Your help is urgently needed to make a break-through on poverty in Canada.
Please support the report – urging the federal government to take action to implement the main recommendation of the Standing Committee’s report – Federal Poverty Reduction Plan: Working in Partnership Towards Reducing Poverty in Canada, which is to establish a federal poverty reduction plan.
Make Poverty History has contributed and pushed for this report, now we must make its recommendations a reality.
This report, Federal Poverty Reduction Plan: Working in Partnership Towards Reducing Poverty in Canada, (the HUMA Report), is the result of an extensive three-year study on the federal role in addressing poverty by the Parliamentary Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development (HUMA).
They support the key goals of the Dignity for All campaign by recommending that the federal government immediately commit to a federal action plan to reduce poverty in Canada.
Key components of a poverty reduction plan the committee recommends the federal government take action on include:
- Raising the Canada Child Tax Benefit and supplement to $5000 within 5 years;
- A long-term national housing and homelessness strategy;
- Measures to help the most vulnerable – a refundable Disability Tax Credit, easing EI (Employment Insurance) qualifications, increasing adult literacy, increasing and indexing GIS (Guaranteed Income Supplement) for seniors, implementing an early learning and child care strategy; and
- Major help for Aboriginal People for housing, education and social services, including elimination of the two per cent cap on federal funding.
There is an urgent call to action for Canadians to show their support for a federal poverty reduction plan by March 10, 2011.
We have been informed that the Federal government is currently considering setting up an agency to look at a federal poverty plan and that is why the March 10, 2011 date is critical.
The Canadian facts on national poverty are as follows.
In Canada right now:
- One in ten children is poor.
- Canada’s child poverty rate of 15 percent is three times as high as the rates of Sweden, Norway or Finland.
- Every month, 770,000 people in Canada use food banks. Forty percent of those relying on food banks are children. These statistics point to a betrayal of Canada’s children.
What makes the persistence of child poverty all the more disturbing is that Canada is such a resource-rich country. It doesn’t have to be this way. All children should have the chance to meet their potential.
Please send a message now to the government that we need immediate action to end poverty in Canada. And send a copy of your message to your Member of Parliament asking her/him to support the recommendations in the HUMA Report.