On September 30, 1990, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney addressed the World Summit for Children, of which he was co-chairman, at the United Nations in New York. The event climaxed 18 months of work by over 30 Canadian non-governmental organizations, much of it at the expense of taxpayers whose opinion had not been sought, but who would certainly bear the cost of the consequences.

Sure enough, the next day, in Ottawa, the Mulroney government announced the establishment, within the department of National Health and Welfare, of a central children’s bureau. Its purpose is to coordinate federal policies on children and to ensure that “the need to respect children’s special needs is recognized at all times.”

Papers presented beforehand by the umbrella group—the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children—expressed gratitude to two government departments for their contribution, while Canada’s spiffy summit brochure—Children of Canada, Children of the World—was acknowledged to be “a collaborative effort involving many departments and agencies of the Government of Canada.”

The Canadian Coalition acts “as a collective advocate for children and monitors the role Canada plays vis-à-vis its own children and children abroad.” It was established to monitor the signing and ratification by Canada of the U.N. General Assembly’s Convention on the Rights of the Child, an aim that was partly achieved on May 18, 1990, when Brian Mulroney signed it.

There are two stages. Signing implies a commitment to review the U.N. documents and compare them to the signing country’s own laws. Ratification, which is expected by Canada early in 1991, binds the ratifying country to abide by the U.N. Convention under international law. (In order that a U.N. Convention can be entered into international law, it must be ratified by at least 20 countries. This was achieved for the children’s rights convention by September 1990.) At the time of this writing, 61 countries had both signed and ratified, 72 had signed but not ratified, and the United States had “initialed” it but neither signed nor ratified.

When Canada ratifies, it will bind itself to comply with the articles (there are 54) of the U.N. Convention, which applies to “every human being below the age of eighteen years”—unless local laws establish majority earlier—and covers a full range of rights: nondiscrimination, rights to life and identity, the basic freedoms, access to health care and education, and protection from economic exploitation.

To back this up—and to fill in the details of the ratifying countries’ commitment—the U.N. issued a Plan of Action for national governments. Among its requirements:

—increase development finance for debtor countries;—create a more open and equitable trading system;

 

—redirect resources from reduced military expenditures to aid programs, including those benefiting children;

—target debt-relief schemes toward children’s programs;

—target more development aid to primary health care, basic education, low-cost water and sanitation programs;

—aid to children to be part of strengthened development programs “combining revitalized economic growth, poverty reduction, human resource development and environmental protection”;

—statistics to be shown “by gender” so that any inequitable effect on girls and women can be monitored and corrected;

—achieve, by nominated years, goals set for the attainment of better health care, immunization, and elimination of preventable diseases.

Throughout, the emphasis is on what governments are to do. Since it was non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that had so big a hand in setting up the summit, perhaps we should take another look at them.

An NGO is a non-profit organization, and the combination—nongovernment and nonprofit—conveys an impression of dedicated volunteers putting freely given contributions to work for the charitable purposes to which they devote their lives. On closer inspection, your average NGO may be nonprofit, but its distance from the public purse is somewhat shorter than arm’s length.

The Canadian government’s International Development Agency (CIDA) provides NGOs and their partners with “matching” government grants in a ratio of three from the government to one from privately raised funds toward overseas projects, and one-for-one grants to cover their operating expenses in Canada. CIDA also fosters “partnerships and networking” among international volunteer groups, improves the skills of staff volunteers by helping them diversify their funding sources, and focuses on organizations that “complement and enhance Canadian development initiatives.”

Prompted by the umbrella NGO—the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children—Canada was one of six initiating countries that brought the summit to life; the others, all of which had ratified the convention by September 1990, were Egypt, Mali, Mexico, Pakistan, and Sweden. Thus it’s safe to say that the Canadian Coalition’s Statement of Principles is a pretty good guide to what’s in store for the governments of other ratifying countries down the road.

For instance, since every child, by virtue of the convention, is guaranteed the right to an adequate standard of living, the Coalition recommends that governments commit, through social assistance, education, and health care initiatives, to protecting all children adequately from the effects of poverty.

Within Canada, the three levels of government are called on to implement “a comprehensive preventive social policy which includes such components as prenatal and postnatal health care, affordable housing programs, parental support, particularly in respect of single parents and child refugee claimants, and educational and social programs including those provided through public education institutions.”

Progress is to be monitored from annual reports to the House of Commons “in a detailed manner” on the state of children in Canada and also on what the federal and provincial governments are doing toward attainment of the summit’s goals for children in Canada and abroad. To this end, the federal government is asked to improve the collection of statistics relating to child poverty within Canada.

Only once, in this shopping list of what governments are supposed to do, are parents mentioned, and then only as subjects for whom governments provide “parental support, particularly in respect of single parents.” It is as if what used to be called fathers and mothers were not around anymore and had abdicated to the state responsibility for the children they gave birth to.

Surprisingly, the government of Canada admits, in the introduction to its summit brochure, that while it has “a major role to play in ensuring the well-being of children, it cannot carry out this mission alone. Many areas of public policy and services affecting children are the responsibility of the governments of the provinces and territories that make up Canada, while others are shared by the federal, provincial, and territorial governments. In addition there are hundreds of municipal and town councils, school boards, other public agencies and nongovernmental organizations. All play critical roles in ensuring the well-being of Canada’s children.”

Nowhere in any of this is the recognition that government intervention has made it harder for people to create the wealth that all societies need in order to function; that government borrowing for social programs has fueled inflation and diminished people’s earning power; that government-fueled inflation has pressured wives and mothers to go out to work; that parents have been told that they must pay the government to provide “daycare” centers. Now, the same government is telling parents that it will assume stewardship of the children; and finally, that parents must contribute to the upkeep of foreign governments embracing similar policies abroad.

Front and center in the state’s assumption of stewardship are the schools, and it is only natural that they should exemplify the state’s encroachment. David Hillen, who heads the English department in an Ontario high school, wrote (in The Idler, November/December 1990) that “It is hard to exaggerate the all-pervasiveness of politics in education. . . . The political will to monitor and control the education system in some kind of total, quasi-totalitarian way has a long history in Ontario. It seems to be gaining momentum again. . . . The power of the collective dominates.” Boosting this collective are the government-funded “women’s groups,” whose agendas are openly socialist.

For them and the rest of the Canadian left, universal government-funded daycare is a rallying cry. Child-care advocates are calling for a program to raise the number of children cared for from the government’s presently projected 200,000 to one million by 1999. When Health and Welfare Minister Perrin Beatty warned “there won’t be large amounts of money for new programs,” and that the government would look instead toward private-sector involvement in social policy, Janet Davis, president of the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, charged that this would “replicate the American market-oriented model. We don’t want the private sector to provide the services. . . . How can you embark on a major new social program if the deficit is still the number one priority?”

In fact it is the deficit that offers relief from the state intervention that caused it. Canada’s total debt is almost double, per capita, that of America. Perforce, Ottawa is obliged to cut back on transfer payments to the provinces, which in turn are cutting back on transfers to municipalities that were getting, on average, about half their revenues from the other two levels of government. Municipalities are where the buck stops. Unlike the other two levels, they can borrow only for capital projects. Their budgets must be balanced, and their ability to do that is pressed three ways: by declining transfers, by their own recession-starved revenues, and by provincial governments shifting responsibilities onto them while dreaming up new programs that municipalities have to pay for.

This has led to dramatic increases in the property taxes that are municipalities’ chief source of revenue. In southwestern Ontario, when some business enterprises were faced with increases of as much as 100 percent, they revolted—not by refusing to pay the taxes, but by threatening to withhold the business portion until taxes were either reduced or frozen at 1990 levels. Groups are spreading across the province dedicated to forcing accountability upon their local councils. George Lansens, a pioneer of the movement who employs about ninety people in three engineering plants near Windsor, told me that he’s not in the solving business; the purpose of the freeze is to get politicians’ attention and to force them to do the job they’re elected for, namely to decide, from a finite amount of tax revenue, how it is to be allocated.

The focus of these groups is not daycare but the related issue of education spending—which amounts to as much as 70 percent of the property tax in some places. This argues a need for a different way of funding public schools, but also for more local control of an education system that is now run by remote bureaucrats. David Hillen promotes funding through a voucher system, “thus effectively giving the client control over the educational service sought.” His and Mr. Lansens’ resistance is one of the few signs in Canada of a renewed interest in federalism.