LET’S MAKE POVERTY AN ISSUE

Damning statistics on poverty give Canada a shameful black eye: 19 per cent of children, nearly one in five, live in poverty. An estimated 40 per cent of indigenous children live in poverty. It should be the biggest issue of this federal election campaign. It is not.

Edmonton’s Food Bank released figures last week showing the number of people served monthly rose to 15,580 this year, up from 13,687 per month in 2013. The 14-per-cent increase is much higher than the city’s population growth. While the city’s aboriginal population is about five per cent of the total, it makes up 34 per cent of food-bank users. Equally disturbing, 40 per cent of food bank users are children; 66 per cent are women. Many rely on less than $25,000 annually to house and feed their children.

Survey results released in July revealed many Edmonton teachers and school staff are handing out emergency food regularly to hungry students — food from their own lunches. Mark Ramsankar, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said, “I think we need to address the root issue, which is child poverty in Alberta.”

Mayor Don Iveson and city council last week embraced a report with 28 recommendations from End Poverty Edmonton, a task force of 18 community leaders Iveson called together to end poverty in a generation. It’s a huge challenge, with local stats showing 100,000 Edmontonians living below the poverty line, of whom about 30 per cent are children.

Heading the task force, Anglican Bishop Jane Alexander said, “Poverty puts bonds around people and it’s our collective ability to release them.”

The Edmonton Community Foundation is to be congratulated for leading the way by offering $1 million in matching grants for anti-poverty initiatives and at least $10 million toward programs in such areas as social housing.

Edmonton Catholic trustees were recently chastised for mishandling the issue of transgender students — a hot-button topic that stirred widespread outrage. Child poverty warrants that same intense concern from all of us. This isn’t a problem we can off-load, either to provincial social services or a federal department that deals with aboriginal matters. .

In poverty, there are no colours; only indignity and pain. A local Anglican priest, who ministers to destitute inner-city residents, says poverty has become a new ethnicity because there’s little difference between a poor aboriginal, a poor white person and a poor African immigrant. Rev. Travis Enright issued a call for faith communities to work together and resume the important role they played five or six decades ago, before government agencies took over, to restore hope and humanity to Edmonton’s poorest people.

Too often the city’s suburbanites try to keep poverty at a distance, as though it’s contagious. But there is no poverty-free bubble. By virtue of our shared humanity, we are touched by the lives of fellow Edmonton residents who fail to thrive in the local economy. The mayor’s task force has produced concrete and practical proposals that should prod all Edmonton’s caring citizens to do their part.

Governments can do much to lift families out of the cycle of poverty. The current federal election campaign is an opportunity to ask candidates about their plans to create a better future.

Our poverty rate is shameful. Among 34 developed countries, Canada sits in 24th place. If that isn’t an issue with the people who want our vote, let’s make it one with just under three weeks left in a long campaign.

In poverty, there are no colours; only indignity and pain.