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Officials aim to reduce extreme poverty to three per cent globally by 2030.

from Reuters

"Global finance officials endorsed a new World Bank goal to end extreme global poverty by 2030 and emphasized that its focus should be on ensuring that the poorest benefit from strong growth and rising prosperity in developing nations.

"'For the first time in history we have committed to setting a target to end poverty,' World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said on Saturday following a meeting of the World Bank's Development Committee. 'We are no longer dreaming of a world free of poverty; we have set an expiration date for extreme poverty,' he added. …"

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Tax competition — in which countries fight to lower taxes — hurts the poor and doesn't help the economy.

from The Guardian

"A myth we're repeatedly told is that a country must be 'tax competitive' in order to support a successful economy. It sounds so reasonable. We're taught that competition between companies keeps them on their toes and pressures them to produce better products and services, at better prices.

"But here's the problem: competition between companies in a market bears no economic resemblance whatsoever to 'competition' between countries on tax. They are utterly different economic beasts. …"

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Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative finds knowledge and access are issues.

from FFWD Weekly

A new report on the relationship between the justice system and those living in poverty is calling for more legal education and access for residents whose income can exacerbate and even create legal issues.

Intervening at the Intersection of Poverty and the Legal System is a report from the Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative’s justice sector constellation.

The constellation is a working group made up of 16 representatives from organizations active in Calgary’s legal sector. It has been studying the issue since the launch of the Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative in January 2012. …

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Aboriginal women five to seven times more likely than other women to die as a result of violence.

from Vue Weekly

"Charmaine Desa would have been 43 this year had she not been beaten to death so badly in 1990 that her sister Colleen Cardinal couldn't recognize her face. Last week in Edmonton — the same city that Desa was murdered in 23 years ago — the Native Women's Association of Canada and the Assembly of First Nations held the National Forum on Community Safety and Ending Violence in response to the worrying trends of murdered aboriginal women.

"Aboriginal women are five to seven times more likely than other women to die as a result of violence, but the statistic has yet to be taken seriously by the general public or the federal government. And through it all, stories like those of Desa are lost or misrepresented. As Desa's sister Cardinal explains, the full context goes back even further. Plains Cree and daughters of a mother who went through a residential school, Cardinal and her sisters were part of the Sixties Scoop: a government program that saw thousands of aboriginal children removed from their biological homes and placed in foster families — usually white. The program began in the '60s, but lasted as long as the '80s. Decades later, many of those affected have come together and taken to the courts, filing a class action lawsuit. …"

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Economist says government must invest in institutions to create a fairer society.

from iPolitics

"Investing in areas such as education, children and health is key to reducing the gap between the rich and the poor in Canada, economist Diana Carney told Parliament’s finance committee Tuesday.

"Testifying as the committee opened a series of hearings on income inequality, Carney said two-thirds of the world’s population lives in countries where the gap between the richest and the poorest has widened in the past decade. While Canada is in the middle of the OECD rankings on income inequality and has remained fairly stable, it is in third place behind only the United Kingdom and the United States when it comes to the proportion of the country’s income that goes to the top one percent of Canadians. …"

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