Since 1999, Nova Scotia Child Poverty Report Cards have recorded changes in child poverty rates to track progress on the government of Canada’s 1989 promise to end child poverty by the year 2000. This year’s report card examines the period 1989 to 2011 (the year for which the most recent data is available), and uncovers some troubling trends: child poverty rates are still higher for children under six, and for children living in female lone-parent families.
Children and youth
Our infographic, based on the Nova Scotia Child Poverty Report Card 2013, takes a revealing look at child and family poverty across Nova Scotia.
(Click the image to enlarge)
Halifax—In 2011, there were still 29,000 children living in poverty in Nova Scotia, twenty-two years after the House of Commons pledged to eliminate poverty for children in Canada by the year 2000. This represents 17.3% of all children and is the fifth highest rate in Canada. Indeed, the province has made very little progress towards reducing child poverty compared to 1989 when 18.0% of Nova Scotian children were living in low-income families.
"There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul," Nelson Mandela says, "than the way in which it treats its children."
Who would disagree? Yet today children may be assaulted, diseased, or killed by pervasive corporate drugs, junk foods and beverages, perverted by mindless violence in multiple modes, deployed as dead-end labour with no benefits, and then dumped into a corporate future of debt enslavement and meaningless work.
In July 2013, Erika Shaker, Director of CCPA's Education Project, was invited to deliver a lecture at the 2013 Summer Institute—an intensive, two-week, interdisciplinary workshop that invites undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral fellows or doctoral recipients with an interest in youth-related research to work collaboratively with major researchers and public intellectuals to generate new scholarship and innovative modes of public communication related to the research theme.
On September 19, Manitoba launched an on-line consultation on the province’s next multi-year plan for childcare. Since 2002, Manitoba has had two five-year plans, each of which made incremental changes. A major redesign of childcare is long overdue. In 1890, the province began building public education, moving past one-room schoolhouses to create a public school system. The same transformation needs to happen today for childcare.
More than 10 years after its creation, although it has a government, policies and legislation in place which officially attempt to support Inuktitut, Nunavut lacks two essential features of any sustainable society: the protection of its language, and its own education system.
Doctors are demonstrating their ethical duty to patients by working towards a society in which everyone has an opportunity to lead a healthy life.
"We bear the expectation of providing resources for families involved in child welfare without having a place at the child welfare table." – CCN.
From bad to worse: our infographic reveals Indigenous and non-Indigenous child poverty rates across Canada, based on our study Poverty or Prosperity: Indigenous children in Canada.