Canada's Detainees

Our jaws dropped.  In responding to a query in Question Period today about why more isn’t being done to fight child poverty, Human Resources Minister Diane Finley retorted that child poverty rates are now half of what they were when the Liberals were in power.  The NDP, Bloc and Liberals all looked at one another in disbelief, for the numbers don’t come near to substantiating her claim.But this has been the way it is for Canada’s children ever since the pledge was unanimously made twenty years ago today (1989) in the House of Commons to end child poverty by the year 2000.  I was in the observation gallery that day and as a food bank director I experienced the same flush of pride that so many others felt on that occasion.  And then the series of failures began, as the Mulroney, Chretien, Martin and now Harper years have frittered away endless opportunities to act on that pledge.  It’s been a system-wide shutdown of possibilities and we are now left with the number of children living in poverty conditions almost equal to what they were on that promising day two decades ago.The truth is that no political leader had the courage to take the plunge once they were in power.  Whether in recession years or boom times, politics went on as though all that mattered was the economy and getting more money into people’s pockets.  Groups like Campaign 2000 and various provincial food bank associations frequented Ottawa each year to ask what happened to the pledge.  “We’ll get around to it,” they were told.  Alas, we never did, and now it’s a national shame.  When Prime Minister Tony Blair promised a decade ago that Britain’s child poverty rate would be cut in half in ten years, he missed it by a breath.  Canada watched his success, marveled, and then went on making money.Now, 20 years to the day, all that we’re hearing are stories of Afghan detainees.  To be sure, this has the potential to become an international embarrassment and it merits due diligence, but this country has its own detainees.  They’re young – under 12 years of age – and they number over 600,000.  Detained in poverty for two decades now, they have been tortured by hunger and want.  Reports have been written about them, detailing the abuses, but they have disappeared.  Those tabling such reports have been shunned and, in the case of protesters, mocked.  They are abandoned to their obscurity.Sadly, no one is pressing their case home because there’s no good politics in it.  Unlike the Afghan detainees, no opposition party will apply the majority of the questions in QP to them because … well, they’re not news and their issue doesn’t have the potential to topple the government.  At the moment, 27,000 First Nations children have been removed from their families and are drifting from agency to agency – a number greater than those relegated to residential schools decades ago.  They suffer in poverty and silence while the country still waits for the details of detainees half a world away.Also today, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson tabled his new legislation on curbing child pornography.  No one objects to that, but in typical Conservative fashion, the crime agenda trumps the child agenda – pornography over poverty.  And so, while one minister significantly fudges the figures and another fails to provide justice for poor children, another opportunity is inevitably lost as we prepare ourselves for years of restraint that will be required to pay off our largest deficit in history.  Say goodbye once again to the forgotten generation of children and get used to the fact that Canada’s detainees might never find their advocates in Parliament.