“You’ll be happy to know Mom passed away.” This was the first sentence in an e-mail to Alex Campbell, a 28-year-old homeless Ottawa man on Nov.1, from his sister.
A month later, outside of Sheperd’s of Good Hope, Campbell rustles in his parka pocket for a cigarette in the dark.
Campbell was angry for years with this mother who was unable to provide a stable home for him due to poverty and addiction issues.
He kicks at the ground and stares at his feet as he speaks.
“Of course, I miss her now that she’s dead, but missing her has been the constant in my life since I was four years old,” he says.
Campbell says he grew up in extreme poverty in rural Nova Scotia. He comes from a single-mother household and although his mother initially worked a full-time job for minimum wage, it wasn’t enough.
He says the stress of never having enough food or enough money to pay for daycare further perpetuated his mother’s love affair with drugs and alcohol.
By the time he was four, her addiction and lack of ability to provide for him landed him in the child welfare system.
Campbell’s story isn’t unique in Canada.
One in nine Canadian children, more than a million, live below the poverty line, according to the 2008 Report Card on Child and Family Poverty in Canada.
As if that fact isn’t despicable enough, 15 years ago, the Canadian government resolved to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000.
Nine years later, nothing has changed. The rate of child poverty has remained at 12 per cent for two decades now, according to Statistics Canada.
Why has Canada, one of the richest countries in the world, not improved the living conditions for children when countries such as Finland, Sweden and Denmark have almost wiped out child poverty completely?
Laurel Rothman , the national coordinator of Campaign 2000, a national coalition committed to ending poverty in Canada, says there have been obvious factors that have hindered Canada’s ability to reduce child poverty rates.
She says the lack of low-cost housing programs, low minimum wages and failure to implement a national child-care program contributes to high child poverty rates.
Rothman says the lack of focus on key target groups for poverty have only perpetuated the problem. such as single mothers, Aboriginal families, and immigrant families.
In particular, the government’s lack of ability to lessen poverty in Aboriginal communities has contributed to the poverty rate.
A Statistics Canada report confirmed that there are several challenges that aboriginal children face in Canada in relation to poverty.
According to the report, one aboriginal child in eight is disabled, double the rate of all children in Canada.
Almost half of aboriginal children under 15 years old residing in urban areas live with a single parent and close to 100 First Nations communities must boil their water. Of all off-reserve aboriginal children, 40 per cent live in poverty.
Rothman says she agrees that while not enough has been done to reach the target groups, progress has been made in some areas.
Upon not eliminating poverty by the 20th anniversary of the resolution, The House of Commons passed a motion at the end last month to develop an immediate plan to eliminate poverty once and for all.
Rothman says individual provinces have also adopted poverty reduction strategies. Quebec, Newfoundland, Ontario, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and New Brunswick also have poverty reduction plans.
Although she says this is all encouraging, it will be a push from the feds that will be responsible for improving the child poverty rates in Canada.
Campbell says that if these things had been implemented while his mother was struggling to raise him, it would have made a big difference.
He says that most importantly, if his mother hadn’t been struggling in poverty he may have been able to avoid being sent into the child welfare system.
This is a fate too many Canadian children face when their parents are losing the battle against poverty, says Rothman.
Campbell says that no matter how pathetic his mothers’s ability to provide for him was, regardless of how she struggled with her addictions, he desperately wanted to belong to a family in her home.
“I bounced from foster to group homes and I was a perpetual run-away, because I was always running to find her, hoping she had changed,” he says.
She never did.
Campbell was sexually and physically abused in several of his foster homes.
Since leaving the system he has battled drug addiction, self-esteem issues, and homelessness.
He says the last time he saw his mother he screamed at her that her inability to provide for him and his impoverished upbringing caused all of his problems and he hoped she would die for what he had caused him.
“None of the pain I’ve lived through amounts to what I feel when I think of my last words to her,” he says.
Now that he's grown up he says he realizes that it wasn’t her fault.
"The government failed us and there were so little supports for our family. If I failed as an adult, I failed alone,” he says as he puts out his cigarette with his sneaker and prepares to join the long line-up of other people waiting to enter the building with equally scuffed shoes and empty stomachs.