On November 24, 1989, Ed Broadbent gave his last major address to the House of Commons as leader of the New Democratic Party, moving a motion for the elimination of child poverty that ultimately passed with unanimous support.
In addressing his colleagues, Broadbent offered a bracing survey of the realities still facing countless children across Canada — forcefully arguing that the very existence of poverty is ultimately a political choice, and that the power to eradicate it for good lies in all our hands.
Today, despite some progress, Ed’s vision of a country whose children are free from poverty remains sadly elusive.
— Luke Savage
Edward Broadbent (Oshawa) moved:
That this House express its concern for the more than one million Canadian children currently living in poverty and seek to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000.
Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear.
Mr. Broadbent: Mr. Speaker, I want to thank my colleagues. One morning in the middle of June, lying in my bed, the alarm dock went off on my clock radio and I listened, as I usually do each morning, to the morning CBC news. On this particular day the news I heard was deeply distressing. The report on that particular morning was that we have in this country of ours 1,121,000 children living in poverty.
Normally I had been reasonably well aware, given my responsibility as the Leader of the New Democratic Party, of the general social policy oriented data, if I can put it in those very abstract terms, but I frankly say that on that particular morning 1 was totally surprised by how serious the problem of child poverty in Canada had become.
I went to my office that very morning, checked with members of our research staff and asked them to get me a copy of the report on child poverty which had just been produced and which formed the basis of the CBC news report.
It turned out that the figures used were true. There were well over a million poor kids in this Canada of ours in 1989, not 1939; in Canada, a developed industrial society, not a poor emerging nation in the Third World.
The situation is bad for our children. For the rest of us, no matter how we have been burdened by tax increases, no matter how hard done by we feel when we cannot buy an extra suit that we might have planned on, take our families out to another restaurant for a dinner on a gîven week, or have a more extended holiday, that is the reality for a majority of Canadians.
It is certainly our task as a party, our task as parliamentarians, to be trying to improve the well-being of the majority, but the well-being of the majority in recent years has been improving. While this has been going on in our country, the well-being of a significant number of our kids has been getting worse.
From 1980 to 1986, when the child population of Canada actually fell by some 4 per cent, the number living in poverty in Canada at precisely the time the rest of us were doing better increased by 13.4 per cent.
A few years after I was elected to the House of Commons a survey was taken in 1973. In 1973 it was found in this land of ours that 21 percent of our kids were poor. The most recent figure, according to the Canadian Council on Social Development, is that this percentage has increased from. 21 per cent to 25 per cent, one child out of four from Newfoundland in the east to British Columbia in the west. Some provinces are obviously much worse than others, not necessarily because of the different political regimes but certainly because of the different capacities of the different regions to generate growth.
I repeat, while the overall sense of well-being for most Canadians has been getting better, that of our children has been getting worse. While the rest of us have been better clothed. There are more kids going without shoes. While the rest of us have improved housing, we have literally thousands of children who are homeless in Canada. While the majority now take their families out to a restaurant from time to time for a meal, we have thousands of kids, indeed 151,000 children, using food banks each month.
While we in Canada have witnessed in the statistics that Mercedes Benzes and Porsches and Cadillacs are selling in record numbers, one quarter of our children are wasting away. This is a national horror. This is a national shame. It is a horror and a shame that we should put an end to.
Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear!
Mr. Broadbent: Mr. Speaker, one of the major obligations of our democratic responsibilities-and I say this to all members on both sides of the House-is to improve the well-being of the majority. That is a fundamental requirement of a democratic society.
It is also a requirement to go back to an old-fashioned and for me fundamental notion of democracy which predates the view that you have a democracy simply if you have a competitive political system, legal institutions and the rule of law. The early 19th century and pre-19th century notion of democracy was that you had a society, not just governmental institutions as important as they are, so organized that all of its members had fully equal opportunities to develop their capacities and talents as human beings. It is to that notion of democracy that we in Canada should be committing ourselves.
When we apply this test we have to understand particularly here, now, in our generation, that we have the obligation of persuading a majority of Canadians to take on the task in the interests of a minority, in the interests of our poor, in the interests in particular of poor children.
In my maiden speech 21 years ago I noted in the euphoria of that time at the end of the 1960s that our task as a people was not simply to praise our past and celebrate our present. I said that our task was to create a future, a different future, to defend what we have, and that to refuse to go beyond was to refuse to lead. We have an obligation always in this chamber to lead.
For too long we have refused to go beyond into the future when it comes to our children. For too long we have ignored the appalling poverty in the midst of affluence. For years the United States and Canada had been regarded not only here in North America but around the world as the world’s two most affluent nations and in many criteria well beyond average personal income, this remains true today. However, today also among industrial states, Canada has the second highest rate of children living in a condition of severe poverty. We are second only in this terrible indicator to the United States.
I want now to get beyond the abstractions of some of these statistics.
What is the face of poverty? It is dangerously underweight babies. It is infant deaths. The infant mortality rate of the poor is twice as high as that of the rich. Physicians in Quebec have stated that babies born in certain poor areas of the province run the risk of being as underweight as babies in developing countries.
Poverty means chronic illness, infection and viral diseases. The rate of poor children in poor health is 150 per cent higher than the national average. This is appalling!
A recent study on poverty in Regina mentioned babies who were brought to the emergency ward with convulsions because mothers had diluted their milk to make it go further. We cannot allow this to happen!
An Ontario study found that being on welfare was one of the best and surest indicators of discovering a child with chronic health problems. Welfare payments are totally inadequate to deal with that problem.
Third, the face of poverty is malnutrition. It means going to school without breakfast and going to bed at night hungry. Again in the same recent study in Saskatchewan that I picked up and read when I was recently out there, it showed that a youngster from school during the summer vacation of two months lost 25 pounds. The weight was checked before school recessed and checked when the kids came back to school. Some 25 pounds in weight was lost by that child because the school lunches that that child was getting during the school year were not being provided at home during the summer in that it was a very poor family.
I repeat, this is happening in Canada 1989, not 1939.
Children dependent on welfare in British Columbia can meet daily nutritional requirements according to medical reports that have been done for only two and a half weeks per month. What are they going to do for the other one and a half weeks? Well, they suffer; that is what they do.
While the rest of us are well off, while the rest of us go to restaurants, while the rest of us have lots of pleasure, these kids are suffering. We should be suffering when we think about it so that we will move and put an end to it.
Being a poor kid means box lunches from food banks and soup from soup kitchens. Children make up 26 per cent of the population, but they make up 40 per cent of the users of food banks in Canada.
Around Thanksgiving I was speaking somewhere here in my home province. I picked up a copy of The Toronto Star and in that paper on Thanksgiving weekend, when most of us are with our families and enjoying our families and when most of us have lots to be thankful for, I saw a report that in Toronto, our richest city, there were 34,000 Canadians who could not feed themselves adequately. Over half that 34,000 were under five years of age. They have inadequate diets.
There are more food banks in Toronto than McDonald’s hamburg outlets. Perhaps if we had neon signs in front of every food bank in the city of Toronto and in every city across Canada, when we drove around in this country of ours we would become as aware of poverty, and particularly poverty for young kids, as we are of McDonald’s hamburgers.
Mr. Speaker, to be a poor kid means trying to read or write or think on an empty stomach.
A Harvard medical study has shown a direct link between poor nutrition and the ability to concentrate, so important in the learning process. A survey of 132 public schools in Calgary reported that in 46 schools, the number of children coming to school without breakfast was a serious problem.
It is not surprising that poor children are twice as likely to drop out of school as other children.
In Canada we know — and in every country where studies have been done they know it — that rich kids are not inherently better than poor kids, that they do not have a greater capacity to become musicians, poets, good hockey players or great skiers. The poor in our nation genetically have the same capacities over ail, statistically, as the rich kids. But as every study shows if you are suffering from malnutrition and you are underhoused and you have ail of the concomitant negative effects on your life that goes with that, you are not likely to do as well ini the learning process, by a considerable proportion, as the rich or the average.
It is time we took our obligations seriously to ensure that every kid in this country has the night and the same right to develop his or her capacities and talents, that the child in Cape Breton Island ought to have the same opportunities to be what lie or she can as the child in Rosedale in Toronto.
Mr. Speaker, to be poor means to be homeless and without hope. Three years ago, 30,000 children were looking for a place to sleep in shelters for the homeless. Others lived on the street or with poor families who skimped on food to pay the rent.
There is now in Canada and in the United States a vicious cycle involving the poor. Poor kids are undernourished, underhoused, more sickly, more poorly educated, get the second or third rate jobs, and when the lay-offs come, they get laid off first.
The same young people marry each other and then they produce children, statistically out of proportion, who go through the same cycle. We have a cycle of poor food, poor housing, poor clothing, poor education, poor jobs, poor spouses, more poor kids. This is a vicious cycle. It is a vicious cycle that can be broken and it is a vicious cycle that must be broken in this Canada of ours.
Our children, 25 percent of them, are imprisoned in poverty and we must get them out of that prison. There is a problem in this relatively well off democracy of ours in dealing with this. It is to get the problem recognized for what it is. It is to get people reasonably well off to care about the problem so that they will come to grips with it.
First and foremost, there has to be a change in attitude. Let me just cite some examples. I will not give names, but I will give positions here.
The Social Services Minister in the Province of Saskatchewan, when asked about poverty in that province, said — and I do not exaggerate — that poverty among children in Saskatchewan does not exist. Saskatchewan has the second highest level, in excess of 25 per cent, of child poverty in Canada.
A premier in one of the western provinces said if poor kids go to school hungry, it is because their parents do not love them. That is outrageous. It shows a terrible insensitivity. Every member in this House has poor families in his or her constituency. Every member in this House knows them. Every member knows that poor parents care for their kids just as much as any other parents. It is terribly offensive to suggest that we have poor kids because their parents do not care for them.
In another province a cabinet minister said kids go to school hungry in her province because their parents spend their money on booze and cigarettes.
There is a psychological explanation for this. We have learned during the course of the 20th century about the psychological mechanism of denial. We all do it in varying degrees in our personal lives. People in political life people do it too. That is to say, when there is a reality out there that you do not want to recognize, you do not recognize it. You pretend it does not exist, and at a certain profound level you believe it does not exist. This reaction, the psychological mechanism of denial, is going on at too many levels in our country.
If I may be personal again on this subject, when I discovered this in the middle of June and woke up to the reality myself from that newscast, I began to speak, and for five months, I spoke in every province of Canada on this subject. Every speech I have made since the middle of June, with the exception of two speeches which were exclusively devoted to the Constitution, I talked about child poverty. There is, to my knowledge, one and only one news report about that issue that has been made on a speech that I gave in five months of making speeches from coast to coast in Canada.
It would be interesting to understand why the news media in our country has ignored the question. Is there a kind of denial mechanism that is going on there as well? Is it because it is not conflict laden, not entangled in personality battles of some kind, or regional battles? Whatever the reason — I repeat, five months of speeches with the exception of two in every part of Canada — I have said almost word for word what I have said today, and the nation has little knowledge of it. There is a problem. The reality is there. The reality is abominable, and the reality is correctable. But many Canadians — I believe most Canadians — do not know about it.
A friend of mine many years ago, Michael Harrington, who is now dead, wrote a remarkable book on poverty in the United States, a book called The Other America. That was almost three decades ago.
As a result of that book and because it came to the attention of a president, a young man named John Kennedy, it did get attention. It was taken up in the centres of power, which is normally what happens in a society. I say to the minister, those who have power are in a position to do something. Something was done. There was going to be something done in that particular instance. President Kennedy was planning a 1964 campaign based on the issue of poverty in America. As the whole world knows, he was shot and it was not done.
It was written about the United States, and it happened to take off for reasons I know not exactly, but I know it became a political issue because a president took it up. I am convinced that this will become an issue in this country of ours when premiers from coast to coast and when the Prime Minister of Canada say, “We have to put an end to child poverty”.
Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear!
Mr. Broadbent: I quoted some of the statements by ministers and governments who blame poverty of children on their parents. Many Canadians will believe that, and average Canadians will believe it as well. But I want to say that that is not the case. The study done recently for the city of Regina looking into hunger produced, as I understand it, a virtually unanimous report on the following points when it came to the causes of the poverty.
It was not due to waste. It was not due to laziness, mismanagement, bingo, booze or wilful neglect. It was due to the fact that the families were without money.
Poor kids are poor kids because they are poor kids. If we want to overcome poverty in this country, we have to do something about getting more money into the hands of poor people. That is where we have to start.
On Monday of this week the United Nations adopted the first-ever Convention on the Rights of Child. Canada co-sponsored that landmark agreement. Let us as a Parliament use that as a nation for a starting point. Article 14 of the Convention imposes on us to recognize, and I quote:
- the right of every child to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental, spiritual, moral and social development.
According to this Article we are now obligated to take:
- appropriate measures to assist parents and others responsible for the child to implement this right and shall in case of need provide material assistance and support programs, particularly with regard to nutrition, health, clothing and housing.
We can, we must take up our obligations now.
The point that I want to make is that it can be done. In Sweden, Norway and West Germany there is a level of child poverty one-fifth as high as ours. Where over 25 percent of our children live in poverty, theirs are around 5 per cent. Other societies that have cared, that have targeted the problem, have understood it is a problem, have done something about it.
In Canada, all parties — and I am not going to talk about the political genesis of it beyond that — in the late 1950s and early 1960s recognized that we had a serious problem with our elderly. We saw then that statistically speaking a much greater percentage of senior citizens were living in poverty than the percentage of children living in poverty today. The people of Canada did not sit back, and at one point people in all parties did not sit back. We all have parents. We know senior citizens. We know it is a human right that a man or woman, who spends his or her life working for the nation and with his contribution whatever it is in labour, ought to be able to retire with dignity, not just survive but retire with some dignity.
We began to move as a country. In the early 1960s we began the important struggle for elderly Canadians. In 1963, 41 percent of elderly Canadians were poor. The Canada Pension Plan came in. Old age security was significantly improved. Indexation of pensions and pension benefits took place. By 1966, the percentage of elderly couples living in poverty had dropped from 41 per cent to 9.5 percent. We still have poor citizens. More has to be done, of course. But we made real progress for the elderly.
There is one person who is sitting here — I see him now — who sat here day in and day out, often in the front-benches of the New Democratic Party rows, now before the Speaker, who in particular did a remarkable job for senior citizens, and that is Stanley Knowles.
Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear!
Mr. Broadbent: Mr. Speaker, I say to you if we want to succeed with our children we have to deal as specifically with their poverty as we did with senior citizens. We helped to bring dignity to the lives of the elderly. We must now do that for our children. We must show that for us human dignity is to be cherished as much in life’s first pages as it is in the concluding chapters.
I say to the minister that the federal government must show leadership. The Prime Minister said this fall that our goal for social programs must be those that “bring us both peace of mind and pride in citizenship.” I agree. All Canadians would agree. I simply say it is time to match the rhetoric with action.
Some Hon. Members: Hear, hear!
Mr. Broadbent: Basically, at the federal level the government must start by increasing the minimum federal wage which is now the lowest in the country and has not been increased in three years. It should be indexed to the cost of living, just as pensions were indexed several years ago. Second, the federal government must increase family allowances and the child tax credit and index them to the rate of inflation. This money goes directly to low-and middle-income families to pay for food, housing and clothing. Third, the federal government must increase federal financing for low-cost housing.
Ten years ago, the government financed construction of 30,000 new low-cost housing units per year. Today, this number has dropped to 20,000.
We must also move to bring in child care legislation which has as its purpose and fundamental goal an increase in the number of spaces that will be available for children throughout Canada.
This in itself will help thousands of Canadian women who love their children, who want to care for them but who are now locked into welfare. They cannot afford adequate child care and so are forced to stay home when they would prefer to be spending part of their time working in the economy out of the house and part of their time looking after children but they know that they cannot leave them if there are not adequate child care spaces available.
One recent survey showed that there were over 21,000 Canadian women who specifically said they would prefer to be off welfare, would prefer to be working out of the house if only this nation of ours had taken the proper steps some time ago to ensure adequate child care service is available. We must begin to make that child care spacing available for these women.
I would like to propose that the Prime Minister or the federal government before long convene a national conference on the elimination of child poverty, inviting first and foremost the provincial governments because much of the responsibility as we know in this federal constitution of ours to deal with this problem resides with the provinces. Also invited should be municipalities to send delegates, volunteer agencies, the trade union movement, chambers of commerce, service clubs and poor peoples’ representatives themselves.
There should be a national effort to talk about and understand the gravity of the problem and to understand that things can be done. This conference should be called. In my view such a grand coalition that could be brought together should not be a one-shot deal, but it should obligate itself to meet on an annual basis to establish targets. I am aware we cannot do this overnight, as I am aware if we begin to spend money now and target spending to overcome the disgrace of national poverty for children certain other priorities would have to be set aside. No serious man or woman in political life can escape from that. I am aware that it cannot be done overnight and without some sacrifice in some other domain, but by God I am saying we should now organize our political community like we have never done before. This can be done by bringing in groups that have not been involved before, setting out a national target, and monitoring it on an annual basis until we eliminate child poverty in this country.
I want to conclude with these observations. Whatever their philosophical basis, whether Canadians are Conservatives, Liberals or New Democrats, I know there is not the slightest bit of difference in terms of their commitment to the well-being of children. However else we may differ on other political matters, and the differences are real and serious on this issue. There is no difference on the commitment to overcome child poverty. I believe there would be no difference about that goal.
I think that if we speak to all of Canada and if all parties took this on, we could get a response. I am convinced that a great attempt to mobilise the energy and effective imagination of Canadians would meet with a great response from the people of Canada. We have the resources. We have the ability. We have done it before on pensions. We have done it before on medicare. What we need now is to demonstrate the same will concerning the needs of our children.
For the sake of our children, let us find that same spirit of reform, of hope, of courage, of tenacious intelligence that has led this nation of ours to great accomplishments in the past. Let us affirm today in this Parliament that as a nation by the beginning of the 21st Century — only 11 years away — child poverty in this great Canada will be a relic of the past.