Maybe it’s time to take some of those assessments that rank Canada up near the top among the world’sbest countries to live with a giant shaker of salt.
A new report released Tuesday delivers some alarming news about the Canada’s children.
The report was prepared and released by Children First Canada with the O’Brien Institute for Public Health and researchers from the University of Calgary and is based on data from numerous organizations, including Statistics Canada, the Canadian Institute for Health Information, and Health Canada.
It’s not pretty.
Researchers examined the state of Canadian children’s mortality rates, physical and mental health and the social factors that affect health, such as poverty, hunger and abuse.
The new study says all levels of government need to do more to ensure that children benefit from the Canada’s overall wealth and prosperity. (Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)
They found strikingly high rates of suicide, child abuse and struggles with mental health and a high rate of infant mortality.
“Whether we’re talking infant mortality or accidents or mental health concerns, all these statistics are deeply disturbing,” says Sara Austin, the lead director and founder of Children First Canada.
“Canada’s ranked the fifth-most prosperous nation in the world, yet when it comes to the well-being of children, we fall far behind. There’s a big disconnect between the well-being of our children and the well-being or our nation.”
Austin cites a UNICEF ranking of 41 OECD countries that places Canada 25th in assessing children’s well-being.
Children First Canada says the report shows little change from a similar one it did two years ago.
Among other facts released in the report:
- Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for Canadian children and youth between the ages of one and 17 according to 2012 data used in the report. (In 2015, Canada was listed as one of the five countries with the highest teenage suicide rates.)
- One of three Canadians report suffering some form of child abuse before turning 16.
- The number of mental health-related hospitalizations among people aged five to 24 has risen 66 per cent over the past 10 years and the number of hospitalizations has risen 55 per cent over the same period.
- An estimated 10 to 20 per cent of Canadian children–or about 1.2 million–may develop a mental health disorder at some point in their lives and only about 20 per cent get the treatment they need.
- Canada ranked 30th out of 36 OECD-member countries with a rate of 4.7 deaths of infants under the age of one for every 1,000 live births. (By comparison, Iceland has the lowest infant mortality rate at 0.7 while India has the highest at 37.9 live births.)
“These issues are all interconnected,” says Austin. “They all tie back to lots of related causes around poverty, around abuse, and the systemic underinvestment in the health and well-being of our children.”
Children First Canada recommends three steps to start to attack the problems: an independent national commission on children, a federal children’s budget that would allow the public to track investments in children and federal support for the Canadian Children’s Charter, a document Children First Canada has already drafted following consultations across the country,
