The Truth About Canada (5 page)

Despite some recent improvements, there are still major problems in Canada’s healthcare system. There remain shortages of medical beds and nurses. Only one in five family physicians are accepting new patients. The number of physicians in Canada is still far below OECD average levels and surveys indicate that more than 4,000 Canadian doctors plan to stop practising within the next two years.
³¹

All of this said, a January 2008 report by a British researcher in
Health Affairs
says that “Canadians are getting excellent value for the money” compared to the citizens of 18 other countries studied, and the outcomes are substantially better than those for their southern neighbour.

For readers who want more detailed healthcare information, the excellent Canadian Institute for Health Information (
www.cihi.ca
) has a long list of valuable reports that can be downloaded free of charge in both English and French.

2

POVERTY IN CANADA

“We’re not the lovely people we think we are.”

“Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings.”

—
NELSON MANDELA, BBC, FEBRUARY
5, 2005

Y
ear after year in Canada, the public opinion polls are clear. After health care, and more recently after the environment, but well ahead of lower income taxes or reducing government debt or increasing military/defence spending, Canadians place a constant and a very high priority on reducing child poverty. But of course you don’t reduce child poverty without lowering the level of overall poverty.

Let’s look at both problems and see how Canada measures up. First, a reminder. In 1989, the House of Commons passed their now notorious all-party unanimous resolution promising to wipe out child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. At that time, using the before-tax system of measuring poverty (see
Appendix Two
for an explanation as to how poverty is measured), 15.1 percent of children in this country were living in poverty. By 2004, despite substantial economic growth and huge wealth creation, the number of poor children had grown to 17.7 percent, or almost 1.2 million children. Statistics Canada also said that 12.5 percent of all Canadian families, 34.5 percent of immigrants who had been in Canada less than 10 years, and almost 50 percent of female lone parents were classified as living in “low-income” situations.

At the end of March 2006, the
Globe and Mail
ran a front-page headline saying, “Growth Spurs Decline in Poverty.” The following month, the paper had a glowing editorial applauding Canada’s success in our war against poverty. Using
very
conservative poverty measures, well below
those used by the United Nations, the OECD, and the European Union, the
Globe
applauded the “heartening” facts that in 2004 only 3.5 million Canadians lived in poverty, that only 14 percent of those who were employed had full-time jobs paying less than $10 an hour, and that only 865,000 Canadian children were living in poverty. For the
Globe
, “All in all, it is a comforting picture.”

Let’s take this so-called “comforting picture” and compare it with the pictures presented by the OECD, by Unicef, and by other international organizations and experts measuring poverty.

Here are conservative figures for the percentage of countries’ populations living below the poverty line for the period from 1990 to 2000, from the 2003 United Nations
Human Development Report
.

So, compassionate Canada is way down in 22nd place.

The Canadian Council on Social Development commented:

In 1989, Canada made a commitment to end child poverty. Instead, successive governments have created ever more elaborate ways to measure it. With the new Market Basket Measure, we now have six different poverty measures which
all show the same thing: no matter how you count them, there are too many poor people in Canada.

In February 2007, an updated Unicef report said that in a list of 25 OECD countries, 18 had lower rates of child poverty than Canada, whose rate was almost 15 percent. The following countries had child poverty rates ranging between 2.4 percent and 4.2 percent,
all less than a third of the rate in Canada:
Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. All of the following had rates of under 10 percent: Switzerland, the Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Hungary, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

How’s that for Canada, a country with the world’s eighth highest GDP per capita?

At the bottom of the list, with the worst child poverty rates? Mexico, at about 27.7 percent. And next worst? Can you guess? The United States, of course, at about 22.7 percent. Year after year, the United States, the world’s wealthiest country, is right down near the very bottom of the barrel.

In another comparison, this time using the most conservative poverty rates, the 2005 OECD study of social indicators,
Society at a Glance
, said that back in 2000 Canada was way down in 18th place among developed countries in the percentage of its population living in poverty. Canada’s rate of 10.3 percent was more than double the rate for Denmark, at 4.3 percent, and the Czech Republic, at 4.4 percent. All of the following were between 5 and 7 percent: Luxembourg, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, France, and Switzerland.

The OECD’s “poverty gap” is a measurement of the difference between the average income of the poor and the 50-percent-of-median-income threshold. Here, too, Canada does poorly. Seventeen countries have a smaller poverty gap, and Canada’s is higher than the OECD average.

More recently still, in an updated list of 27 developed countries in the 2006 United Nations
Human Development Report
, 16 countries had a lower percentage of their populations living below the United Nations’ broadly accepted poverty line when it was computed for the years 1994
to 2002. And shockingly, in the most recent UN calculations, Canada is back down at 19th in a list of 26 OECD countries.

So what do you think? How is it that so many countries have child poverty rates only a quarter of Canada’s, or a third, or less than half? It’s no secret. It’s not magic. Through decent social programs, Denmark has been able to reduce its child poverty rate from 11.8 to 2.4 percent, Finland from 18.1 to 2.8 percent, Norway from 15.5 to 3.4 percent, Sweden from 18 to 4.2 percent, the Czech Republic from 15.8 to 6.8 percent, France from 27.7 to 7.5 percent, Belgium from 16.7 to 7.7 percent, Hungary from 23.2 to 8.8 percent. And there are many other examples of public policy sharply reducing rates of child poverty.

So what’s wrong with wealthy Canada? See the chapter that follows on comparisons of international rates of social spending.

Timothy Smeeding of Syracuse University is the director of the renowned Luxembourg Income Study. In his October 2005
Poor People in Rich Countries
(
www.lisproject.org
), he compares 11 countries: Canada, the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and Sweden. Among his major points:

A majority of cross-national studies define the poverty threshold as one-half of national median income.…

Alternatively, the United Kingdom and the European Union have selected a poverty rate of 60 percent of the median income.…

The United States makes the least anti-poverty effort of any nation, reducing relative poverty created by market incomes by 28 percent compared to the average reduction of 61 percent.…

In most rich countries, the relative child poverty rate is 10 percent or less; in the United States it is 21.9 percent. What
seems most distinctive about the American poor, especially poor American single parents, is that they work more hours than do the residents of other nations, while also receiving less in transfer benefits than in other countries.…

In the 11 rich countries in Smeeding’s study, six have lower overall poverty and child poverty rates than Canada: Germany, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Finland.

As a result of government measures to reduce poverty, Canada has been able to cut the overall rate by 46 percent. But eight of the 11 countries in Smeeding’s study have been more successful, some of them much more successful. Finland, for example, reduced its overall poverty by 81 percent, and Sweden and Belgium by 77 percent. Only the United States and Italy have a record worse than Canada’s in reducing poverty rates in single parent households.

It’s interesting to use the Luxembourg Income Study to compare child poverty in the three North American free-trade agreement (NAFTA) nations. In Mexico, since 1986, it’s never been below 23 percent. In the United States, the lowest it’s been is about 22.5 percent. Using similar measurements, during the same years in Canada, it has hovered around 15 percent.

In November 2006, the widely based Campaign 2000
¹
coalition produced its annual report, which began:

The rate of child and family poverty in Canada has been stalled at 17–18% over the past 5 years despite strong economic growth and low unemployment. In fact, data from Statistics Canada show that over the past 25 years Canada’s child poverty rate has never dropped below the 15% level of 1989 when the House of Commons resolved to end child poverty.

The report shows that 1,196,000 children, almost one in every six, were living in poverty, that about one in three poor children live in families where at least one parent was working full-time, and that a great
many poor families in Canada are very poor. For example, “The average poor female lone parent would need $9,400 a year additional income just to bring them up to the poverty line,” and average low-income families would need an extra $7,200 a year just to be able to reach the Statistics Canada low-income line.

The report also notes that “even with a booming economy, Alberta’s child poverty rate is double digit and has fluctuated between 14% and 15% since 1999. The child poverty rate in British Columbia is 23.5%.”
²
How’s that for progress?

Want yet another source? In the spring of 2006, Statistics Canada reported that by their most conservative after-tax measures, 12.8 percent of Canadian children lived in low-income families. Bear in mind that these figures somehow fail to count the terribly poor aboriginal children living on Canada’s Indian reserves.

You read the junk in the
National Post
about poverty in Canada and still want yet another source? In its 2006 Economic Survey of Canada, the OECD has a chart of poverty rates for jobless households in 23 countries. The highest poverty rate was for the United States, but Canada’s was the second highest.

And yet another? In 2006, the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights once again sharply criticized Canada, as it did in 1998. The criticism was aimed at our high rate of poverty, our totally inadequate unemployment and welfare benefits, our far too low minimum wages, our treatment of our aboriginal peoples, the fact that social assistance benefits are lower now than they were a decade ago, the “discriminatory” child benefit clawback, and Canada’s failure to respond to similar UN criticisms from eight years earlier.

As far as the
National Post
is concerned, let’s turn briefly to its founder. In the 1990s, the colossally arrogant Conrad Black, owner of dozens of Canadian daily newspapers, incredibly told us that “caring and compassion really means socialism.” In a speech in Edmonton in 1992, Black complained about Canada’s “extravagant welfare programs which cause money to be skimmed to people who haven’t earned it.” Speaking of skimming money …

So what has happened to compassion in Canada? Do we care about poor children or not? We know from numerous studies that poor children tend to have far more disabilities and poorer functioning levels of vision, speech, and mobility, shorter lifespans and more chronic illness, as well as engage in more criminal activity and receive harsher treatment in the justice system, and many other problems.

And we know from many other reliable studies that apart from the misery and despair that comes with poverty, it makes no economic sense at all. It’s far less costly to tackle poverty than it is to pay for its consequences. Ed Finn, writing in the June 2007 issue of
The CCPA Monitor
, points out that

the Center for American Progress (CAP), a progressive think-tank in Washington, recently did a study on the economic costs of child poverty in the United States. Their researchers’ estimated figures are staggering. They calculated that Americans who were poor as children — and there are now 37 million of them — are much more likely than other citizens to commit crimes, to need more health care, and to be less productive in the workforce.