MARGARET PHILP
The Globe and Mail; Source: Unicef
Tuesday, June 13, 2000

Canada lands near the bottom in a new ranking of child poverty in the world's richest nations.

With 15.5 per cent of its children considered poor, Canada won the dubious distinction of ranking No. 17 among 23 industrialized nations in the first such report by the United Nations Children's Fund on an issue plaguing the developed world.

One out of every six children -- a total of 47 million people -- in the world's wealthiest countries are living in what the Unicef report calls relative poverty, measured as the percentage of households in a country with incomes less than half the national median.

At the bottom of the heap is Mexico, with 26.2 per cent of its children living in poverty, followed by the United States, with 22.4 per cent regarded as poor.

Sweden led the world in the fight against child poverty with a rate of just 2.6 per cent, reaping the rewards of two decades of social-welfare programs aimed at closing the gap between rich and poor and a long tradition of generous family-leave provisions.

Close on its heels were the other Nordic nations, all champions of redistributing wealth among their populations, with child-poverty rates less than a third of Canada's.

"If only for very selfish reasons, we should care about child poverty, and we should care a lot," said Unicef Canada executive director René De Grace.

"The cost of not investing in kids is translated into some of the worst situations we find in our countries, like crime, early drop-outs, early pregnancy for young women, low education and the perpetuation of poverty."

One of the report's most striking findings is that single parenthood is not the recipe for poverty in other industrialized nations that it is in Canada.

A little more than half of single parents in Canada live in poverty, and lone mothers constitute by far the biggest share of welfare rolls in provinces across the country. But in many other developed countries with comparable numbers of children living with single parents, the child-poverty rates are a fraction of the level reported in Canada.

While the same proportion of children are being raised by single parents in Finland as in Canada -- about 12 per cent -- the poverty rate among Finnish children sits at just 4.3 per cent.

"In Canada, if we were to tackle the situation of children living in lone-parent families, we could have as much as a 30-per-cent impact on the reduction of the number of children living in poverty, which is very substantial," Mr. De Grace said.

"What that tells me is we have hope to be able to make a positive impact on the situation of child poverty in Canada. All we have to do is find out what they did in Finland and Sweden and Norway, and I'm sure we could apply that to make a big difference quickly."

Part of the story is social expenditures such as publicly funded child care and tax breaks. On the whole, the report found, countries that invest more of their gross national products in social programs reported lower rates of child poverty.

In Finland, the number of children living in poverty is a quarter of the level that it would be without the influence of tax breaks and other social programs.

While child poverty in the industrialized world looks nothing like the slums and filth of developing countries, the sons of Kali Tsimidis, 40, a single mother raising two of her four children on an income of $16,500 a year in Toronto, suffer their own kind of deprivation.

Ms. Tsimidis left her abusive husband years ago, returning from the United States to her native Canada with no high-school diploma and years spent as a housewife. She had little choice but to turn to the welfare system for the money to raise her four boys.

A few years ago, she returned to school and is now studying for a social-work degree at Ryerson Polytechnic University, racking up tens of thousands of dollars in student loans.

On her budget, she can ill afford the stylish clothes her boys' teenaged friends are wearing. After school, her sons, aged 12 and 14, go straight home while their friends head for the corner store with their pockets full of money to buy pop and chips. Ms. Tsimidis curses when the next-door neighbours are barbecuing because the aroma of cooked meat she simply cannot afford wafts in the window to her salivating children.

With no spare change, one of her sons is about to miss a school trip this week to the Wonderland amusement park north of Toronto.

"He can't go. He called me from school and said, 'Mom, I want to go.' And I don't have $20," she said, bursting into tears.

"My kids know they're not like their friends. Why can't my kids get a new outfit? Why can't my kids go on class trips? Why can't my kids go to the movies? It's not right that my children should be penalized because society says I'm unworthy of support."

Measuring poverty is fraught with controversy, and the report goes to great lengths to defend a barometer of child poverty that identifies being poor in a developed country as quite different than poverty in the Third World.

The report, prepared by Unicef's Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, regards poverty as a relative state that describes people whose incomes and lifestyles lag far behind the average in the society where they live.

The Unicef measure rejects the way poverty is calculated in both the United States and Canada, where someone is considered poor if they can scarcely afford the necessities of life.

Widely regarded as the country's unofficial poverty line, Statistics Canada's Low-income Cut-off considers people poor if they spend more than 55 per cent of their income on food, shelter and clothing, a level that pegs Canada's rate of child poverty at close to one in five.

CHILDREN IN POVERTY