AFN leader challenges governments to deal with child poverty and despair in First Nations
Canadian aboriginal chief decries child poverty
OTTAWA, November 23, 2009 — Canadian aboriginal children are being raised in "extreme poverty," the nation's top chief lamented Monday, two decades after parliament voted unanimously to eradicate child poverty.
"Today, far too many of our First Nations children live in extreme poverty and all its ugly manifestations," said National Chief Shawn Atleo of the Assembly of First Nations.
"The tragic circumstances faced by indigenous peoples on a daily basis, from high suicide and incarceration rates, to missing and murdered women and children, are all rooted in poverty and despair," he said in a statement.
Two decades after a parliament passed a motion to end child poverty in Canada by the year 2000, Atleo pressed the government to take measures to ensure "access to breakfast programs and affordable healthy food so that no child goes to school hungry."
He urged Ottawa to also fund better education and economic development in aboriginal communities, and implement treaties and pacts to stabilize funding "so that every community has good homes, good schools, and clean drinking water."
According to the latest statistics from 2007, cited in the daily Globe and Mail, 637,000 or 9.5 percent of children in Canada live in poverty. The primary reasons are unemployment and single parent families struggling to make ends meet