HALIFAX, NS –Twenty-one years ago (in 1989), the government of Canada promised to end child poverty by the year 2000. In 2000, not only had they not kept the promise - the child poverty rate was even higher. Today, ten years after the goal date, the broken promise remains.
Children and youth
On Wednesday, September 29th the CCPA–MB launched its latest report at the Freight House. The launch was part of a one-day conference entitled “Building Positive Relationships” organized by the Coalition of Community-Based Youth-Serving Agencies (CCBYSA).
This research report provides an overview of the ‘state of youth’ in Winnipeg communities by addressing two main questions: What are the issues that youth in Winnipeg face? What are the difficulties youth-serving agencies encounter when helping the populations of youth they serve?
During the G20 ministerial meetings in Toronto, the sensational images of burning police cruiser cars and broken shop windows dominated the newspaper headlines. This is what the world saw.
What I saw in Toronto was radically different.
Three weeks ago, a 19-year-old from Winnipeg’s inner city shot two teenagers. Our city government’s response was to send in more police officers. But incarceration and tougher sentences do not tackle the root causes of crime: poverty and inequality. On the other hand, if inner city youth had the kind of access to educational and recreational activities that suburban youth did, they would not be committing these crimes.
For the past ten years Manitoba has been mapping unchartered territory in an effort to transform a child welfare system that will better serve the needs of children and families. In particular, through the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry – Child Welfare Initiative a new governance structure was developed to address Manitoba’s very poor track record of serving the Aboriginal children and families who are vastly overrepresented in the child welfare system.
Imagine a Canada where we all have a roof over our heads, childcare for our children, access to education and a job that pays a decent wage. Imagine a Canada where we all can look forward to retiring without financial worry.
“Anti-Racism in Education: Missing In Action, a book I am glad to be part of, addresses needs across the educational spectrum, from primary school up to and including university, and addresses quite directly the link to our workplaces and to ongoing issues of societal and institutional racism. It also looks at the relationship between education and other systems in which racialized and Aboriginal peoples face on-going challenges, e.g., children’s aid societies and law enforcement.
Why are some people, and more particularly some groupings of people, healthier than others? A large part of the answer depends on a range of variables that have little to do with life-style choices like smoking, diet, and exercise, and nothing at all to do with the bio-medical approach to health — medicines, hospitals, forms of surgery, and so on. It has been shown definitively that our health is shaped by our living conditions, the economic and social conditions of our lives.