The Speech From the Throne: Investing in Children

An optimistic country is one that chooses to invest in its children.

Investments in the well-being of today's children improve the long-term health of our nation.

With the nation's finances in good shape, we will soon be in a position to make choices and investments that support this Canadian priority.

A growing economy that creates jobs is the best guarantee for our children's future. And it goes without saying that families have the primary role to play in nurturing children.

But, Canadians also want their governments to work in partnership with parents and the private and voluntary sector to ensure that all children are equipped with the capacities they need to be ready to learn when they begin school, and to grow into healthy, competent adults.

We and our provincial and territorial partners have agreed to address in a co-operative way the problems of low-income families with children. We are now building a comprehensive and effective National Child Benefit System.

We demonstrated our commitment to this project in our first mandate by increasing our contribution to the Canada Child Tax Benefit by $850 million a year, with higher payments to families beginning July 1, 1998.

And we will work with our its provincial and territorial partners to establish jointly a common timetable for increasing the federal contribution to the Canada Child Tax Benefit by at least an additional $850 million during the course of this mandate.

And we will also work with the provinces and territories to establish the National Re-Investment Framework, which will guide the re-allocation of our partners' savings from our increased contribution to the Canada Child Tax Benefit into new services and benefits for low-income families with children.

With our partners, we also agreed in January 1997 to work together to develop the National Children's Agenda, a comprehensive strategy to improve the well-being of Canada's children. We will work together to develop this agenda, including clear outcome measures by which to gauge success.

As part of this national agenda, the federal government will undertake three new initiatives.

• We will establish Centres of Excellence to deepen our understanding of children's development and well-being and to improve our ability to respond to their needs.
• We will expand our Aboriginal Head Start program onto reserves to ensure that all Aboriginal children have the opportunity to get a good start in life.
• We will measure and report regularly on the readiness of Canadian children to learn, so that we can assess our progress in providing our children with the best possible start in life.