It’s a sad state of affairs when one of the fastest-growing institutions in Canada are food banks. According to a Toronto Star editorial, now more than 330,000 Ontarians (80,000 in Toronto alone) rely on food banks (including 100,000 children).
By the same token, according to the Financial Times, the richest 2% of people in the world hold over half of the world’s assets. Moreover, the poorest half of the world holds just 1% of the world’s assets.
It raises the question: Is a wealth country one with the most rich or the fewest poor? In the Anglo-American world, it appears a wealthy country is defined by the most rich people, while places like Scandinavia take the opposite approach — that they are affluent only when there are few poor people. How else can we explain the unprecedented wealth AND the unprecedented levels of poverty living side-by-side in the Anglo-American world? For that chance to make it in the top 2%, public policies in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland, Australia and New Zealand have ignored the growing problem of child poverty. Compare the rates of child poverty — defined as < 50% of the median national income -- in the Anglo-American world (from Unicef's "Child Poverty in Rich Countries, 2005"):
United States -- 21.9%
New Zealand -- 16.3%
Ireland -- 15.7%
— Median — 15.6%
United Kingdom — 15.4%
Canada — 14.9%
Australia — 14.7%
with the Scandinavian countries:
Denmark — 2.4%
Finland — 2.8%
— Median — 3.1%
Norway — 3.4%
Sweden — 4.2%
The incidence of child poverty is five times greater in the Anglo-American world than in Scandinavia.