News Releases

Campaign 2000 Breakfast for MPs

Canada can do much better!

by Madame Monique Bégin
25 November 2010

I voiced repeatedly, as Minister of National Health and Welfare and for years after, my then firmly held view of Canada as "the Sweden of the Americas": our safety etc. Not only did I believe it, but I used to proudly compare Canada with the European country many experts held up then, as they do now, as a model of social and economic justice and well-being.

Well, I was making a huge mistake. Canada's the least bad of the Americas, but it's not Sweden by a long shot.  It is not because we don't have early child development for all children, starting at age 3, except in Quebec. We lack terribly in social housing, our unemployment insurance does not cover a great number of people loosing their job, and so on. When it comes to these programs, the OECD rank us towards  the bottom of the loist of industrialized countries, just above the US. Not a reference.

The truth is that our country – more or less the ninth richest in the world - is so wealthy that it manages to mask the reality of poverty, social exclusion, discrimination, employment erosion, mental health and youth suicides. While Canada is one of the world’s biggest spenders in health care, we have one of the worst records when it comes to providing an effective social safety net. Does it not make better sense to invest in programs that will help Canadians of all walks of life to prevent health problems rather than fixing them after the fact?

We can do much better. In fact, we have, at least on one occasion. In the early eighties, we lifted seniors as a sub-group of our population out of poverty, from 59 per cent living in poverty to 8 per cent after taxes and transfers such as bonifies Old Age pensions and supplements. However, Canada has not done so well when it comes to her children.  

If, like several others present here this morning and like the coalition members of Campaign 2000 against poverty, I find myself involved, it is on a deep belief in the fundamental value of equity. I know however that in today's Canada, the economic argument in favour of eradicating poverty is also a very powerful argument. Based on research, the 2008 Report of the Ontario Association of Food Banks reports that child poverty in the US costs at least $500 billion per year before the economic crisis, the equivalent of four per cent of GDP. In the United Kingdom, child poverty then was £25 billion a year, or the equivalent of two per cent of their GDP, and is now certainly more.
Campaign 2000 urges all players to work together on a Plan to Make Canada Poverty-Free. I agree. Such a plan, secured in legislation passed by Parliament, is essential. Such a Plan is needed for translating ideas and principles into action: needed are objectives, clear timetables, transparent accountability structure. Canada, however, is a country of incremental action, not of big, loud reforms. Progress will take place according the basic rule of politics – the art of the possible. It will happen through different avenues of changes, and the sum total will one day have achieved the eradication of poverty.

In the current federal political situation, it seems to me – and I used to be recognized as a good politician! – that at least two such avenues can be implemented by this government and be acceptable to its electoral clienteles. The first is for the Minister of Finance to announce in his next March budget a serious contribution of federal funds for social housing, a program depleted of new funding as far back as 1993  The second is the increase by roughly one third, to $5400/year/child (according to the excellent work of the Caledon Institute), the children benefits for those in need. Of course, such action are possible only if the Minister of Finance and the Prime Minister do not proceed with more tax cuts to business as they are hinting right now.

We are talking of the mid- and the longer-term, but lots is feasible in a decade. This campaign is a wake up call for action. Change is achievable in our lifetime but it is not a task for the faint of heart.

 

Monique Bégin