Put poverty on the agenda
Vancouver Island News Group -- Peninsula News Review
January 25, 2008
Opinion

When Parliament resumes on Monday (Jan. 28), politicians from all parties need to turn their attention to the appalling state of poverty in this country and the need to find solutions.

With fears of a recession growing across the country, poverty is not apt to be at the top of the list of political concerns. But there are many reasons why it should be.

Yet in Ottawa, there is little talk of helping the poorest among us.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is trying instead to woo middle-class voters in an election expected this year with another cut in the GST. He has also slashed corporate taxes.

For his part, Liberal Leader St phane Dion has promised to make poverty reduction a central theme of his election platform.

Dion has committed his party to reducing overall poverty by 30 per cent and child poverty by 50 per cent in five years. That would mean one million fewer Canadians would fall below Statistic's Canada's low-income cut-off line and the number of poor children would be cut from the current level of 778,000 to about 390,000.

But Dion has not said how the Liberals would achieve those goals or pay for the programs. He has not even promised to develop a Canadian definition of poverty, which many see as an important first step that would allow us to hold him to his promise.

To date, Dion has only briefly outlined several measures to help the poor, including expanding the child tax benefit and improving two of the Conservatives' tax-credit programs to make sure they also apply to people who don't pay income taxes. These measures do not add up to a comprehensive anti- poverty strategy…the Liberals have no plans to develop a new poverty definition and further details of their program will not be released until their election platform is revealed.

As for NDP Leader Jack Layton, he has promised he would raise the child tax benefit, restart a national housing program and provide more help for new immigrants. But he has not outlined an overall poverty reduction strategy with definable targets.

Clearly, all three parties need to make poverty a higher priority in the coming parliamentary session. They should also commit to working with the provinces, which have responsibility for programs like housing and child care but lack the resources to fund them fully.

Fighting poverty is not simply about the poor. It is about the well-being of the entire country. That is why politicians in past decades created the social safety net that now so obviously needs repairs.