Poorer families get poorer says CCSD report on children. (Children & Families).

OTTAWA -- More Canadian children are living in large urban centres and increasingly more are living in single parent families says a released report by the Canadian Council on Social Development.

Further, the disparity in income growth between wealthy and middle class and low income families jumped significantly. Noting that "in Canada, the rich families continue to get richer, and poor families continue to get poorer" the report says that between 1984 and 1999 the average net wealth of the top 20 percent of couples with children increased by 43 percent while income of middle income families grew only by 3 percent. But alarmingly for families whose income is at the bottom of the income scale their income dropped by more than 51 percent in the same time frame.

In a wide ranging report, The Progress of Canada's Children, which is based on a survey of Canadian provinces and territones, the CCSD reported on child poverty, safety of children in neighbourhoods, access to education, recreation and health services and housing. (Link to the report at our website: communityaction.ca)

By 2000 almost 64 percent of all children and youth under 20 years of age lived in large urban centres compared to 54 percent in 1994. At the same time, immigration of children increased by 13 percent from 1990 and 56 percent of those children belonged to a visible minority. As well, about two out of every three children who immigrated between 1997 and 1999 could neither speak English nor French, this at a time when schools are increasingly facing the loss of English as a Second Language program.

In Ontario, the number of schools with ESL program declined from 58 percent to 40 percent between 1997/98 and 2001 and 2002.

The report stressed that children who live in persistent poverty are less likely to be included in societal aspects that are critical to their growth and development. For instance, they are twice as likely to live in a dysfunctional family or to live with violence. In addition, they are three times as likely to live with a depressed parent.

Recreation is also out of the reach of many of these children with only half of them participating in recreation at least once a week as opposed to three quarters of children who have never been poor.

Although child poverty has dropped in Canada in 1999 to 18.5 percent down from 21.3 percent in 1993, this rate is still an increase from 15.2 percent in 1989 when the report notes that parliament passed a resolution to eliminate poverty among children by 2000.

Meanwhile in provinces with strong economic growth, such as Ontario and Alberta, child poverty has fallen to its lowest levels in the country but the depth of poverty is higher than in most other provinces. The report attributes this discrepancy to "deep cuts made to social assistance rates in both of those provinces."

In other areas, more families are paying more than 30 percent of their pre-tax income on housing while 21,000 more families experienced hunger than in 1994 for a total of 75,000 in 1996.