Human Resources Committee on May 12th, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, Bernard.

I know we had Mr. Kirby out to our committee over the last couple of weeks. That was exactly his point: awareness. Even the fact that we're talking about it more is a good first step, but there's more that needs to happen. And being able to talk about it is one of those first steps, as opposed to hiding it or keeping it in the background. We really appreciated having this testimony.

I'm going to move over to Madame Beaudin for seven minutes, please.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. chair. Do I have an hour? There are so many things that I want to talk about.

I would like to continue on the same topic since it is very relevant. I have a question for each one of you but the first one is for Mr. Duplessis and is on the issue of shelters.

Yesterday, we met with the director of a shelter in Nova Scotia and I was telling him that we have similar shelters in Quebec. I am a Quebec MP. One of the major problems we have with those shelters is that it is very hard to ensure some follow-up when people leave a shelter.

I have two questions for you. You seemed to say that existing programs relating to homelessness as well as grants for partnership initiatives were only aimed at the physical infrastructure, at housing.

Can you give us more information about this? Did you mean that this does not really meet all your needs?

You would also need funding for human resources and for providing some professional follow-up to the people you deal with, I suppose?

[Brian Duplessis]

If I understand the question correctly, there is no coordination to follow the individuals, to provide supervisory support, until a real crisis occurs, and even then usually it's a band-aid that's used. I know a lot of work has been done in Montreal, for example, with the Old Brewery Mission. Jim Hughes, who's now our Deputy Minister of Social Development, was running the Old Brewery Mission. He developed programs to help transition people from the shelter into the community, and then to follow them as well, and I think that's what you're asking.

There is also an interesting model in New Brunswick, in Saint John, from the Salvation Army Booth Centre. They have the shelters, but they also have a nurse practitioner who comes into the shelter to provide support. They also obtain apartments and rooming houses in the community, so if someone comes into their facility, they work with them, develop them. They take conservancy, they take responsibility for the person, so a person signs over, to be their trustee. Then they help them live in the community, and they follow them. If they're in a rooming house or a bachelor apartment, they make sure they continue to get the support and services they need. It's an interesting model, but I know they struggle all the time as to how to fund it, how to support it.

The Salvation Army has a rich 100-year history of helping people with their most basic needs, and we're trying to work with them, to learn from them, to see what we can do as well. But it's within the government sphere and all of the services that exist that we're missing that coordination.

To really help those who are at the bottom of the bottom, we have to be thinking of housing first, and maybe you've heard this expression before. If somebody doesn't have housing, doesn't have a place to live--and I'm not talking about a shelter--nothing else matters. They're trying to get by each day, to survive in the environment of a shelter, to survive to get something to eat. If they have some housing, that basic little room, that apartment, then that starts to become the transition that takes place. But if the basic welfare rates are so low that you can't even afford a room in the community, that doesn't even start to take place.

I would like to say, as a bit of a follow-on to what Dan said about money and solving poverty, that we can talk about programs, we can talk about structure, but money comes to the root of it. At $294 a month, you're going to supply all these other programs, but the person can't live in a room, even, by themselves. In New Brunswick they've just frozen those rates again this year because of the economic situation.

I would challenge you and I would challenge the provincial government to try to think of economics a little differently. I think this makes sense. Whenever I talk about it, people seem to think it does.

We want economic stimulus in the country and we want it fast. There's lots in the news about the big economic stimulus package that isn't getting moving, all the infrastructure. If you want economic stimulus to happen, and you want money in the system, give it to the poor people. For the person making $294 a month, make it $400 or $500. Every penny of that will go into the system again, will get circulated quickly. Give it to organizations that are trying to provide the support. We will spend every penny of it. We won't hold it. We'll spend it immediately. You'll see your two-month, three-month, four-month economic stimulus come from that money much faster than from trying to get the agreements from the levels of government to build a new bridge, to refurbish this, to do that--which is all great, but we're saying we're in a crisis situation. Put the money in the hands of those who are going to spend it on the basic needs and services of surviving.

You'll have the economic side of it. And you know what? We'll all feel good about the fact that we're doing the right thing. When we're talking about doing these things, we still have to come back to that base. We need to do the right thing for those who are really suffering in our communities. We are not doing the right thing. We are not supporting them. We're paying it lip service over and over again.

Did that answer any of your questions, or did I just get on my soapbox again?

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Yes, thank you very much, you have fully answered my questions.

Mr. Richard, you were referring to early childhood, which is an issue that is very dear to me because I have worked for many years with very young children, up to five years of age. I believe that we might be able to break the poverty cycle if we could provide some tools to those very young children.

You were talking about the steps taken by the government over the past few years to try and eradicate child poverty. Do you have any explanation for the failure of those initiatives?

[Bernard Richard]

That is a good question. I cannot claim to have the answer but it is quite clear that they have failed. We have not made very much progress. We hear that the rate of poverty today is roughly the same as in 1989, twenty years ago. However, our country has become much more wealthy in that time.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

So, why have we failed? I would really like to know.

[Bernard Richard]

My thinking is the same as Fraser Mustard's. I don't know if you know him. He is a great Canadian and a great Canadian expert also. His position is that the sooner we invest, the better it is. In other words, it is a matter of prevention, of helping people...

We do not choose where we are born and in what circumstances. With a little bit of help, we can achieve whatever we want, without consideration of where we were born. What counts is to be involved as early as possible, otherwise the cycle cannot be broken. That is the lesson of the past twenty years and that is what will happen again during the next twenty years if we cannot find a way to invest as early as possible, to be involved as early as possible, to provide adequate support where support is not available, for all kinds of reasons, good or bad.

I believe that Canada is wealthy enough to be able to intervene and to provide enough balance and opportunities so that each individual can reach his or her full potential. There are no real limits in a country like Canada if we are really committed to find real solutions.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

So that each child gets the best possible start in life.

[Bernard Richard]

Absolutely.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you very much.

[Bernard Richard]

You are welcome.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

We're now going to move over to Mr. Martin. Sir, the floor is yours for five minutes.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much. I have to say right at the start that I think Dan is absolutely right, that it is a macro problem that we have failed to address over a number of years now. The signs were all around us. We should have known and seen it coming. Some economists warned us, but we didn't listen. The different expressions of poverty are like the canary in the coal mine. They should have told us that there was a problem and that eventually it was going to catch us all.

Now we're at that place where we have the kind of poverty that you're seeing every day. We have seen over the last few years a growing number of working poor, people who are getting up in the morning, getting out, doing the job, working full-time year-round at minimum wage, and are just not able to make ends meet as inflation continues to grow. Now we have groups of people who, because of the way the system has been set up, are deep in debt and have no savings left. The safety net has been shredded. They're going to be at your door pretty soon, too.

We have a disaster in the making here that the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives says is eminently preventable. To be frank with you, I'm not quite sure how eminent it is, even with, as they suggest, a change in the EI system so that we catch more people. After 50 weeks, they run out. They've added five weeks, but they still run out. Then, when the people who run out look behind them to see what's there, there's really not much. Social welfare has been ratcheted down now so that it's just a last gasp of help for some folks.

The question is, what do we do? We're into stimulus in a big way, but stimulus to do what? Is it to recover what we had, which has just failed? Does that make much sense? I know we need to do what are often described as band-aid things. We have a charitable non-profit sector out there working full-time overtime and running out of money. We have a group out of Toronto called the Recession Relief Fund that is trying to send a message to the government to say that they're going to be broke within a matter of weeks. The sources of money of the charitable sector are drying up because the investments they made are no longer producing the income they used to produce.

Having said all that, I think we have an opportunity in front of us to change the system, if we want to, so that it works better for everybody. I'm out there trying to get some answers from people as to how we change the system so that it works better for everybody.

Dan, do you have thoughts about that? You've done an excellent analysis. Have you done any thinking about how we change it and what we can do to make it work better?

[Dan Weston]

If you look at the Obama administration in the United States, one of the avenues they're choosing, with this infrastructure money, is to start to develop a new, more environmentally friendly and more technologically modern infrastructure. Canada needs to do somewhat the same thing. It needs to be able to produce more of its own products out of its own resources. This line has been going on for fifty years, people saying this, and it's still true.

If we do that, we will develop an economy that deals with and produces our own resources for our own country first. We should then begin to trade what we have to spare. In that way we'll find we're employing more and more people. However, if we continue on the way we're going, there will only be work when somebody can finance something.

It was hard enough during the oil shock to try to have a contract with somebody that would cover your oil costs, or to try to do anything with a long-term projection, because everything was so up and down. There was no economic stability. The economy didn't make any sense. Even in terms of capitalism itself, it makes no sense when you cannot control energy prices because you can't have a contract and make a stable prediction of how much money you can make.

Because of so-called “globalization”, we are at the whim of all sorts of forces that we can no longer control. We go along and say this is all right. It is not all right. We need to control this economy and we need to build this nation. That's the direction we have to take. That's the opportunity. The opportunity is to build a nation that produces products in an environmentally friendly and technologically advanced way.

There are other countries we can look at to help give us some ideas. We can look at Germany. They are quite far advanced in developing new technologies that are environmentally friendly. We can look at Denmark. Denmark is eliminating most of their hydro poles and overhead wires, because a lot of their institutions and apartment buildings have their power generated right inside the building through natural gas. Instead of wasting natural gas on the oil sands, we should be doing a lot more with it that would be more constructive.

There are many ways to do it. You only have to think about it, instead of going the same old way that the Conservatives, the Liberals, and the NDP have been providing for us all this time. You know, it's their economic policies that have put us in this situation.

Let's try to think outside the box, is all I can say.

[Brian Duplessis]

I have a question for you as well.

Although I know we like to think in terms of today's modern mediation, this is the crisis of all crises. It's been building for many years.

Many of the individuals we're dealing with have been living in poverty for many, many years. This is the current economic cycle; it's part of the cycle. It's going to be worse than it was, but it's still a cycle. Those who are at the lowest end of the scale have always been there. They don't see much change either way. What came to my mind, even as I was driving here, was that as you're touring the country, you're collecting all the reports that have been done in the 1970s and 1980s on the issue of poverty. Many have been done here in New Brunswick, right back to the Hatfield days: details, consultations in the community.

There's a whole round being done by the poverty reduction task force in New Brunswick right now, and I think we've all had an opportunity to participate. I posed that question to them a little while ago: had they read all the reports? Quite frankly, they hadn't at that point collected the report that had been made. There's a real focus in Saint John on a public housing area called Crescent Valley, where I happened to grow up. A tremendous report was done in the early 1970s, and they're now redoing new reports on Crescent Valley. But nobody has dug out the ones from the 1970s. I suspect you will find an awful lot of what you're hearing today is what we heard in the 1980s and the 1970s, when all those reports were done.

Please take the time to collect those reports across the country and start to recognize that this isn't only today's problem; it's systemic. It has been long-term systemic. You can learn from all of that. You don't have to talk to all of us. It is good to talk to us, but you don't have to talk to all of us to learn what many have known for many years and have been fighting for many years. Please, please collect those; please get them together and take that into consideration when you're putting your report together.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Tony and Brian.

We'll move over to the last questioner of this round.

You have seven minutes, Mr. Komarnicki.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

That's a fair point. I think what I hear is that many are saying there's a lot that you know, but it's action you're looking for, and some positive steps.

On a less serious note, in the last round it was said that many politicians do a lot of blowing in the wind, so to speak, and you were saying it's with heads in the sand, and I suppose that's partly true. Some would displace more sand than others, but the fact of the matter is that it is a serious issue. I think my colleague said there's a bit of a transformation in thinking, in not looking at dealing with the roots of poverty as a matter of charity but as a matter of social justice, and really also as an investment in our social infrastructure.

I take note of your words, Kelly, when you say that when you look at the health costs we have, and the criminal justice system.... I was a lawyer in my former career and I know something about the costs associated with the justice system. When we put that together, we could, by trying to deal with the root causes much earlier, actually save some money if we were prepared to make that investment.

I do appreciate that treating the individual, the whole person, takes more effort. It will take more moneys to do that rather than to just look at it as a black and white issue, which maybe we have been doing from point to point.

My initial question is to Mr. Richard. Senator Kirby talked to us about mental health issues, about some of the stigma and misunderstanding there, and how we might deal with that. But could you describe what you see in terms of young people with issues falling through the cracks? Can you describe what you see as the inadequacies now? Also, maybe you can describe some of the practical things we might consider in fixing those gaps. Then I'll move on to some other areas.

[Bernard Richard]

Certainly, I would refer your clerk to our report that we published last year, Connecting the Dots, in which we addressed a lot of those issues. All of the recommendations were accepted by the provincial government. Some of them are being implemented now.

I think there's a lot more here than I can talk about in a few moments, but certainly identifying mental health issues early on and intervening in the right way--these are solutions. All too often, youth dealing with addiction or mental health issues act out, obviously, but the response to that is usually the criminal justice system, not treatment. They're not diverted away from the criminal justice system.

I think that takes the right training. I think it takes youth mental health courts. There's a pilot in Ottawa now, which I'll be visiting on Friday. I hope it really takes off, because I think it's a wonderful approach to diverting youth away from the criminal justice system into treatment. It's multi-disciplinary and multi-departmental so that people are not working in silos. They're actually working together. Once a youth is identified with a mental health issue, that youth is directed away from the criminal justice system into treatment.

If we can do that, if we can identify early enough and provide the right response, then they won't be coming back time and time and time again, so that people like you and me, as former lawyers, can make a living at representing these people. We'll be providing treatment. They won't be going to prison, where they become better criminals. In prison, they're dealing with mental health issues, so they'll be coming back out and we'll be facing property crimes, theft, and violent crimes. In prison, they're just going back into the system, where it costs $100,000 a year just to hold them in a cell while they're not improving.

Solutions include early detection, early intervention, the right kinds of intervention, the diverting of youth dealing with mental health issues away from the criminal justice system into treatment, better coordinated efforts, and better sharing of information. As parents have told me, “My child with autism changed schools and it's like starting all over again.” There's no reason for that in a province like New Brunswick. Moving to a different region should not be like starting all over again. Those parents didn't know anything. They couldn't get the files from the other region. Privacy has become almost an obsession with civil servants; they're very nervous about it, and even when it's in the best interests of a child or a family to share information, they're not doing it.

I think there are solutions out there. There are really good models and good practices being established in all parts of the country. We just need to make sure that we're able to learn from them and support those kinds of models.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

That's a fair comment. Dan mentioned that perhaps we should be thinking outside the box, and that's a fair point. Mr. Castell, in his opening remarks, talked about a bottom-up approach and having to hire professional fundraisers and people who can apply for grants, to be sure you get the money. Also, there's a certain element of competition amongst the various groups to try to target the money, as opposed to asking where the greatest need is and where the best spending is for those dollars.

It seems to me that we need to have some sort of systemic approach to deal with that. It's fine to say that we should put out a call for proposals for what we think should be out there and ensure that it's done properly and so on, but maybe we've gone a little too far in that direction. If we were going to have a systemic approach to getting to the ground and making sure the money gets up, with the dollars flowing back, how would you suggest that might be accomplished in a country as diverse as Canada? Knowing that we have regional differences, jurisdictional issues, and all kinds of things like that, how would you tackle it? What kind of system would you put in place to ensure we reverse that order?

[John Castell]

I'm not sure I'm so wise that I have the advice on how to solve these things. But I see in the Canadian community foundations, and in the example of the Fundy Community Foundation, which is in Charlotte County, New Brunswick, a model for something that works in supporting a large number of not-for-profits. The Fundy Community Foundation isn't there to do charitable work itself, but to support the other not-for-profits and charities in facilitating funding for them. They're set up so that people can donate and create foundations to assist themselves and others. They have general endowment funds, and the interest on money that's invested is there for them to put back into charities.

They also work as facilitators of communication. I think facilitating communications at the community level and upward is important. But rather than writing a report at the end, I think there should be an ongoing dialogue from the bottom up—through municipal, provincial, and federal governments. It's our community dialogues organized by the Fundy Community Foundation that end up solving a problem.

Transportation was identified as a problem. We ended up stealing an idea from Nova Scotia and setting up a Dial A Ride program, for alternative transportation. Tomorrow night I'll be speaking with all the mayors in Carleton County. They're looking at copying our model and setting up a Dial A Ride program there. I've spoken with the MLA from Sackville, and they're looking at setting up a Dial A Ride program in that county. I spoke with people from a town in Queens County, Chipman Parish, and they're looking at taking that model. So the Fundy Community Foundation had the dialogue, addressed a problem, and we came up with a community-based solution to it. We have volunteers who are participating.

Rural communities don't have bus service, and you have transportation problems. With the centralization of hospital services, there are many people in St. Stephen, in St. Andrews, and in the area of LSD, Rollingdam, and so on, who have cancer, who have kidney problems and have to go for dialysis, who have no money because they're living on welfare. How the heck can they afford a taxi or $100 each way to go from St. Stephen up to Saint John for the treatment they have to have? The Dial A Ride program has solved that. It's a model of the sort of thing that can work. The Fundy Community Foundation is community-based, but it has a national organization. It's a model; it's not the solution.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Interestingly enough, in Halifax, there was an information service called 211 dial-up, where you could dial up and they would refer you to the person you needed to see, as opposed to having to figure out for yourself where you needed to go. MOSH, a mobile medical unit, went out there. My thought was that this was something specific to the community, an example of community outreach doing some positive things that otherwise might not be done.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Savage.

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

You talked a bit about thinking outside the box. I think that's true, but I also think there are other matters to consider. We've heard from some strong social policy advocates that we now have some mechanisms that work in dealing with poverty. The child tax benefit is an example. It was introduced in 1996-97. That $1,500 is now somewhere around $3,500. They're suggesting that if it went to $5,200 we could further reduce poverty.

GIS for low-income seniors has helped a lot with seniors poverty. The working income tax benefit has great potential for the people Tony referred to, who are actually working very hard and still can't get out of the hole they're in with their families. The Caledon Institute has produced an idea for people with disabilities that would set up a basic income for persons with disabilities. It would equal the combined OAS and guaranteed income supplement, giving people a better chance. One of the sad things about poverty in Canada is the groups that are continually marginalized—aboriginal Canadians, people with mental health issues, people with addictions, and persons with disabilities. The challenges faced by people who have some kind of physical or intellectual disability are just amazing. It's really and truly almost impossible for them to have equal access to the wealth of the country.

I wonder if any of you have thoughts about producing a basic income for persons with disabilities.

[Kelly Wilson]

I think it's more important than just throwing a dollar their way. You need to teach them skills with that dollar. So if you were going to look at finding a way to fund a certain portion of society or a marginalized group, you need to develop some benchmarks before you do that so you have something to measure, to see whether or not what you're putting out there is working. If you're just going to throw a dollar at a problem, it'll only work as long as the dollar is there. When the dollar is gone, it's going to be the same problem over again. And those same people are going to be back in the same group.

It's really important to develop some benchmarks, to figure out what you want to target with that dollar, and to figure out what kinds of measurable milestones you're looking to attain with that dollar to make sure that the people who access a service are coming through and maintaining those measurable outcomes at the end.

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

I agree with that a hundred per cent. But it seems to me that in the meantime, people are starving to death. And they can't get around.