the city of Toronto. But the Mississauga charity helps 5,500 people every month. Half are children.

Meanwhile, the core operation of the Canadian Association of Food Banks receives zero government funding, and only in Quebec and Nova Scotia is there more than minute government assistance. According to the
Hunger Count
report,

In one month in 2006, 753,458 Canadians obtained food from a food bank; 41 percent were children. Contrary to popular assumption, many food banks can only provide a few days’ worth of food. Food shortages have forced dozens of food banks to cut back on food hampers, turn people away, and even shut down for several days.
⁵

Welfare rates in Canada are pathetically inadequate (see the chapter in this book on welfare). As a result, many of those who must resort to food banks are also dependent on welfare.

Greg deGroot-Maggetti, of Citizens for Public Justice, opens his foreword to
Hunger Count
with a famous quote from the late Brazilian bishop Dom Halder Camara: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist.” The wonderful Sue Cox, who in December 2005 stepped down after 17 years as the executive director of the Daily Bread Food Bank in Toronto, says, “My greatest regret is that we have failed to put the serious issue of hunger on the public agenda.”

One further thought on the subject of poverty in Canada. During the 19 years since the House of Commons resolution promising to abolish child poverty, Canada’s GDP more than doubled, increasing by almost $880 billion. But the most recent Statistics Canada figures put our child poverty rate at exactly the same level as it was back in 1989.

(In
Appendix Two
, you will find a brief discussion of how poverty is measured and some additional comments on poverty in the United States. The National Council of Welfare website,
http://www.ncw.gc.ca/[email protected]
, has a report,
Solving Poverty: Four Cornerstones of a Workable National Strategy for Canada
, which can be downloaded free of charge.)

PART TWO

3

ABORIGINAL PEOPLES IN CANADA

THE SHAMEFUL NEGLECT OF APPALLING,
DISGRACEFUL, GRINDING POVERTY

“Many of us just don’t give a damn.”

A
s we all know, Canada has ranked at or near the top of the United Nations Human Development Index for many years. At the same time, our aboriginal peoples rank 63rd on the same scale.

The average life expectancy rate for Canada’s aboriginal people is seven years shorter than the lifespan for non-aboriginal Canadians. The levels of diabetes, disability, suicide, poverty, and unemployment among aboriginals, particularly those living on reserves, are all significantly higher than the levels among non-aboriginals. And the disability rate among First Nations children is over twice the national average.

According to Laurel Rothman of Campaign 2000 and Assembly of First Nations head, Phil Fontaine,

• more than four in ten First Nations children are in need of basic dental care they cannot afford;

• nearly 100 First Nations communities must boil their water;

• mould contaminates almost half of First Nations households;

• diabetes is three to five times more common than the Canadian average and tuberculosis is eight to ten times more common;

• forty percent of aboriginal children whose homes are off-reserve live below the poverty line.
¹

Aboriginal people are about 3.8 percent of Canada’s population, but they make up about 20 percent of all prison inmates. The prison rate of 1.6 percent is eight times the rate for other Canadians. There are over 17,000 native inmates in Canada’s prisons, where they face systemic discrimination.
²
In Manitoba, more than 68 percent of those sentenced to custody in 2003/2004 were aboriginals although they made up only 10.6 percent of the province’s population. In Saskatchewan, it was more than 80 percent with less than 10 percent of the population. In Alberta, it was almost 39 percent with just over 4 percent of the population.

In Toronto, aboriginals make up about 1 percent of the population but over a quarter of the homeless. They also remain homeless much longer than other homeless people, on average about five years.

The unemployment rate for young aboriginal workers is just under 23 percent, about double the rate for all young workers. In 2005, the unemployment rate for off-reserve aboriginals in Western Canada was 2.5 times higher than the rates for non-aboriginals.
³

Between 1997 and 2000, the average homicide rate for aboriginal people was almost seven times higher than it was for non-aboriginals.
⁴

In 2001, a startling 41 percent of aboriginal children under age 15 were poor. And 37 percent between the ages of 15 and 24 were poor. These figures were more than double the rates for non-aboriginal children. Yet somehow people registered under the Indian Act living on reserves are not included when poverty rates are calculated.

Phil Fontaine, speaking about the 30 percent of aboriginals who live on reserves, said bluntly:

The underlying problem is the impoverished state of First Nations communities.

We exist with poor housing, poor schools, poor access to quality health care, poor drinking water, and the pressure as a result of this grinding poverty is just overwhelming for too many of our people.

Thirty-five percent of on-reserve aboriginals are on welfare.

Michael Mendelson of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy has pointed out that only 16 percent of the general population between the ages of 20 and 24 have not finished high school, but for natives living on reserves in the same age group it’s an appalling 58 percent. Mendelson writes, “What do you suppose their young men and women will do with their lives? … The only difference between this and the kind of disasters that grab headlines and emergency funds is that it will take longer for the destruction to become obvious.”