Poor policy

Campaign 2000 reports on the woeful lack of progress in combating child poverty in Canada:

The group's annual report says 1.2 million children in Canada – one out of six – continue to live in poverty; a rate that hasn't changed in almost 30 years.

Food banks across the country continue to do a bustling business.

In Toronto alone, 175,000 people use them every month – and it's not just the unemployed.

According to the study nearly half of all poor children, 48 per cent, live in families with working parents.

It's bad enough how little progress has been made over the past three decades. But it should be all the more shocking that this is one of the few issues where even the impending election campaign can't induce the Liberals to inject any money:

Minister of Social Development Ken Dryden says he's reviewing the problem.

"Everybody is really ready to come up with a really workable definition, a definition that the public understands and accepts, and then out of that there's a much better chance ot setting targets," he said.

The answers listed in the report itself are rather obvious, including policies such as improving access to EI and providing better funding for social housing. Not coincidentally, those are precisely the issues that have been ignored or undone throughout the Libs' term of office.

That leaves voters interested in reducing poverty with a choice between a Liberal party still interested more in arguing about definitions than taking action, or the NDP which has already forced more action in one budget than the Liberals have ever been willing to take. Hopefully after another election that gives enough added clout to the NDP, the numbers actually will change for the better.

(Deleted double post.)