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House Hansard - 167

44th Parl. 1st Sess.
March 9, 2023 10:00AM
Context: House Hansard - 167 - Mar/9/23
Ms. Elizabeth May (Saanich—Gulf Islands, GP)
  • Mar/9/23 6:46:49 p.m.
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Madam Speaker, it is an honour to rise this evening in Adjournment Proceedings to pick up on a question I asked on the occasion of World Children's Day. On the closest opportunity to that day, I asked the hon. minister responsible for children and families whether the government was finally making any progress toward creating, at the federal level, a position to advocate for the rights of children. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child is under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Canada has signed on to and which most countries have signed on to. Since 1989, virtually the entire world has committed. Strangely enough, not the United States, but most countries around the world have adopted the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I pointed out that the committee that oversees that convention has been asking Canada for some time when we plan to fulfill one of our obligations, which is to create a position within the government that advocates for the rights of the child and that oversees, monitors and promotes the well-being of children: a children's advocate. Since I first asked that question in November of last year, Canada lost one of our most extraordinary advocates for children. Senator Landon Pearson, whom I had the honour to know and work with, passed away. She was perennially, in the other place, making the same points I am making here tonight: that Canada is letting down our children and that we need to have an advocate for children at the federal level. People may ask “Why?” and say that Canadian children are doing great. We do not know, if we do not advocate and if we do not collect data. I found fairly recent statistics, from last year, 2022, in a report called the “KidsRights Index”. Because I am a proud Canadian, I like it when we rate really high, so I immediately looked up the top 10 countries in the world. The top is Iceland; second, Sweden; third, Finland; fourth, Netherlands. I will not keep going, because we were not in the top 10. We were not in the top 20. We were not in the top 30. We rank, in the world community, at number 48 in terms of measurable commitments and measurable achievements to ensure the rights of the child. What are the rights of the child? They are the rights to life, to health, to education, to protection from harm and to enjoying an enabling environment that supports them as they grow. One would think that Canadian children must be pretty well off because Canada is an industrialized society that is wealthy. A recent report on poverty among Canadian children found that thanks to the CERB, the special COVID benefits, poverty in Canadian children dropped by 40% when the CERB was reaching families. However, even with that, we had a million Canadian children living in poverty. Globally, 1.1 billion children live in poverty. We are not doing what must be done. In the wake of the pandemic, we see increasing mental health issues for our children. We know we need to do more. What progress is being made for the rights of the children?
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