Child Poverty

 

Child poverty has a negative and long-lasting impact on a child's ability to learn, build skills, find employment and avoid poverty. It is well-understood that children who experience poverty and lack of educational opportunities often grow up to become adults who experience poverty and low education levels. A lack of healthy food, health care, and a stimulating environment lowers a child's ability to learn for the rest of their lives. A child's experience during the early years of development (prenatal to 8 years of age) sets a critical foundation for their entire life course. All aspects of Early Childhood Development (ECD) - including physical, social/emotional and language/cognitive domains – strongly influence basic learning, school success, economic participation, social citizenry and health. The environments where children grow up, live and learn – with parents, caregivers, family, and teachers – have the most significant impact on their development. 

Children living in poverty show almost 3.5 times the number of conduct disorders, almost twice the chronic illnesses and twice the rate of school problems, hyperactivity and emotional disorders as children who don't experience poverty. Canadian children that live in poverty often suffer from iron deficiencies, which lead to difficulties in cognitive development. They also have such health, social, and cognitive disadvantages compared to other children, that they are generally less equipped - socially, emotionally and physically - to undertake school programs. If their disadvantaged position and different day-to-day experiences are not taken into account by school education, they are unable to benefit fully from the school system. Numerous studies have consistently shown that the strongest single predictor of educational achievement and attainment is the socio-economic status of the student's family. Education - in close co-operation with health care, guidance and counseling services, and income generating activities - is pivotal in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and social exclusion that is the reality for many families.

 

Since 2009, 88 Percent Of Income Growth Went To Corporate Profits, Just One Percent Went To Wages

By Guest Blogger

After the longest recession since WWII, many Americans are still struggling while S&P 500 corporations are sitting on $800 billion in cash and making massive profits. Now, economists from Northeastern University have released a study that finds our sluggish economic recovery has almost solely benefited corporations. According to the study:

“Between the second quarter of 2009 and the fourth quarter of 2010, real national income in the U.S. increased by $528 billion. Pre-tax corporate profits by themselves had increased by $464 billion while aggregate real wages and salaries rose by only $7 billion or only .1%. Over this six quarter period, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of the growth in real national income. …The absence of any positive share of national income growth due to wages and salaries received by American workers during the current economic recovery is historically unprecedented.”

The New York Times adds, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.”
So as average wages fall, and nearly 14 million people remain unemployed, America’s economic recovery has almost entirely benefited corporations. This development adds another chapter to the decline of the middle class, whose incomes are shrinking and wages are stagnating. Last year, top executives’ salaries increased 27 percent, while workers’ salaries increased only 2 percent. At the moment, income inequality in America is the worst it’s been since the 1920s, as the richest 1 percent make nearly 25 percent of the country’s income.
–Sean Savett

 

Tommy Douglas' big dreams

Tommy Douglas' big dreams

Douglas knew how to dream big, championing medicare even when the critics said he'd never succeed.

Wed 24 Mar 2010

By Jack Layton, as published in the Mark
When Canadians voted Tommy Douglas our “Greatest Canadian” in 2004, we honoured a man whose example sets the highest bar for today’s political leaders. A portrait of the preacher from Weyburn hangs in my Centre Block office, watching over every meeting with every delegation from every corner of this country. A momentary meeting of the eyes often brings to mind Tommy’s essential teachings.
“Dream no little dreams,” Tommy would say – then show us how. Medicare is impossible, the world cried out. You’ll never balance Saskatchewan’s budget. The medical establishment won’t allow it. It can’t be done. Then he got it done, through a dramatic team effort sparked by his courage to dream big. That same courage lowered Saskatchewan’s voting age to 18, pioneered public-sector bargaining rights, prototyped public auto insurance, launched a public air ambulance service, and issued a bill of rights – all in Tommy’s first term as our party’s first provincial premier.

Contrast Tommy’s vision with more “modern” leaders whose idea of nation-building is to prop up big business and hope for the best. We need more of Tommy, and less of that. More of that Douglas-style dreaming that’s genetically linked to getting things done.
When he came to Ottawa as the NDP’s first federal leader, Tommy set to work building bridges with Lester Pearson’s minority government. Persistently. Pragmatically. The results became defining aspects of Canadian society – national medicare, the Canada Pension Plan, a world-class affordable housing strategy. That’s why older Canadians aren’t surprised to see today’s New Democrats making minority Parliaments work. We’re learning from the very best.

But Tommy’s example also underlines vital limits on compromise. Forty years ago, I was studying at McGill University when Pierre Laporte was murdered by the FLQ. Like so many, I found myself carried away by the popular impulse to applaud Trudeau’s drastic crackdown on the threat that the FLQ seemed to represent. Then Tommy began powerfully condemning the suspension of civil rights under the War Measures Act – risking terrible ostracism to give sober voice to principle: we mustn’t use fear as a smokescreen to trample basic rights. As the vans plucked hundreds of peaceful separatists from the streets of Montreal, something clicked and I rushed to become a New Democrat.
Dream big. Be pragmatic. Stick to your principles. That’s Tommy’s distinguished example. There’s none better for aspiring young leaders looking to make a positive mark on their country.

Issues: The Link Between Incarceration And Poverty

 

The Link Between Incarceration And Poverty

Categorized | Federal Politics, Issues, Top Stories

Issues: The Link Between Incarceration And Poverty

Originally Posted on 24 February 2011
By David Murray. In my riding there is no better example of what the highest levels of underemployed, child poverty and youth unemployment result in.

Abbotsford and Prince George are two of the highest crime cities in Canada. Our tax dollars would be much better suited helping people in abject poverty. If you look at history. In almost every case , all crime bosses came from abject poverty. Johnny “the Fox” Torrio, Al Capone, Tony Accardo,Charles “Lucky” Luciano to name a few. We need to have a major tax shift and thought shift from the way we are thinking. Reactionary politics is not the answer. Preventive politics is much more attainable. We can change people’s habits. Look at what we have done to smokers.

In 1961 over 65 % of people smoked in Canada , in 2011 it is 19%. This was done by putting our energy and dollars into the prevention of trying to get people to quit smoking. For every dollar we will spend on our families in need today, it will come back over 100 times the value in related health risks, crime, productivity ,we are investing in our society. Not just a social -democratic society. As Jack Layton says ” a society that leaves nobody behind”. This was an interesting quote by Senator Hugh Segal “Almost all those in Canada’s prisons come from beneath the poverty line. Less than 10 per cent of Canadians live beneath the poverty line but almost 100 per cent of our prison inmates come from that 10 per cent.”

Debates about whether approaches to crime and corrections in Canada are too soft or too tough are ongoing and endemic.
While the partisan debate continues unabated, the real issue is why prisons disproportionately house our most vulnerable citizens.
While all those Canadians who live beneath the poverty line are by no means associated with criminal activity, almost all those in Canada’s prisons come from beneath the poverty line. Less than 10 per cent of Canadians live beneath the poverty line but almost 100 per cent of our prison inmates come from that 10 per cent. There is no political ideology, on the right or left, that would make the case that people living in poverty belong in jail.
Statistics underscore the bleak link between poverty and incarceration. While aboriginals, many mired in poverty, represent 4 per cent of Canada’s population, they make up almost 20 per cent of those in federal prisons. A study by Toronto Star journalists unfortunately makes the point. Sandro Contenta and Jim Rankin, in an impressive 2008 feature for the Star, reviewed thousands of pages of data concerning crime and those caught up in the system.

They noted that:
• More than 70 per cent of those who enter prisons have not completed high school.
• Seventy per cent of offenders entering prisons have unstable job histories.
• Four of every five arrive with serious substance-abuse problems.
• A Toronto study of 300 homeless adults found 73 per cent of men had been arrested and 49 per cent of them incarcerated at least once. Twelve per cent of women had served time.

In a modern, competitive and compassionate society like ours, these numbers are unacceptable. If Canadians want to wage an effective war on crime we must first reshape the debate. If crime abatement is the goal, it is time for all Canadians and their governments to become tough on poverty. By doing so, the outcomes we all want — safer communities and diminishing prison populations — will follow.

Not only would this approach — best achieved through the establishment of a needs-based, refundable income tax credit for all Canadians (a guaranteed annual income, or GAI) — prove more effective, it would also be cheaper. At a time of government restraint, prisoners are, in a word, expensive. With all costs factored in, Canadians spend more than $147,000 per prisoner in federal custody each year. By contrast, it would take between $12,000 and $20,000 annually to bring a person in Canada above the poverty line. Even at the high end of the GAI scale, this represents savings to taxpayers of $127,000 per federal prisoner each year. Those are figures that should be of interest to any federal or provincial finance minister — of any party background.
The most famous call for a Canadian GAI was issued 40 years ago by Senator David Croll. It was 1971 when his Senate committee on poverty issued its report.
“Poverty is the great social issue of our time,” Croll wrote. “The poor do not choose poverty. It is at once their affliction and our national shame. No nation can achieve true greatness if it lacks the courage and determination to undertake the surgery necessary to remove the cancer of poverty from its body politic.”
Both Conservative and Liberal federal governments have ignored this proposal ever since. In the years following, the expert calls for a GAI have only increased. The Macdonald Royal Commission challenged Canadians to take a “leap of faith” and embrace free trade with the United States in 1985. It also stated unequivocally that a universal income security program is “the essential building block” for social security programs in the 21st century.
What anyone who studies Canada’s prisons understands — be they from the right, left or centre of the political landscape — is that current approaches are not working. Whether or not one believes crime is decreasing, reducing the pipeline that feeds poverty is the best public policy. Police chiefs with whom I have spoken all agree that their areas of greatest challenge are not the better off parts of town. To be tough on crime means we must first be tough on the causes of poverty.