'Get smart' on child poverty, leaders told

from the Toronto Star

by Laurie Monsebraaten

Canada can either "get tough" on youth crime by handing out life sentences for 14-year-old criminals, as promised by the Conservatives, or "get smart" by developing strategies to fight child poverty, anti-poverty activists said yesterday.

"In contrast to building prisons, we should be building a national network of early learning and child-care centres and investing in a child benefit that would lift children out of poverty," said Ryerson University professor emeritus Marvyn Novick.

"It's not a question of being tough on crime or soft on crime. I say we can either get tough or get smart," said Novick, a founding member of Campaign 2000, a coalition of 120 groups committed to ending child and family poverty in Canada.

Stubbornly high child poverty rates in Canada's largest cities underscore the urgent need for all federal party leaders to tell voters how they would tackle the problem, said Novick and other coalition members who note that only the Tories have been silent on the issue.

Data from the 2006 census shows one in four children in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver lives in poverty and one in five does so in Winnipeg, St. John's and Victoria.

Nationally, about 880,000 children are poor, or about one in eight, according to the coalition, which defines the poverty line as Statistics Canada's after-tax "low-income cut-off," which calculates the income level at which a family spends a greater portion of its income on shelter, food, and clothing than an average family.

"Child and family poverty in Canada has remained high during a time of unprecedented economic prosperity," Campaign 2000 spokesperson Laurel Rothman told reporters. "This will only get worse if the effects of the financial meltdown in the U.S. ripple into Canada's economy."

Four provinces – Quebec, Newfoundland, Ontario and Nova Scotia – with two-thirds of the Canadian population are acting on poverty reduction plans, Rothman said, but cannot do it without federal help.

Link to full article. May expire in future.