The Truth About Canada Read Online Free PDF Page B

lowering the level of overall poverty.
    Let’s look at both problems and see how Canada measures up. First, a reminder. In 1989, the House of Commons passed their now notorious all-party unanimous resolution promising to wipe out child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. At that time, using the before-tax system of measuring poverty (see Appendix Two for an explanation as to how poverty is measured), 15.1 percent of children in this country were living in poverty. By 2004, despite substantial economic growth and huge wealth creation, the number of poor children had grown to 17.7 percent, or almost 1.2 million children. Statistics Canada also said that 12.5 percent of all Canadian families, 34.5 percent of immigrants who had been in Canada less than 10 years, and almost 50 percent of female lone parents were classified as living in “low-income” situations.
    At the end of March 2006, the Globe and Mail ran a front-page headline saying, “Growth Spurs Decline in Poverty.” The following month, the paper had a glowing editorial applauding Canada’s success in our war against poverty. Using very conservative poverty measures, well belowthose used by the United Nations, the OECD, and the European Union, the Globe applauded the “heartening” facts that in 2004 only 3.5 million Canadians lived in poverty, that only 14 percent of those who were employed had full-time jobs paying less than $10 an hour, and that only 865,000 Canadian children were living in poverty. For the Globe , “All in all, it is a comforting picture.”
    Let’s take this so-called “comforting picture” and compare it with the pictures presented by the OECD, by Unicef, and by other international organizations and experts measuring poverty.
    Here are conservative figures for the percentage of countries’ populations living below the poverty line for the period from 1990 to 2000, from the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report .
Slovakia
2.1%
Denmark
9.2%
Luxembourg
3.9%
Switzerland
9.3%
Czech Republic
4.9%
Spain
10.1%
Finland
5.4%
Austria
10.6%
Sweden
6.6%
Japan
11.8%
Hungary
6.7%
Ireland
12.3%
Norway
6.9%
Estonia
12.3%
Germany
7.5%
United Kingdom
12.5%
Belgium
8.0%
Canada
12.8%
France
8.0%
Israel
13.5%
Netherlands
8.1%
Italy
14.2%
Slovenia
8.2%
Australia
14.3%
Poland
8.6%
United States
17.0%
    So, compassionate Canada is way down in 22nd place.
    The Canadian Council on Social Development commented:
In 1989, Canada made a commitment to end child poverty. Instead, successive governments have created ever more elaborate ways to measure it. With the new Market Basket Measure, we now have six different poverty measures whichall show the same thing: no matter how you count them, there are too many poor people in Canada.
    In February 2007, an updated Unicef report said that in a list of 25 OECD countries, 18 had lower rates of child poverty than Canada, whose rate was almost 15 percent. The following countries had child poverty rates ranging between 2.4 percent and 4.2 percent, all less than a third of the rate in Canada: Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. All of the following had rates of under 10 percent: Switzerland, the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.
    How’s that for Canada, a country with the world’s eighth highest GDP per capita?
    At the bottom of the list, with the worst child poverty rates? Mexico, at about 27.7 percent. And next worst? Can you guess? The United States, of course, at about 22.7 percent. Year after year, the United States, the world’s wealthiest country, is right down near the very bottom of the barrel.
    In another comparison, this time using the most conservative poverty rates, the 2005 OECD study of social indicators, Society at a Glance , said that back in 2000 Canada was way down in 18th place among developed countries in the percentage of its population living in poverty. Canada’s rate of 10.3 percent was more than double the rate for Denmark, at 4.3 percent, and the