Dion to advocate targets for cutting poverty in Canada; Echoes move by Tony Blair
The Province / CanWest News Service
November 9, 2007
By: Juliet O'Neill

Federal 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 leader of the Opposition 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 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….

Dion's anti-poverty policy speech is part of a series in which he has been laying out his party's economic policies.

Speech to the Learning Enrichment Foundation: Towards a Fairer Canada Without Poverty