The Globe and Mail has an op-ed by Ed Broadbent on Canada’s poverty and child poverty record, asking why we’re becoming more unequal and failing to live up to our own expectations when it comes to poverty reduction.  His answer: Tax the rich.  Taxes are a means not only of supporting public programs, but also are a means of distributing wealth and power in accordance with democratic and social values.  If one part of society gets too much power this power can be abused and used to concentrate power even more.  Taxes are one way to keep the balance of power and wealth intact, an essential ingredient for stable democracy.

Why is it that Finland, Sweden and Denmark have almost wiped out child poverty, and we have not? Why do more than 600,000 Canadian kids wake up hungry and go to school trying to read, write and think on an empty stomach?

First, we should have no illusions about where our poor children are to be found. Most are in families with two adults. Most poor adults work. Most of them have incomes so low that they can’t afford housing and can’t adequately feed or clothe their kids. If kids are members of aboriginal or immigrant Canadian families, the odds are even much greater that they will be poor.

Second, this poverty was not inevitable. Mostly it is the product of governments that have neither shared nor cared. As a Unicef report last Friday pointed out, Canadian politicians have failed our children. During the 1990s, the federal government abandoned a leadership role for Canada’s poor. It unilaterally cancelled the Canada Assistance Plan with the provinces, eliminated all low-cost housing programs, ceased to set the pattern for minimum wages and failed to bring in a national child-care program. Perhaps most serious and unbelievable of all, it exacerbated the inequality that was emerging in the marketplace by changing the income-tax system to the advantage of the richest Canadians.