Advisory Council on the Status of Women
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2006-01-12: Poverty Issues, 2006 Federal Election
Letter to the Editor
Submitted by Jane Ledwell, PEIACSW Researcher/Policy Analyst
January 12, 2006
In the recent candidates’ forum organized by the PEI Make Poverty History campaign, the PEI Working Group for a Livable Income addressed issues of ensuring Islanders have access to livable income.
Organizers were disappointed that the Conservative Party was unable to send a candidate to the forum on poverty. However, we were grateful that the three New Democrats, two Greens, and one Liberal who attended the forum are well-known to anti-poverty groups. Each of these politicians has been present and active in their own way in addressing issues of poverty in the community and worldwide.
While the focus of “Make Poverty History” nationally has been on ending “child poverty” in Canada, the PEI committee rejects the phrase “child poverty.” Children are poor because their families are poor. The federal government has a role to play in overcome poverty among families and individuals in our community.
We’ve been hearing a great deal in national debates from Mr. Harper of the Conservatives and even Mr. Layton of the NDP about supporting “working families.” This begs the question: what does each party really mean when it talks about “work”? There is a great deal of socially and economically important work going on in Prince Edward Island that must be valued and requires ongoing support — work of caring for children and elders, work of environmental stewardship, volunteer work in communities, work of maintaining families and households.
Islanders take pride in this traditionally non-paid work — as much pride as they take in paid work. Studies have shown that the way that Islanders survive on the lowest wages in the country is through strong social support networks built on the community connections that rely on non-paid work.
For this reason, in addition to ensuring well-paying meaningful employment for Islanders, the federal government must also have a plan to value and support socially important and economically necessary non-paid work. This must be valued and supported through programs such as caregiving supports (including childcare), through healthcare programs that address the social determinants of health (including income and social inclusion), through EI that truly meets the needs of workers (especially seasonal workers), and that supports families with appropriate child tax credits and other benefits.
While we are hearing a commitment from parties to restore some of the funding that was taken out of health and social transfers, we are not hearing a commitment from mainline parties to reinstate national standards and conditions that used to ensure that money sent to the provinces for health and social services were spent on social services.
At the forum, Liberal candidate for Charlottetown, Shawn Murphy, commented on the provincial clawback of the child tax credit in PEI. The Working Group for a Livable Income affirms that we need to move beyond wrangling between federal and provincial governments about responsibilities. We need, as a community, to give a clear and strong mandate to politicians to collaborate across jurisdictions and across parties to eliminate poverty in all of Canada.
We are still not hearing from the main-line parties any long-term thinking that would lead to appropriate, environmentally and socially sustainable development that looks beyond the next election and that helps ensure that young people can stay in their communities in every part of PEI and still find good-paying jobs. We hope the Conservative and Liberal parties will find ways to incorporate ideas being expressed by the New Democrats and the Greens — who wholeheartedly support the goals of the Make Poverty History campaign — and to collaborate with Canadians who can imagine solutions to the crisis of poverty in Canada and the world.
This information has been taken from www.gov.pe.ca