Free The Truth About Canada by Mel Hurtig Page A

brief, we could raise minimum wages at least to $10 an hour to help provide a more decent standard of living for our 650,000 working poor. We could provide an earned-income supplement which takes into consideration regional cost-of-living factors. We could stop taxing people with very low incomes. We could return to a much more realistic and effective unemployment insurance program. We could stop the provincial clawbacks of child benefits and increase the supplement for low-income parents. We could develop an affordable rental housing program. We could increase social assistance benefits and expand job training. We could develop a national early-education and childcare program and provide more funds to help pay for university and college tuitions and expenses. We could substantially increase such public expenditures, which in 2004 were well below the standards of the Nordic countries, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, and Italy, both in quality and as a percentage of GDP.
    As for the Harper government’s 2006 plans for more assistance for disabled children, the media in Canada have somehow been blind to the inadequacies of the plan. Hillel Goelman, of the University of BritishColumbia, spelled it out nicely, however, in a letter to the Globe and Mail: “Tax breaks do not provide more hours of physiotherapy, tax breaks do not provide more trained, early-intervention therapists, tax breaks help only wealthy parents who have enough income that they can benefit from deductions.” 8
    Would ending the clawbacks of the national child benefit supplement (NCBS) make a difference to families on social assistance? Just under half of families who go to Toronto’s Daily Bread Food Bank say that the extra $122 a month per child would mean they would no longer have to depend on the food bank. By 2005, some 174,250 families with almost 281,000 children continued to have their welfare or child benefits clawed back by the Ontario government.
    In the summer of 2006, a new Statistics Canada study showed that only 26 percent of some $3-billion paid out by the federal government in GST rebates went to low-income families, while some of the balance went to families earning up to $100,000 or more. Once again, if this isn’t ridiculous, I don’t know what is.
    Today, all across Canada, rent eats up the vast majority of any welfare or other benefits the poor receive. The very small amount left for food, clothing, transportation, school supplies, hygienic supplies, utilities, and so on, is hopelessly inadequate.
    We should be ashamed. Very, very ashamed.

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    IMMIGRATION AND EMIGRATION
    I n 1981, Canada took in 127,000 immigrants. Ten years later, in 1991, it was 221,000, and in 2001 it was up to 253,000. In 2005, the number was up again, to over 262,000. The same year, some 36,000 emigrants left Canada, well below the 48,000 average figures for 1999 to 2001, leaving us with a large plus migration rate.
    Of the 30 OECD countries, in the period from 2000 to 2005, only Italy, Ireland, and Spain had a higher plus migration ratio than Canada. Canada’s ratio is better than such countries as the United States, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and Norway, and far ahead of such countries as Japan, Finland, France, the United Kingdom, and Belgium. Moreover, in recent years, Canada’s plus migration ratio has been increasing, from 3.8 per 1,000 in 1991, to 6 per 1,000 in 2004.
    How do immigrants to Canada compare with immigrants to other OECD countries when it comes to the percentage of all those with a post-secondary education? The answer is very well indeed. In Canada, such educated immigrants make up more than one in five of all persons with a post-secondary education. Only Luxembourg, at just over one third, and Australia, at just over one quarter, do better. Of the immigrants who arrived in Canada between 1996 and 2001, more than 52 percent had a university education, compared to the Canadian-born average of only 21