Human Resources Committee on May 12th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we continue our study on the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada. This is committee meeting number 25.

I want to welcome all our guests and witnesses today. Thank you very much for taking time out of your busy schedules. Thank you for all the work you do on the front lines. We are happy to have you here in Moncton as we move through.

We have been hearing a number of witnesses in Ottawa, but we realize that the real work doesn't happen in Ottawa; it happens out in the ridings, out in the various parts of the country.

We started yesterday in Halifax. We are here today in Moncton, and then tomorrow we'll be in Montreal.

As I said, we want to thank you for taking the time. We are interested in hearing what your stories are about, what is going on, what's working, and what suggestions we can take back and look at.

The way things will work today is this. I'm going to start over on my right-hand side. Bernard, we are going to start with you and work across the row of witnesses. We are going to ask for five minutes each, and then we are going to have a couple of rounds of questioning. If you don't get a chance to talk about all the things you were hoping to, they will probably be brought up in some of the questions and answers.

I'll identify each of you. We'll have a timer here, just so that we understand where we are. You don't need to touch the microphones; they're going to be operated for you.

The last thing I want to mention is with respect to translation. For those who need translation, such as me, English is on channel 16 and French is on channel 17. Some questions will be asked and/or answered in French. Please feel free to speak in your natural, native tongue.

I am going to start with Bernard Richard, ombudsman and child and youth advocate, who is here as an individual.

Sir, welcome. You have five minutes. The floor is yours.

[Bernard Richard, Ombudsman and Child and Youth Advocate, As an Individual]

Thank you very much. I'll talk as quickly as I possibly can.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

The interpreters may not be able to keep up. We'll strike a balance.

[Bernard Richard]

I stand corrected.

I am obviously very pleased to be here and I want to congratulate the members of the committee for having decided to leave Ottawa. There is certainly real work being done in Ottawa but it is also important for Canadian citizens to have this kind of access to their Members of Parliament. We are privileged to have this opportunity.

Thank you.

I am New Brunswick's ombudsman, child and youth advocate, privacy and right to information commissioner, and civil service commissioner; I have many hats and different roles. In the past, I've been a member of the legislature for a number of years and a cabinet minister in a previous government.

In the course of several years now I've had an opportunity to look at the face of poverty and to reflect upon what kinds of challenges it poses to any society and why it's important to deal with it, so I certainly welcome you here. I am sure you've been reminded a million times that the House of Commons has already taken a firm stand on poverty, way back in 1989, promising to abolish child poverty by the year 2000. We're not quite there yet. None of you was there in 1989, so I'm not holding you personally responsible for the fact that we're not quite there yet.

But I think it's important to remind ourselves that this is something that needs to be done, if all of Canadian society is to continue to advance. We have many advantages in this world and we are a model for many countries. Those of you who travel around the world have been approached by people who want to immigrate to Canada, who really hold Canada as a model, as just a wonderful place—and it is.

That, I think, makes it more embarrassing for us to realize that many children in Canada still live in poverty, and that while we export our wonderful water to other places, many children don't have access to clean drinking water. We should be embarrassed about that.

I think we need to understand that if we're to continue to be a beacon for the world in terms of human rights and economic development—and of equal opportunity, to use a phrase that was coined in New Brunswick—then we need to make sure that our tide lifts all ships and that all members of our society have an opportunity.

In my work I've had the chance to develop some recommendations around mental illness, particularly around youth suffering from mental challenges and how our criminal justice system responds not very well to them—not just in New Brunswick but in other parts of the country as well. If I can ask you anything in these very short minutes, it's to focus on child poverty and on some of the challenges that youth are facing in regard to limited access to mental health services.

I think it's true all across the country. I have had the opportunity to meet with ombudsmen from every province, and with child and youth advocates and right to information and privacy commissioners from every province. I think it is important to remember that these are not just challenges in New Brunswick, and that however well we're doing in places such as Quebec or Alberta, we are leaving behind some of our citizens. That holds back our possibility of becoming all that we can be.

So, it is important to include all our citizens in our efforts to make Canada what we want it to be and what it is in the eyes of many on planet Earth. However, we will not really have reached our objective if we cannot find a way to include everyone.

Furthermore, MPs' words are very important. Even though you were not there in 1989, Parliament made that commitment. And Parliament belongs to all Canadians. We all rely on commitments made not only by our MPs but also by our Parliament.

As MPs, we are proud to say that we fulfill our promises. At least, that was the case when I was an MP. And I do believe this is true of all Members of Parliament, whatever their party.

We make promises; we keep our promises. Well, Parliament has made a promise to Canada's children and has not kept that promise. I think we have the means of doing it, but it takes more than words; it takes action and commitment.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Richard.

We're now going to Kelly Wilson, who is from the John Howard Society of New Brunswick.

I don't know, Kelly, whether in any of your remarks you're going to be talking a bit about what you guys do at the John Howard Society. If you aren't, I'd ask you to talk a bit about it, but if it's part of your remarks, that's great.

But the time is yours, for five minutes.

[Kelly Wilson, Executive Director, Charlotte County, John Howard Society of New Brunswick]

Thank you for inviting us from New Brunswick today.

My speech is quite a bit different from Bernard Richard's. I want to talk about the fact that in my role as an executive director of the John Howard Society, I work personally and individually with people who live in poverty and who are suffering from the consequences of poverty every day.

Over 95% of the 150 individuals we deal with are living in poverty. These are people whom we actively work with each year, people who walk through our door. They suffer from low education levels, low literacy levels, poor employment history, poor physical health, engaging in risky sexual behaviour, and conflict with the law. To survive these challenges, they develop a lot of poor coping strategies, which lead to poor decision-making, poor problem-solving skills, impulsiveness, and of course substance abuse. Substance abuse is having a huge impact on our community and provincial resources. The cost to health care is increased vastly. A homeless person in Canada uses $4,714 in health care, compared with $2,633 for an average person. I think that's a significant cost to the federal government.

When you look at the province of New Brunswick—

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Kelly, sorry to interrupt. Is that $4,000 per year?

[Kelly Wilson]

Yes, and per person.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

[Kelly Wilson]

In New Brunswick, the average cost to the health care system to treat those with substance abuse problems is $1,500, compared with the national average of $1,267. In New Brunswick we also rank higher in substance abuse and treatment of it. This represents a huge financial burden on government funding in health care costs alone. We're not even talking about the criminal justice system. Over 80% of my caseload are individuals who have come into conflict with the law and who are suffering from substance abuse problems. I feel that a lot of these problems need to be addressed in the community through programming and services that we can provide as non-profit.

Low education levels also have a significant impact on our target population. According to Literacy New Brunswick, we have the second lowest literacy rate in Canada. Specifically, 60% of New Brunswickers aged 16 and over are at the lowest levels of literacy. That's a huge problem. Families with low literacy levels are more likely to be sick more often; they're more likely to smoke; they're less likely to go to a doctor or an optometrist; they eat poorly; and they're more likely to be poor. Over 80% of incarcerated individuals have low literacy levels. Low education levels affect an individual's access to employment, which affects the quality of life for families. I think we need to examine responses that target multiple risk factors at the same time. We need to find ways to treat the individual as a whole person.

A response to poverty will take time, and measurable results may not be as immediate as we would like. I think measurable results definitely need to be flexible in order to capture good results. We can't just look at a black and white approach. What I mean is this: if we're looking at a person who's suffering from substance abuse or having an addiction problem, and we're counting that person only when he stays clean for the rest of his life, we're missing the boat. Slips are part of the substance abuse recovering process. If a person has a slip and doesn't go into a complete relapse, this ought to be captured. We ought not to count that person as a failure.

In these tough economic times, our target population really suffers when government cutbacks are made to services and programs. It has a huge impact on them and they lack the knowledge and skills to advocate for themselves. Their concerns may go unnoticed until a crisis occurs.

I want to talk a bit about the John Howard Society approach and some of the things we do in our office. I believe that in order to reduce poverty we need to address its root causes. It is important to connect with your community, your province, and also your country to understand the latest challenges and opportunities that exist for our target population. As an agency, we need to stay current with the latest research and implement the best practices and lessons learned into our programs and services. All the clients who walk through our door need to look at where they have been, where they want to go, and what they need to do to get there. We need to support them throughout that process.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I'm now going to move to John Castell and the Fundy Community Foundation.

Welcome, sir. The floor is yours. You have five minutes.

[John Castell, Member, Moving Forward Together Steering Committee, Fundy Community Foundation]

Okay.

Now, because I can't possibly say everything I want to in five minutes, I'll say right at the beginning that I'm going to advocate a bottom-up approach to poverty in Canada. I think the closest interaction with and the closest feel for poverty comes from the local communities. Groups like the John Howard Society, which Kelly represents, and many of the charities or not-for-profit groups that I'm involved in have the hands-on feel and the trust of a lot of the people in poverty.

I'm hoping that by speaking today I will advocate for a forum where you will have continuing input from representatives of groups like the one I work with. I'm not part of the Fundy Community Foundation, but I work intimately with them. I would like to speak to their model of approaching community development as one of the means at the community level--but with a national organization, the Community Foundations of Canada--to approach dealing with poverty.

That's what I wanted to say in my five minutes, so I got that off my chest to begin with.

I'm involved in the Charlotte County Dial A Ride program, which provides volunteer transportation for seniors, disabled, and needy families in Charlotte County. We have a number of volunteers who give up their time and will transport those people otherwise unable to have transportation in a rural community to medical appointments, to banks to cash their cheques, to grocery shopping, to social events, and to quite a few other things.

We do about a thousand trips a day. It's not something that was developed in Charlotte County. We stole the idea from Nova Scotia. There are about 10 counties there that do it. It was facilitated in our county by dialogues that were put on by the Fundy Community Foundation. They organized a community dialogue with stakeholders involved in programs to assist those in need in our county. At that time, it was the Charlotte County Benevolent Society that I was involved in, which provided support to families of seriously ill children. Through that dialogue about transportation, that problem was solved.

The foundation now has a poverty working group. I'll give you a little history, if I may. The premier of New Brunswick set up an advisory council on not-for-profits, headed by Claudette Bradshaw. In order to approach input to that in Charlotte County, quite a large number of the not-for-profits organized meetings to get together to share ideas so that we could give a better picture to Claudette Bradshaw on how she should advise the premier. I believe the input from Charlotte County was very helpful to Claudette. She spoke very highly of the organized approach we had to begin this.

That led to the idea that a lot of us overlapped in our objectives in helping the people living in poverty in our community and that we had a problem of not knowing each other that well. A lot of us are run by volunteer boards--and sometimes not even with any paid staff--with a mission, and we are very enthusiastic in approaching that mission, but there is difficulty in finding funding because we don't have a professional fundraiser. There are all kinds of grants that we don't know about.

In that dialogue when we got together, we realized how much we could contribute by working together rather than as individual charities, so one of the greatest things that Claudette's group did was to get us together to talk. In getting together to talk, we felt that we could come up with solutions. Yes, we can wait for the province and the provincial government to help out, and we can look to the federal government, but we feel there are things we can do without waiting for government support.

With the help of the Fundy Community Foundation, we began a series of dialogues. They have a nice process. You call together the stakeholders who have a similar interest, you address the need--and addressing poverty was the need--and then you have a facilitated dialogue. You have groups of five to ten people who get together, address and identify the problems, and suggest solutions.

We had a series of dialogues. Out of that, we decided within the group that we would do a number of things. We'd pick three target projects that we could and will do. We may get government help, but we'll do something.

First of all, because they interacted with the poverty people, we invited people living in poverty to work with us and advocate with us. Our committee includes people who are living in poverty, so input was there.

Three programs relate to food security and housing security. The outline on that is here.

Third, because of the volunteer hours, we learned of a program called time banking, and I've provided information on that.

I would like to address those in question period, if we may.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you. Hopefully, the question period we have here will be more productive than the question period we have in Ottawa.

I'm going to move along to Brian Duplessis. Thank you very much, Brian. You're with the Fredericton Homeless Shelters, so I'm going to turn it over to you for five minutes.

[Brian Duplessis, Executive Director, Fredericton Homeless Shelters]

First of all, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The opportunity to speak to members of Parliament is one that can't be turned down.

I will tell you that a few months ago I was asked to speak at a local church, and the minister asked me how much time I would like. I said I was good for anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours. We did compromise on about 20 minutes.

I've never tried to speak on this subject for five minutes, so I'm really going to focus on two things. First, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the shelters that we run in Fredericton. I think it's important for you to know that. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about how our whole society and the different levels of government need to work together to deal with poverty.

Before I even do that, I want to tell you that the people I work with—the 389 men who used the Fredericton Men's Shelter last year and the 96 women who used Grace House for Women, our women's shelter—don't live in poverty. They live and exist in abject poverty. There is poverty, unfortunately, then there's worse poverty, then there's the worst, and then there's the bottom. That's who we work with--the close to 500 people we work with in Fredericton.

When I say abject poverty, I am talking about the welfare rates and systems in New Brunswick that drive people into poverty and then keep them there. The single employable rate of welfare—and I'm going to call it that, not income assistance or social assistance. I'm going to call it what those who receive it call it, and that's welfare. The single employable rate in New Brunswick is $294 a month. That's $294 in Fredericton, where the cheapest room in the cheapest, seediest rooming house is about $325 to $375 a month.

The next level of income assistance—basic assistance it's called—is $537 a month. With either of those levels, take into consideration that Statistics Canada has said that the poverty rate for a single person in Fredericton is around $20,000 to $22,000 a year. At $294, that's less than $4,000 a year. At $537, that's between $6,000 and $7,000 a year. Abject poverty is what we're talking about.

We run these two shelters around the clock on $400,000 a year. We staff them and run them on $400,000 a year. Even as an organization, we are just providing a basic subsistence, roof-over-the-head situation while at the same time trying to coordinate the efforts with all the other agencies that exist.

Our funding is $60,000 from the province, zero from the federal government, and zero from the municipalities. Fifteen per cent comes from any level of government. We have some through United Way and the rest we fundraise, $250,000 to $275,000 a year in Fredericton, to keep the doors open and a roof over the heads of those 500 people.

I've only been doing this about a year and a half. All of the services exist to help transition those individuals we serve out of shelters in a reasonable length of time into the community. They all exist and they all operate in silos. Within the Department of Social Development there are silos with housing, adult protection, child protection, and other services. They don't coordinate well among themselves. They don't coordinate well with mental health and addiction services. Sixty per cent of those we serve have mental illnesses. I think it's a low number, but we estimate it at about 60%, diagnosed or undiagnosed.

About 80% have addictions, either gambling, drugs, alcohol, or a combination of. Many with the mental illnesses have the addictions because they are self-medicating through the addiction. Nobody works together. I'm going to take that up another notch and say that a huge part of the challenge in this country is that you, as representatives of the federal government, those who are at the provincial level, and those who are at the municipal level, are all in your silos. To put it bluntly, you all have your heads stuck in the sand when it comes to dealing with poverty. I'm going to be very blunt about it.

You all have funding mechanisms for different things. Through the federal government and under the homelessness partnering strategy, it's not a problem to get money to build a new shelter. Grace House, our women's shelter, was opened in 2001. There was some money through the old SCIPPI program. You can get projects and extra funding in projects to go on, but we can't get operational funding, which would allow us to be able to help coordinate those activities for individuals.

I'm sure I'm coming up close on my five minutes, but I'm going to try to tell you one story.

Are there media here, by the way?

In Fredericton, New Brunswick, there is a man. I'll use the guy's real name. Danny is a 53-year-old man with multiple mental illnesses who has resided in our dormitory-style men's shelter for 14 years. He's had no medical treatment in years. He's had no psychiatric treatment. He's had nothing. He's fallen through every crack. Within the next two months he's going to move out, because we, our organization, has taken all of the people in social development and mental health and we've essentially banged their heads together and said we're drawing a line in the sand on Danny. Danny is going to move. He's going to get the treatment, he's going to get the care, and his life is going to change.

He was married. He had children. The file in social development goes back this far, when you finally get everyone to dig it out, but nobody's working together. We discovered months ago that there are no case managers for people on basic assistance in New Brunswick. You get $537 a month and you get a cheque writer. You do not have a case manager. So Danny is left to be there. We have others with fewer years. Danny's going first, and then we're going to tackle the others.

We need to work together at all levels of government and with the non-profit sector in a meaningful way if we're going to really change the lives of those who are living in this abject poverty.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, Brian.

We're now going to move to Dan Weston from the Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization.

Welcome, Dan. The floor is yours, sir, for five minutes.

[Dan Weston, Coordinator, Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization]

Thank you. Welcome to the sticks.

We have been at this for quite a while and have spoken to many committees over the years. Usually it happens at the end of a mandate.

I am one who is known a little bit for being audacious, so I'm going to look at things not from a micro-economic point of view, which is what you'll get at most of these travelling committees, but from a macro-economic view, if I may.

What I have done, remarkably, is reduce 35 years of economic history into a page and a half, so it shouldn't take too long.

In the early 1970s, capitalism was restructured. After Henry Kissinger met Zhou Enlai, vice-premier of China in 1971, and Richard Nixon shook hands with Mao Tse-Tung in 1972, Nixon then moved the U.S. off the gold standard in 1973. The American dollar became the base currency of world trade and business competition. These events placed the American and Canadian workers in wage competition with the same jobs developing on a much larger and cheaper scale in the third world.

During the 1980s and 1990s, the structural adjustment of capitalism became global, and this saw American and Canadian secondary industries, the job creators and the product makers, seek cheap labour off shore, aided and abetted by government. Consequently, America and Canada, with Canada in tow, exported their secondary industry to low-wage countries and thereby exported their ability to create production jobs at home, the backbone of job creation and nation building.

In order for consumers in North America to have the purchasing power to buy all of these cheap labour products made by the third world, and especially the developing Chinese joint ventures, North American workers had to have access to more money than their stagnant pay cheques provided. So credit cards and, a little later, debit cards were introduced. Presently, everyday things like gas and food, for example, are being credited and debited by the consumer. The future is financing the present.

This financial process channels all the workers' money through the banks, instead of only the money that workers had previously chosen to deposit. Finance markets boomed, financing both the new factories abroad and the developing service-based debt-dependent economy at home. Business expansion and job creation are now dependent on financed capital and/or taxpayers' money through government assistance. Structural adjustment, viewed on a global scale, has all countries dependent on a global supply chain for everyday things.

In the face of a sustained crisis in finance capital, such as the present one, the sustainability of the global supply chain is dependent on the success or failure of the third world worker, who is working in or unemployed from what was once our secondary industry.

It is the view of FAPO that unemployment and impoverishment will affect more income groups in the near term in New Brunswick and in Canada. Once the morphine of government financial injections has worn off, inflation will combine with unemployment, creating the first major crisis of unemployment in this new debt-dependent financial market system in North America.

The ability of government to create jobs by bailing out the financial sector with borrowed money secured by the debt-ridden taxpayer, as opposed to assisting the long lost productive sector, is throwing good money after bad. It is a recipe for disaster that sees a future financing the present, instead of the present financed by the past.

A little bit about FAPO, the Fredericton Anti-Poverty Organization. Established in 1983, FAPO is New Brunswick's largest poor people's organization, helping many thousands of people each year throughout central New Brunswick maintain their standard of living through our recycling and distribution programs.

FAPO does not receive funding assistance of any kind from government, organizations, associations or individuals. Our three facilities are open seven days a week.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Weston.

We'll now start our first round of questions, which will be seven minutes for questions and answers. My colleague, Mr. Savage from the Liberal Party, will start.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

I want to thank you very much for coming today. Those were very compelling and thought-provoking presentations.

I come from neighbouring Nova Scotia, and I know a couple of you mentioned that you have had experience in Nova Scotia.

Monsieur Richard, you have a unique perspective to offer, it seems to me. We're active politicians, or reasonably active politicians. You've been a politician; I think you've been a municipal councillor, a provincial MLA, a cabinet minister, and a leader of a provincial party. Now you're advocating for some of these issues that we're trying to get to the bottom of.

Can you give us any advice on how to deal with our colleagues in the House of Commons in being serious about tackling poverty? It's not that most of them, I don't think, don't really want to get at it, but I don't know if some of them would prioritize it the way that you're talking about.

Do you have any advice for us in that regard?

[Bernard Richard]

I'll do the best I can. I don't want to be presumptuous in any way.

My experience is that all elected members I have met with, from all parties, want to see things improve. I've worked with people from all parties for many years, and I've always been convinced of that.

I think that as politicians we often tend to say, “Well, we've done this or we've invested $500 million or we've created this new program, so what do you mean, we're not doing anything?”

In my view, the one thing that I would like to see of Parliament, irrespective of the governing party--which has changed quite often in the last few years--is to talk not about initiatives, but about outcomes, measurable outcomes.

If Parliament tasks this mighty and very resourceful civil service that we have in Canada to produce results that are measurable, then regardless of which party you're in, you will have something you can look at every year or every two years. Outcomes means looking at whether we are actually lowering the rate of poverty in Canada or whether children are going to school. There are ways to measure that.

Last year our office initiated a report on the state of children and youth. We found out that New Brunswick is--like Canada, I'm sure--data rich but information poor. There are a lot of statistics out there, but not many people take the time to analyze them to try to find out what they're really saying, so we've taken it upon ourselves every year to measure child obesity rates, child poverty rates, and teen pregnancy. No matter what government is in power, if a minister tells me they've created this new program or they're investing more money in schools or in health and it is not measurable, in my view it doesn't exist. I think that's true in the business world as well as in the political world. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist; if you can't measure it, you don't know if it's being done.

Officials at the federal level can establish benchmarks that you can look at, regardless of the party you're in, in one or two or three years. They're very resourceful. There are thousands and thousands of civil servants who are very smart. They can establish the benchmarks. Whether you're in government or in opposition, in five years you can know if we made real progress in attacking these issues.

What's embarrassing to me is to see native indigenous Canadians. This is the richest country in the world, and at times the best country in the world in terms of social indices, yet we still support having some of our citizens living in these kinds of conditions.

Today, as we speak, the minister in Fredericton is announcing in the legislature that she is asking my office to review child welfare services on the 15 first nations in New Brunswick. One thing that I'll want to do is establish benchmarks so that we know that we're actually making progress, not that we're spending billions of dollars. That's easy to do, particularly at the federal level, but in my view, measuring where we're going and if we're meeting our goals is the key.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I think we've moved from looking at government support for social infrastructure as charity to seeing it as justice, and maybe now we're at the point of seeing it as an investment as well. If we look at the countries that do invest in what I call the social infrastructure, they also do well economically. They have lower rates of illiteracy, etc.

I would like to talk about mental health for young people.

Brian, we mentioned to you very briefly before that we were at Metro Turning Point shelter yesterday with Michael Poworoznyk. He appeared at our committee, and then we went to have a look. They have a capacity of 75 beds, dormitory-style. There are men sleeping there. Somebody from the committee asked what percentage of his clients would have mental health issues or addictions, and there was a chart that showed 50% for mental health.

He said if you look at it, how do you diagnose these, necessarily? It's difficult to really know, but I think he said yesterday that he guessed it would be 90% to 95%, because if you didn't have those issues when you got there, after spending night after night in the same room with 60 or 70 other men, and listening to people with hallucinations and waking up in the middle of the night, you would end up with them.

On youth--and John, you mentioned this too--how do we do mental health better for young people? How do we get to the point of diagnosing it and treating it so that we don't criminalize them further down the road and have them end up dealing with Kelly and her organization or the Elizabeth Fry Society or something?

Are there any specific ideas and investments in mental health for young people so that we can make a difference?

[Brian Duplessis]

I would throw the number 60% out, and much like the chap you're talking about in Halifax, I would say it's much higher.

We see the results of the children who didn't get the mental health help, and who perhaps have never been diagnosed or who have multiple mental illnesses at the same time and then addictions on top. We see the mixture of all that, but we have also seen directly some of the younger people. When I say younger, I mean as young as 16. We'll take 16-year-olds into our shelters. I'm very unhappy when someone who's 16 shows up at either of our shelters, and I get directly involved before they can come in. We do everything to keep them out, but we have them at 16 to 18 years old. Everybody's given up on them.

Some of it starts in the school system. There are opportunities, I believe, to identify and provide those services through the school system, through the medical system, to start to diagnose and work with the children at that young age. I'll give you one example.

We had a young man who was 20 years old. He was with us a few months last year. His mother had taken him out of the school in the Fredericton area when he was eight years old. He was in grade three. The school found him unmanageable, so she took him home to home-school him, and she home-schooled him up to 16.

There were no medical interventions. Her husband refused to admit that there was any real problem and had challenges there. Nobody followed up. I had many conversations with the mother and father in this case. He's back home at the moment, getting some help, but once she took him out of the school, I was told, there were no other approaches. She said, “I'm going to home-school him because that makes it easier for everyone.” They weren't getting the calls from the school to have to try to deal with the problems, all the difficulties he was in, and he was just abandoned.

I think an awful lot of children, one way or another, who aren't receiving the treatment, are effectively abandoned, either to go home like that, or, if they stay within the system, they're just manoeuvred and shoved through, and given a little assistance here and there, as teachers say “let's move them and get them out of my classroom” to the next one to the next one.

It's a sad commentary, but it's an observation based on the experience that we've seen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Because this is an important part of the topic, why don't we go to Dan and then Bernard, just for a couple of comments, and then we'll move on to the next questioner?

Go ahead, Dan.

[Dan Weston]

There is one measurement of poverty that sticks out in my mind. In 1974, what a single welfare recipient received to live on was reduced from $254 to $100 a month, and it stayed that way for years. Today it has just recently gone up to about $290. If you measure that in constant dollar value, a single person on welfare was much better off in New Brunswick in 1974 than he or she is today.

Second, in terms of what to do about the situation involving people who suffer from not being able to mentally adjust to poverty, the state seems to be willing to spend a lot of money on what I call the psychosocial industry, and it deals with that situation rather than giving any money to the people. Really, anybody would go half nuts if they had to live on a welfare cheque for the rest of their lives, which is the way it seems. In New Brunswick, we say that when you're on welfare, well then, it's just farewell to you, because you're never going to get off it.

So really, the situation is whether the government is willing to commit to finance and money to help this situation. They've taken a lot out of employment insurance. You would think it's time to give some of that back. I think if a lot of money were spent and a lot of other programs were introduced, that would help to ensure people's ability to work. In New Brunswick, for example, we have a large construction industry, in proportion to other industries in New Brunswick. Decimating employment insurance here in New Brunswick was extremely difficult on people who owned businesses who were trying to keep things going, because they weren't able to keep their crews. If the crew was laid off for a while because there was a shortage of work because the person didn't have a whole lot of contracts, they knew that employment insurance would keep their crew around in the local area and they could get them back and make some money. One of the hardest things to do is to find a crew you can train and then keep.

In a lot of ways, governments, federal and provincial both, have failed to really have a kind of macro outlook as to what they are doing. They keep thinking it's just a little band-aid type of problem. As this gentleman just said here, now we've gotten to the point where we think if we put in some money to help people out, it would be an investment in terms of working more dollar value for the state. Indeed, it would be. It really would be the opportunity to do this on a large scale. You know, we're one of the richest countries in the world, and we happen to have a large problem with poverty. There are only three people per square mile. Do you mean to tell me that we can't keep these people productive and involved in society and fit and mentally healthy and eating proper food? What's happening? Are we allowing the whole infrastructure of this country to just disappear? That's the way it seems to be going.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Bernard, you can have just a quick response.

[Bernard Richard]

On the mental health issue, what kind of brought it home to me last year was a mom who's the mother of one of the girls and youth we followed for a couple of years in preparing our report, Connecting the Dots. She looked at me and said that she wished her daughter had had cancer instead of schizophrenia, because then she would know that she would have gotten treatment and help.

To me, that kind of says it all. We look at mental illness in a different way than we do physical illness. We spend a lot of money on physical illness. Your dad was a doctor, I think. We spend a ton of money. I think we compare well--there's a big debate on that--to the rest of the world. Yet, when it comes to mental illness, we don't like to talk about it. Even in families we don't like to talk about it. If someone in our family has cancer, we rally around. We say that by God, we're going to beat this. But if someone has schizophrenia or autism, it's like we're on our own. The same kind of support is not there.

So I think we have to look at mental illness more as we do other kinds of illnesses. I'm sure Michael Kirby will give you a lot to think about in the next few years. He's been given support now much more, and I think that will be helpful. But on the issue of the stigma attached to mental illness and all of that, she said it all in just a few seconds last year at about this time.

I think that's a big challenge. We should be addressing these issues, not ignoring them. We pay the price. We pay the price as taxpayers, family members, and society. Where do they end up? They end up in Brian's place, or they end up in prison, where it costs $100,000 a year for not treating them, and they'll come back over and over again. We see that in our office every day.