The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has launched its ninth report card, entitled The Children Left Behind: A League Table of Inequality in Child Well-being in the World’s Rich Countries. The report shows that when it boils down to the material welfare of our nation’s children, Canada has slipped to 17th place out of 24 high-income countries evaluated by UNICEF.

The report was authored by researchers working at UNICEF’s Innocenti Research Centre located in Florence, Italy. The report draw on the research of a previous UNICEF working paper carried out by Candace Currie, Dorothy Currie, Leonardo Menchini, Dominic Richardson and Chris Roberts.

The report examined 24 countries that are a part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Family income and adequate housing are among the key indicators for assessing and ranking countries.

In Canada, income inequality remains a critical concern, having improved very little over the past decades. Sharing its place at the bottom with Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece, Canada has the worst child income inequality in the “developed” world.

However, thanks to Canada’s universal approach to social policy, the country fared better when it came to children’s access to education and health, being ranked third and ninth among OECD countries, respectively. Canadian children’s access to healthy food was also scored favourably.

Capturing the attention and commitment of national and provincial governments, while enlisting the help of well-placed civil society organizations is absolutely vital for realizing child rights in Canada to an adequate standard of living. UNICEF’s report found one particularly frightening statistic that it identified as being especially striking in Canada: “exposure to poverty in childhood doubles the risk of death by age 55.” In a country where the average life expectancy is 81 years old, this is not acceptable and a very easy-to-grasp indication of the extremity of relative poverty in Canada.

UNICEF’s report is timely, coming out soon after Canada’s Campaign 2000 released its report on Child and Family Poverty in Canada over the past 21 years.

Not surprisingly, the United States, Italy and Greece had the lowest child-equality scores, while the Scandinavian countries—Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands—and Switzerland had the best scores.