Sins of a Nation

By Melissa Volker

For twenty dollars per month through the Childreach Foundation, my husband and I could sponsor a child in India. However, recently I’ve struggled with the seeming moral dilemma of sponsoring a child in another country when there are children who live in poverty in our own nation. This internal struggle is intense, prompting feelings of inadequacy (we aren’t doing enough) and wrongdoing (I should take care of my own community first.). But then something struck me – the issue becomes not so much that we might sponsor a child in India versus a child in Canada; the issue that surfaces is that a child in one of the most affluent countries in the world actually needs our twenty dollars.

According to Child and Family Canada (CFC), the child poverty rate in Canada is second only to the United States when compared to seventeen other industrialized nations. And compared to 1989, 68% more children now live in families that need social assistance. 44% more children live in families of unemployed adults. The CFC has directly linked unemployment to the rates of poverty, leaving children at the mercy of the ever-changing instability of the job market and training programs for their parents or guardians. A child under the age of eighteen has a greater chance of being poor than an adult in Canada.

Research has proven the necessity and benefits of a healthy start for children and so $600,000 of the 1997/98 federal budget has been dedicated as the beginning funds for a new benefit program, National Child Benefit (NCB). But this is only a beginning. Although the Government of Canada set the year 2000 as a target date for eliminating child poverty, not only has that deadline been missed, the child poverty rate has risen by 50% since that commitment was made in 1989. For the last seven years, child poverty rates along with unemployment levels have been rising at the same time Canada experienced significant cuts to federal spending on important services in health, social assistance and post-secondary education.

These children did not ask to be born into poverty nor to take turns eating breakfast or live without plumbing. We champion the unconditional support to children of other less developed nations, those obviously lacking the resources we are so lucky to have, but with our own children, there are strings attached. The issue may be tied up in politics and beaurocracy, but in the meantime, children are forced to live unhealthily or in hunger. The bottom line is that the bickering and political refusal to constructively intervene perpetuates a miserable condition for children caught in the crossfire.

Children in this country go hungry. Children in this country are without proper clothing, shelter, and basic human care. That should be all anyone needs to know.

Yes, we could opt to sponsor a child in our own country rather than a child in India, and perhaps we still will. But the real problem remains larger than our choices of sponsorship. The real problem remains the fact that no child in a country as economically sound and politically enlightened as ours should be in need of a twenty-dollar sponsorship. We should be ashamed of communal neglect of our children.

It is time to stop making excuses and empty promises. This is an epidemic as serious and rampant as any disease. As Bill Bradley, candidate for the United States Presidency, likes to ask: "If not now, when? If not us, who?"

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