Liberalism - Not So Lovely After All
I don’t care what political stripe you are from, or even if you’re not political at all. It’s likely that for all of us, our greatest hopes and dreams rest upon our children. We sacrifice for their peace, education, health and their future. Yet a great society is bigger than your kids, or mine. As Nelson Mandela put it a few years ago: “There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” We best be careful, for behind our commitment to our own personal offspring lies a sad truth about our wavering commitment to Canada’s children in general.The House of Commons unanimously voted in 1989 to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000. I was there that day as a food bank observer, and I picked up that the mood in the chamber in those moments prior to the vote was more serious than merely emotional. Every single member from every party voted to get that job done. By 2006, the rates of child poverty had in fact increased. I was so fed up with successive federal governments and our burgeoning foodbank numbers that I opted to run for Parliament to at least fight the issue on the front lines.Except there are no front lines. Child poverty is a vague issue in the House, with the exception of key champions like Tony Martin (NDP), Mike Savage (Liberal), and Yves Lessard (Bloc). If it weren’t for the voices of these courageous souls, the plight of our poor children would be merely a sentimental journey.The federal silence is all the more perplexing because of the recent strides made by six provinces and one territory to endorse plans meant to eliminate or reduce poverty.Carol Goar of the Toronto Star wrote of a press conference headed by the late Jane Callwood and child poverty activists. Attendance was dismal:
Only four journalists showed up. The pile of press kits sat pathetically on the table. The childcare and church leaders who gathered for the event tried to hide their disappointment. Callwood asked how countries such as Hungary and Poland – which ranked 25th and 28th on the global wealth scale – can afford to treat their children better than Canada. Callwood’s colleague, Rabbi Arthur Bielfeld, sad, ‘I believe in the decency of Canadian society, but I’m becoming increasingly restive. We are not responding to the despair around us. We’re not the lovely people we think we are.’ “
Yet it was at the federal policy level that all the hoopla was made and it is on our federal parties that much of the blame must be placed. The great promise made over two decades ago now hangs around our necks like an albatross, largely because the poverty levels haven’t budged much in that time and few sounded the alarm that we were sliding into a tacit acceptance of a troubling reality nobody really desired. To quote Mandela again: “Like slavery and apartheid, poverty is not natural. It is man-made and it can be eradicated by the actions of human beings.”But, again, it’s not – it lingers and condemns us as a people with each passing year. Let’s just put in on the table in all honesty. We are not ignorant of the fact that 16% of our children are living in poverty. That’s some 1.2 million kids – a number that doesn’t include aboriginal children. When the pollsters and researchers ask us to rank child poverty as a serious issue to be dealt with, we actually respond by placing it above tax relief and job security. Yet we don’t really vote that way, choosing instead to punish any party or its leader for suggesting an early learning and childcare program (which experts say would be a key component to reducing child poverty), or applying a slight increase in taxes in order to target this lingering sore. That’s up to the citizenry, naturally, but it does contradict what we say in the polling.Sure, there’s plenty of blame to go around here, but the reality is that our belief in the children of Canada does not extend far enough to trouble our present existence. We are comfortable, even knowing that over a million kids aren’t. We have accepted this reality – for decades – and we are not calling on our governments to reverse it or to accept the remedial actions required to lift Canada’s kids our of their poverty. There’s no point in denying it, because if we wanted it eradicated, it would be. We are an advanced democracy and the amount of wealth in this country is staggering. Yet … nothing.The initial promise concerning child poverty was non-partisan, and now its relentless presence among us is also non-partisan – all parties have ignored it at the country’s peril. Small “l” liberals in this land simply can’t accept this cancer any longer. It undercuts our heritage and hinders our progress. If it’s true that citizens aren't so lovely after all, then we have some serious work to do in challenging this generation, and ourselves, to live up to our promise.