Guhn – eliminating child poverty

Having done this research now for a while coming to a social determinants of health research environment here at UBC and having worked in this field for many years the one thing that strikes me, I think stronger and stronger as I go along, is the universal presence of a very, very strong socioeconomic gradient of health. And it brings up questions about equity and fairness in our society. If you live in Vancouver, and I guess it’s the same for some other places within Canada, historically and geographically speaking we’re living in a time of plenty, on average. But we also live in times where child poverty rates are terrifyingly high. There are twenty percent, plus minus depending on how you do the counting, in BC and also in the same ballpark in other provinces. And the question is how do we as a society allow that one in five children live in poverty because we know what the dire consequences are when you look at long term consequences of poverty in terms of disrupted – sometimes – sleep patterns, access to nutrition, exposure to environmental pollutants and there’s a whole sequence that’s associated – it’s not necessarily causally determined by poverty – but it’s associated with it. You look at some populations in single parent families, sixty percent of those children live in poverty and the poverty rates for aboriginal children are absolutely shocking and the question is if we look at the values you ask any Canadian on the street and ask, “What’s one of your values?” and they’ll say equity and fairness. But that’s not the society in which we live. But we do have all the resources we need to make this a more equitable society. So one of the underlying fundamental goals of our work is to shine the light on the inequity that we see and to motivate people to take action on it because there’s a lot that can be done. Denmark has basically eliminated childhood poverty. They’re not richer than Canada as a country, they’re not smarter than Canadians but they have a history of looking at policy decisions that said “we want to eliminate childhood poverty” and they have done it and there’s no reason for Canada not to do that. So I hope that by keep pushing, keep shining a light on inequity and the consequences for us as a society, whether it’s the well-being of children right now, which is really, really important, but also the long term consequences of living up – living – growing up in those kinds of experience, how detrimental they are for our society, so that’s my main hope with this type of work.