Liberals to call for broad-based poverty-reduction strategy

from Canada . com

Juliet O'Neill
CanWest News Service

OTTAWA - Liberal Leader Stephane Dion will tear a page out of former British prime minister Tony Blair's book with a "bold initiative" that would set measurable targets for reducing poverty in Canada, an official in his office says.

In a speech in Toronto today, the official Opposition leader is set to propose the establishment of measurable targets for reducing poverty, along with a set of "realistic, action-oriented" measures to meet those goals. The Liberals hope to galvanize public opinion with the idea that 750,000 children, and one in every three single mothers, need not be poor in a country as prosperous as Canada.

Some of the proposals would involve revisiting some existing federal income support programs, notably for parents and seniors, to make them more beneficial to those on low or fixed incomes.

Among the programs that would be revisited are the child tax credit, the child tax benefit and the guaranteed income supplement - a monthly non-taxable benefit to low-income Old Age Security recipients. The Liberal proposal for a national child care and early learning program, which was abandoned by the Conservative government, will be part of the package as well.

The concept echoes former New Democratic Party leader Ed Broadbent's longtime campaign to methodically eradicate child poverty in Canada, but it is Blair's Labour party policies in Britain that were cited as a model by the Dion official.

Blair, who recently stepped down as prime minister and Labour leader after a decade in office, pledged early in his mandate to wipe out child poverty in Britain within 20 years. His government set up a poverty-auditing system to measure progress.

Among the targets were a reduction in truancy at schools, improved literacy at age 11, increased employment, a reduction in the number of children admitted to hospital for injuries, reduced smoking, a reduction of elderly people unable to afford to heat their homes properly, and increasing the proportion of people contributing to private pensions.

Dion's anti-poverty policy speech is part of a series in which the Opposition leader has, since late summer, been laying out parts of his party's economic policies.