On April 14, UNICEF Canada launched UNICEF Report Card 13 and our Canadian Companion analysis, Fairness for Children. Please visit their web page (www.unicef.ca/irc13) to access these links.
Report Card 13: Fairness for Children highlights the inequalities in child well-being in the world’s most affluent nations, including Canada. While progress in reducing child well-being gaps has been modest overall, Canada’s children are near the back of the pack, ranking in the bottom third when measured against other rich nations – with particular concern for health inequality and life satisfaction.
It also reveals that Canada ranks 26th of 35 nations when compared across four key domains of child well-being: income, education, health and life satisfaction. The report measures bottom-end inequality of children compared to their peers in the middle. When inequality gaps between children in the middle and those at the bottom are closed, overall child well-being should improve for all of Canada’s children. Despite Canada’s relative economic strength, the dividends have not been spread equitably to children, with little progress achieved to close disparities in their well-being over the past decade.
As UNICEF Canada emphasized in the past, the state of child well-being is not predetermined or inevitable and there are positive proactive steps that a country can take to move up in this comparative League Table. Those steps are outlined in UNICER’s Canadian Companion, called Fairness for Children: Canada’s Challenge.