Evidence of meeting #37 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was women.
3:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
We'll begin meeting 37, pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), for a study of the federal contribution in reducing poverty in Canada.
We're pleased to have pretty much all our witnesses in place. Whether Josephine shows or not.... We'll start by going to Judit and Elita. I don't know which of you will be taking the five minutes.
3:10 p.m.
Judit Alcalde Research Director, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
We're splitting it.
3:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
We'll be flexible, so we'll go to five minutes each. If you need more for concluding remarks we'll let you go over that. Then we'll go seven minutes apiece. Ms. Chow will be here as well. They'll direct their questions to whoever they choose, or maybe to all of you.
We'll proceed with Judit, the research director for Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion. She is splitting her time with Elita McAdam, research assistant.
Take it away.
3:10 p.m.
Research Director, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
Thank you.
Thank you for inviting us to contribute to your discussion on poverty. Our focus today will be on lone mothers in poverty, based on our roles in the national research study. The study is Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion. It's a five-year research alliance that involves academic researchers from five universities across Canada, as well as government and non-profit community organizations. It's funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The research is focused on the three urban regions of Vancouver, Toronto, and St. John’s.
The brief we have provided is based on our research data over the last three years. We interviewed over 100 single mothers from St. John's, Toronto, and Vancouver annually over the last three years. We're about to begin our fourth round of interviews. About one-third of the women interviewed are visible minority or aboriginal, and all were on social assistance at the outset of the project. Since then many have moved back and forth between welfare and work. We'll go over a few of the examples, and refer you to the brief for the more detailed discourse on this.
Our recommendations are based on the suggestion that current policies of gender neutrality are actively disadvantaging Canadian women and therefore failing at neutrality. Women are poorer than men at almost every stage in life, and women have become the dominant workers in the increasingly precarious labour market. These issues are magnified for aboriginal and racialized women.
Women constitute 70% of the part-time labour force. The average annual income for non-aboriginal women is $19,350. Aboriginal women earn only about two-thirds of this, and visible minority women about three-quarters.
On the gender income gap, Canada is 14th of 15 peer countries. I'll refer you to many quotes from the women we've interviewed in the brief we've provided.
A key aspect of our project is that the research team includes lone mothers whom we have hired and trained as research assistants. This offers us a much deeper understanding of the needs and aspirations of these women and their families.
With me today is Elita McAdam, one of Lone Mothers' researcher assistants who has been working with our project over the last three and half years. I'll turn it over to her so she can highlight the seven main issues that are coming out in our research.
3:10 p.m.
Elita McAdam Research Assistant, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
Thank you.
It's important to acknowledge that some people think that people on social assistance are all deadbeats and don't want to work. We can tell you that for the women we've talked to, nothing could be further from that. They want to have the dignity that is denied them when they're poor and on welfare.
Some of the issues they face are abuse ones. Women often have to turn to social assistance when they face abusive relationships, and that applied to one-third to one half of the lone mothers we interviewed.
On poverty and profound material deprivation, the women don't have enough food to feel their children, never mind worrying about feeding them healthy food. And 40% of lone mothers live below the Statistics Canada poverty line.
It's very difficult for women to find adequate child care, especially if they have to work after hours. It's easy to get a subsidy for child care, but it's very difficult to find a day care that takes that subsidy. So that's also a hurdle.
Housing is another big hurdle. Of the 42 women we're following in Toronto, at least 27 families have moved within the last two years alone. We have found that when women live in social housing that is adequately maintained, it's a major factor in enabling lone mothers to leave assistance.
On education and training, I'll give you a personal example. I'm aboriginal, first nation, and I had to fight my band to fund me. It's not as easy as it seems. Once I started going to the University of Toronto I was hired as a relief worker at an addiction centre. With the money I made there I paid for my own college so I could get a degree in addiction counselling. There is a link there if women have adequate access to university.
As far as the labour market, most jobs are minimum wage. Even $12 a hour can't sustain a woman and her family.
On getting caught in the safety net, the failure of systems, single mums living on poverty rely on different supports and systems like OW, ODSP, child welfare, and housing. They are often vulnerable because they are left to manage and navigate these systems alone. An example we had was a woman who had to give her kids to her parents temporarily so she could find a place to live. When she found a place to live the welfare system would not give her enough money to pay for the last month's rent because they deemed her to be a single person. She couldn't get her kids back until she had the place, and she couldn't get the place until she had her kids back. It was a Catch-22.
On dealing with the issues we've outlined, you can refer to our report.
I will turn it back over to Judit.
Thank you.
3:15 p.m.
Research Director, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
Do we have time left?
3:15 p.m.
Research Director, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
It's okay. We've highlighted the seven key issues that we see related to mothers in poverty. Our report outlines twelve recommendations that are key to dealing with these issues.
3:15 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Right. We have those. They are very well laid out here, so we'll want to catch that and maybe ask questions to cover it that way.
We'll move to Yves Savoie.
3:15 p.m.
Yves Savoie President and Chief Executive Officer, Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada
Thank you.
Thank you for your invitation. I will address you only in English but I will be very happy to answer your questions in French later on.
Thank you very much for inviting the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Canada to present today. We're pleased to provide input to your study of the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada, and congratulate the committee for undertaking this important work.
Our recommendations focus on two areas--one, ensuring that people with MS can stay at work, and two, ensuring that those who cannot work do not live in poverty. We have three specific recommendations, and I'll detail them: first, allow spouses to claim the caregiver tax credit, which--you may find this surprising--right now isn't allowed; make employment insurance sickness benefits more flexible to allow people with MS to work part time and receive partial benefits; and finally, make the disability tax credit a refundable one. I'll discuss each in turn at greater length.
Allowing spouses to claim the tax credit for caregiving would recognize the incredible contribution caregivers make, particularly, as is most often the case, when this role falls on the spouse. We hear about this issue very often, typically when someone who is trying to understand the caregiver amount gives our society a call. As their spouse becomes much more disabled, they're often unable to work as much, and have to reduce their hours of work to provide for their very disabled spouse. With that in mind, the spouse starts reading what is available in the government documentation, and reads:
you or your spouse or common-law partner’s child or grandchild; or you or your spouse's or common-law partner’s brother, sister, niece, nephew, aunt, uncle, parent, or grandparent who was resident in Canada....
That's quite a list, but obviously the person who is not included in this list is the spouse of the person who is disabled. We believe this is a major policy gap. It undervalues the caregiving that spouses provide every day, often at the expense of their paid participation in the labour market, every week, every year.
I just mention as an aside that the Province of Manitoba has just launched a refundable caregiver tax credit, very much modelled on the federal one, but in that case it extends to spouses, who can also claim the credit.
Our second recommendation is to allow people who have an unpredictable and episodic disease to have the option of working part-time while receiving partial employment insurance sickness benefits. This would encourage them to stay in the workplace and encourage employers to think of them as valuable employees, not as those who are ill and unreliable.
Episodic disabilities--these include, beyond MS, such things as lupus, mental illness, cancer, arthritis, hepatitis C, HIV--are illnesses that are characterized by periods of graver illness and then periods of respite. We recommend changes to the EI rules so that they allow individuals to work part-time and receive partial sickness benefits from 150 half-days instead of the current 15 weeks or the 75 full days.
We believe this small step would benefit people with MS and other episodic disabilities and benefit society at large as well. There are obvious benefits beyond the collection of taxes, obviously, to participation in the labour market. We know that from people in poverty and people with disability--people want to work.
We do recognize that this change has the potential to increase the number of EI sickness benefit payouts, but we believe this cost would be substantially offset by the increased number of people and the value, obviously, of their participation in the workplace.
Our third recommendation really has to do significantly with those people with MS for whom the disease has been most disabling, and who cannot work. It really is a simple one: make the disability tax credit a refundable benefit.
Having a disability automatically means that you have expenses that an able-bodied person avoids. These expenses are very significant. For many people with MS, fatigue will be an invisible characteristic of the early course of the disease. That alone can make walking even short distances impossible. Riding a bus or using public transit is made difficult. A car becomes a necessity. For people who use a wheelchair, an adapted van is a necessity.
We believe that making the disability tax credit a refundable benefit would bring money into the hands of people with a disability who do not have enough income against which to apply the credit.
I realize my time is up, so I'll just say that the adoption of these three practical and modest changes could allow for quick movement in this very critical area. We've prioritized them because we believe they're relatively easy, small steps to make, and are all clearly within federal jurisdiction.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
3:20 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Thank you, Yves.
At this point, then, we'll turn to John Myles, who's the Canada research chair in the social foundations of public policy at the University of Toronto. John, take it away for five minutes.
3:20 p.m.
John Myles Canada Research Chair in the Social Foundations of Public Policy, University of Toronto, As an Individual
Thanks very much, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the committee for inviting me to be with you today.
Before I begin my remarks, I just wanted to remind the committee members that Canada does have at least one great success story in the field of poverty reduction. When I began my career over 30 years ago, Canada had the highest rate of poverty of any western country among its seniors. Our poverty rate among seniors was higher than it was in the United States in the late 1970s. By 2000 our seniors had among the lowest poverty rates of any western country. In this particular instance we rival good old egalitarian Sweden. My reason for pointing that out is that we've demonstrated we can do it. The big question is whether we can duplicate this kind of success among other disadvantaged groups in Canada.
I think we certainly know what needs to be done, but we don't always know how to do it. By that I mean there are real, practical problems of coordination. One of the issues I'll turn to at the end of my remarks, if there is time, is an issue that I think is of interest to this committee, the problem of federal and provincial jurisdictions.
The first point is that there's no single magic bullet that you can use to fix poverty or to bring poverty down. You need a whole complex of institutions, a family of policies all working at the same time. Among these, the single biggest weapon in the war on poverty is employment. Having a job is the most effective guarantor of escaping poverty. I might also mention that the psychologists are puzzled sometimes by the fact that having a job is probably the single best predictor of individual psychological well-being and happiness. It matters more than your salary, for example.
Canada's done middling well on the employment front, but not nearly as well as we could or should. Male employment rates have actually fallen in Canada since the 1980s. We now have a lot of good comparative research that indicates the most successful countries in recent decades are those that have invested heavily in what are called active labour market policies. Now, active labour market policies can be a complex topic, but the simple notion of it is that if people can't find jobs, then governments create institutions to bring jobs to people and to provide the training that enables people to find employment.
Countries like Denmark and the Netherlands really began to take the right to work and the right to employment seriously in the 1990s. These programs have made a huge difference. In contrast, Canada's investment in activation strategies has been rather modest.
Achieving high levels of employment, of course, also requires good public services, including health, education, and public transport. All of these things are connected. Today it also requires good child care programs. In 1990 single mothers in Quebec had the lowest employment rate of any province in Canada. By 2000 Quebec single mothers had the highest employment rate of any province in Canada. The explanation is fairly simple: highly subsidized day care services.
Employment is the key, but not if wages are low. I have another little fact for you. Along with the United States, Canada enjoys the ignominious position of having the largest share of low-wage jobs in the OECD. The OECD estimates that about 22% of Canadian full-time employees are in low-paying jobs. In continental Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the numbers are around 15% compared to our 22%. In the Nordic countries, those numbers fall to 7% or less. As a result, Canadians face a high risk of being among the working poor.
I have some comments in my notes about strategies to deal with that situation, both long term and intermediate term, but I'll pass over them in the interest of time.
I could go on and mention other policy areas that are essential to licking the poverty problem--housing is an example--and I said little about specific target groups, such as aboriginals.
Is that my time?
3:25 p.m.
Conservative
3:25 p.m.
Canada Research Chair in the Social Foundations of Public Policy, University of Toronto, As an Individual
My point is that addressing the poverty problem requires a whole family of policy initiatives that all work together at the same time. That means that fighting poverty requires lots and lots of policy coordination. If you want to maximize employment, for example, you also have to be thinking about family and child care issues. You can't deal with them as separate issues. But our structures and institutions make this difficult.
There are two main obstacles to developing a well-coordinated policy agenda. One is the old problem that every country faces, which is a bureaucratic division of labour into different departments of government. We've chopped up the policy domain into little packages to make it manageable. But every country faces that. The most pressing problem is overlapping federal and provincial government jurisdiction, especially in areas related to the labour market, which is an issue I've emphasized this afternoon.
Is there any solution to this problem? The committee might find it instructive, if you haven't already studied it, to consider the European Union strategy for addressing an even more conflictual problem with coordination across member countries. It's called the open method of coordination. It involves the setting of common targets, such as employment levels, without trying to dictate to countries which policy mechanisms they will use to reach those targets. It also involves an intensive system of auditing and analysis to evaluate national success in reaching these targets.
Here in Canada we also have exemplars of an even more demanding political process, and I'll close on this. To illustrate, I want to use the example of the CPP reform of the late nineties, a reform that almost everyone now judges to be one of our big federal-provincial success stories. What drove the reform? Bruce Little's recent book on the CPP reform, which I recommend to you all, contains what I think is the essence of the answer. In 1985, ten years before people started looking for a solution, the federal government and the provinces introduced what I will call a forcing mechanism that required them to seek a joint solution to problems of inadequate CPP funding, as determined by the chief actuary. The default provision they introduced in 1985 meant that when the chief actuary submitted his gloomy 15th report on the CPP in 1995, the outcome was certain. Federal and provincial ministers would soon be at the bargaining table, either to cut benefits or to raise contributions. They had locked themselves into this agreement. Should they have failed to act, contribution rates would automatically have risen to about 14% in the year 2030, and for reasons of intergenerational equity, no one wanted that. The entire purpose of the reform was to preclude that possibility, and they cut a deal that will keep the rates stable at about 9.9% well in the future.
What do we see here? Despite enormous differences in political preferences among the provinces and the federal government, they reached a consensus on policy targets. Then they created a lock-in provision that required them to reach these targets: if X doesn't happen, Y will happen. This is exactly what I encourage you to think about. If the Parliament of Canada wants to reduce poverty, lock yourselves and your successors, along with the provinces, to the extent you can, into reaching specific outcomes. And specify what must happen if those targets are not reached. I think of this as making a poverty reduction contract with the people of Canada.
Thank you.
3:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Thank you, John.
We'll move to Mark.
Sometimes those who have testified here, if they want more of their material on the Hansard record--I know that Josephine and others have caught on to this--will use it in the response to a question. Ignore the question and enter your material. Well, pay attention to the question too.
I'll turn it over to Mark. Mark is the chair of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. Then we'll go to Sarah, and by that time, hopefully, Josephine's materials will be back on the scene.
Mark, please proceed for five minutes.
3:30 p.m.
Mark Chamberlain Chair, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I also sit on the National Council of Welfare and the Ontario provincial poverty results table.
The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was born out of a concern for our community's poverty challenge. It came together in May of 2005 to understand Hamilton's high poverty levels, to focus the community's attention on poverty, and to begin to find solutions. Initially co-convened by the Hamilton Community Foundation and the City of Hamilton, the roundtable today is a multi-sector 42-member body that has engaged more than 900 organizations and 42,000 individuals in Hamilton in an effort to make Hamilton the best place to raise a child.
A poverty matrix based on Statistics Canada 2001 census data concluded that Hamilton was tied with Toronto for the highest rate of residents living below the low-income cut-off: 20% of Hamilton residents lived in poverty, while one in four children were growing up in poverty. That equals about 100,000 of our residents and 25,000 children under the age of 14.
The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction developed a change framework that focused on a policy and systems change agenda and identified key points in a child's development in which strategic investments could make a positive difference. These critical points of investment include quality early learning and parenting, skills gained from education, activity, and recreation, targeted skills development, employment, asset building, and wealth creation. In other words, we looked at what a human being needs to be a resilient and contributing member of society from pre-birth to employment.
In driving forward community investments, the roundtable worked with established collaborative planning tables, which are focused on the shared outcomes and impacts for children and their families living in poverty. These critical investment points are built on foundational community supports, each of which requires investment and policy interaction by all levels of government, including municipal. We have focussed on systemic changes that will lead to long-term poverty reduction efforts. For example, we have encouraged enhanced community partnerships with governments, increased flexibility in funding and program delivery, and action-oriented solutions.
The Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction experience proves that a strategic focus on poverty can shift the impact of poverty on a community. By working together, citizens, businesses, governments, and community organizations have achieved the following outcomes: a reduction in the poverty rate from 20% to 18%, resulting in 6,000 fewer citizens living below the low-income cut-off, at a time when other communities experienced rising poverty rates; 175 community solutions leading to increased household and social assets for over 47,000 children, youth, and their families, including increased income, access to child care, increased access to skills training, new employment opportunities, and increased access to housing; over $10 million invested in local poverty-reduction priorities through the Hamilton Community Foundation, the United Way, the City of Hamilton, and, more important, business corporate investments and new investments by the provincial and federal governments; unprecedented media coverage of the impact of poverty, which has helped our community to understand that poverty is not lazy people; and putting the Ontario poverty reduction strategy into effect.
Over the past four years, we've learned a number of important lessons. First, we learned that the problem is complex and multi-sectoral. The solution must include all stakeholders—government, business, not-for-profit sectors, health, education, local communities, and people living in poverty. Essentially, we are all part of the problem; therefore, we must all be part of the solution. We encourage the federal government to establish an interdepartmental secretariat on poverty reduction and a multisector national panel on poverty reduction.
Second, we learned that, generally speaking, we know the solutions to poverty and we have many capable folks who can actually deliver those solutions. There is great evidence regarding the positive impact on individuals, communities, and entire countries of investment in early intervention, affordable housing, education, skills training, new Canadians, urban aboriginal populations, and income security, including emergency supports such as EI. However, for sustained solutions, we must invest these resources and create the necessary policies to reduce and prevent poverty. We must ensure that program investments are flexible and sustainable, that they realize the maximum impact over the long term, and that all programs reflect the uniqueness of each community.
Third, we learned that investments in poverty are essentially the same investments that one makes for prosperity. It is investment in human capital, human resilience, and community resilience. In a world of constant change, what better investment is there? And if poverty and prosperity are inseparably linked, then it is clear to us in Hamilton that it is impossible to have a national economic strategy without having a national poverty reduction strategy.
Unfortunately, we have also found that we have, for all our efforts, had very little impact on the overall poverty rate in Canada for the past four years, other than--I completely agree--for seniors. This is caused by many factors. However, none is greater than our lack of a sense of urgency and how this issue aligns or apparently is misaligned with our values as Canadians. We ask in Hamilton, is poverty the flu or is poverty SARS? If poverty were viewed as we view SARS, it would have been solved a long time ago. The solution and the urgency is not a question of money or knowing what to do; it is a question of values.
Once we have agreed, as we have in Hamilton, that poverty is simply unacceptable in Canada--and if poverty is unacceptable, then child poverty is simply disgusting--then there is no question that we can all but eliminate poverty. We must simply set measurable indicators and timelines to reduce and ultimately eliminate poverty and set ourselves a much higher aspiration than we have currently.
Thank you.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Thank you very much, Mark. You got a lot of material packed in there. You must be a jogger or aerobic exerciser or something. You're not even panting or anything.
3:35 p.m.
Chair, Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction
I'm fast, and we have a longer report that we've e-mailed you.
3:35 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Sometimes we do have to watch the speed because of the interpreters, but I never heard any complaints, so they must have managed.
Next will be Sarah Blackstock, who is a research and policy analyst with the Income Security Advocacy Centre. You have five minutes.
3:35 p.m.
Sarah Blackstock Research and Policy Analyst, Income Security Advocacy Centre (ISAC)
I'm really pleased to be here today contributing to what's becoming quite a rich discussion across this country about poverty reduction. I'm sure certainly everyone who is here would agree it's about time, and I imagine most of you would as well.
As the chair said, I work with the Income Security Advocacy Centre, which is a legal clinic in Ontario focused on test case litigation, law reform, and community organizing that's focused on improving the income security and social inclusion of low-income Ontarians.
As I said, the goal of poverty reduction is being taken up by provinces across the country, including Ontario. There are provincial poverty reduction strategies, there's poverty reduction legislation, and now there is innovative programming. Provinces have come to realize that creating public policy to reduce poverty is not only the just and decent thing to do—which I would argue should certainly be reason enough to act—but it's also the smart thing to do if we want strong economies and healthy communities. And as Mark just indicated, it's not just the provincial jurisdictions that are taking up the call to reduce poverty; it's municipalities and communities across this country, it's social activists, it's teachers, it's health practitioners, it's faith communities, it's heads of banks, and it's chambers of commerce, which are all insisting that poverty reduction should be taken seriously for reasons of justice, fairness, social inclusion, health, and economics.
As has already been mentioned, Ontario has developed a provincial poverty reduction strategy, and I know Minister Matthews has appeared before this committee and told you in detail about it. It's an imperfect strategy, in my view, but it is a significant step in the right direction.
What's exciting to those of us who do the work here in Ontario is that people across this province, and at the local levels, are getting involved in the work of poverty reduction. But it seems to me that Canada is not simply the sum of its parts; we are a nation. Certainly we are a nation with tremendous difference and diversity, but we're also a nation with shared values and aspirations, and Ontario is not alone in calling for the federal government to take its rightful and necessary place in our shared work to reduce poverty.
Working in a cooperative and transparent fashion, the federal government and provinces should establish a national poverty reduction strategy that complements and reinforces provincial and territorial efforts and that's guided by a vision of a poverty-free country in which charter and human rights are fully realized. It should be a strategy that has targets and timelines. I suggest it must also be a strategy that's transparent, one that's transparent in its decision-making, its deliberations, its monitoring, and its evaluation.
I offer the national child benefit supplement as an example of a mostly good program that resulted from provincial, territorial, and federal negotiations, but also as an example of some of the pitfalls of cooperative federalism, because with no formal signed agreement and mostly closed-door negotiations, there was a lack of transparency and accountability, which mattered a lot to those advocates and anti-poverty activists who had concerns they wanted taken seriously. We didn't have access to the deliberations to have the rich analysis we wanted to be able to engage in with government around our concerns.
Preliminary steps to establish a national poverty reduction strategy, I think, are obvious and have been articulated here and by provinces and municipalities across the country as well as researchers, advocates, independent citizens, and low-income people themselves. So I'm just going to touch quickly on three important ones.
Mine is only yet another voice calling for the reform of employment insurance in this country. Unemployed workers are entitled to those benefits that will enable them to cope financially and gain the necessary support and/or training they need to re-enter the labour market. I'm sure many people who have appeared before you today have reminded you that in this province only 32% of unemployed Ontarians qualify for EI. So like many others, the Income Security Advocacy Centre is calling for uniform entry requirements based on 360 hours of work, benefit levels raised to 60% of earnings based on a worker's best 12 weeks, and an increase in the period in which benefits may be collected to a maximum of 50 weeks.
Secondly, increase the national child benefit supplement. This is money that is always well used. It feeds, it clothes, it takes care of our kids, and it's money, of course, that's used immediately in local communities, so it's also good for local economies. We're calling for the NCBS to be increased to $5,200.
Finally, I'll just mention the urgent need to invest in early childhood education and care. Our recommendation is that money should be earmarked in the next two federal budgets for ECEC, specifically for operating costs and capital expenses, including expansion and quality improvements, but that a national child care strategy is critical to poverty reduction in this country.
I'll stop there and just say that I am very excited by what I hope will be very fruitful discussions.
3:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Thank you very much, Sarah.
We'll turn now to Josephine Grey. I think Josephine is ready to go, and she is the executive director for Low Income Families Together.
3:45 p.m.
Josephine Grey Executive Director, Low Income Families Together (LIFT)
Thank you.
I'm actually also appearing here today as the so-called appointed domestic observer for the World Summit on Social Development for Canada. I was asked to observe Canada's negotiations as part of the World Summit on Social Development in 1995. That might seem like a long time ago, but I raise it because I do think... Let me say that I agree with all of the things that people have said here today. I want to talk about some things that maybe surround that, some of the context and some of the political issues that I think have a lot to do with this.
I raise the World Summit on Social Development along with a number of other things that occurred in the early 1990s because I think it's really important that we remember that at one point in time we were making some fairly serious strides toward not only poverty reduction but poverty eradication. We had a common purpose as a country to try to model and show an example of how a nation can in fact eradicate poverty--at least, that was what was being said at the time.
I should mention that in Ontario there was a nine-year and at least a $9 million process on social assistance reform that did a great deal of work on establishing how a social security system could be instituted that would be truly beneficial to low-income people, rather than simply becoming a different form of industry exploiting the misery of people who are vulnerable.
All of these things were lost in the shuffle, and particularly under the pressure of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. It had an enormous effect on our social policies for a variety of reasons. One of the things that I saw creeping into our policy arena was the notion that we could potentially privatize various forms of human service, which to me became perhaps the only explanation as to why a country with such wealth and so many resources and so much knowledge and a previously better record would suddenly be increasing poverty, freezing wages, freezing income levels, so that people were getting more and more desperate and more and more poor.
To me, the only explanation I could see is that those who were pulling strings behind government perhaps saw an opportunity to profit from human misery by privatizing human services. In fact we've seen quite a lot of that occur over the intervening period of time--for example, juvenile justice systems and the like--where a private company profits from the fact that poverty exists. If you look at the prison system, that is a very clear example.
I happen to live in a very densely populated, very diverse community, and I saw huge changes happen in that community. After the federal government decided it was no longer responsible and dumped the responsibility for poverty onto the provinces by cutting national standards, the province immediately responded by cutting everything else, right to the extent of having something like 130 laws and regulations changed in one bill, and there was no one there to stop that. There was no one there to say anything about it. At this point, I have to wonder if we are actually living in a country or we are living in a bunch of balkanized little states. The result of that was very quick and very severe. In my community, the level of criminal activity, drug dealing, etc., desperation, skyrocketed very fast. So the effects were immediate and blatant.
The other thing that happened, however, in that riding, which is the poorest and the richest riding in the country, was that we lost something along the lines of a million dollars a month in local revenue because cuts to people's income security--old people, refugees, immigrants, single mothers and the like--took money out of the local economy there.
I mention this because I think we are not simply talking about some nice ideas to reduce poverty. I think we're talking about something more fundamental and larger than that. How is it that Canada went from a country that believed in the common good to a country that suddenly didn't give a damn and wanted to follow the United States in every way? We brought in workfare. We brought in American corporations to design our social assistance systems and the like.
Meanwhile, some of us who realized that we had no protection.... By the way, if you look closely at Canadian law, there is no form of protection for people who are living in poverty. It is not a ground of discrimination, so we have no form of redress. This then allows someone like myself to go directly from my local community to the United Nations, without any stops along the way, because Canada has no accountability to my rights as a poor person.
So I went to the United Nations. And what the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights has had to say about this country is something this committee should study. It says very clearly that we have failed miserably, and in fact committed some pretty grievous violations of the human rights agreements we signed in 1976, by having absolutely no accountability mechanisms, no redress, no standards, etc. Now, I would submit that these things were signed in our name, as a people....
That couldn't have been five minutes, was it? Sorry. I'll finish up.
Anyway, I would implore that you study what the committee had to say. It made some very intelligent recommendations, and it brings some very important issues forward. It's ridiculous that we had to go that far to be heard so that something could be communicated back to our government about the realities we are facing. That was the only forum where we could have that dialogue--in Geneva. This is the first time I've seen dialogue involving the federal government about poverty reduction and these issues since the early nineties, so I find that rather extraordinary.
I also wanted to mention that at the time of the World Summit for Social Development, Lloyd Axworthy was very involved in that big reform of human resources and development. There was, again, money, investments, time, and effort that Canadians within my lifetime had put in to try to come up with a better system. And on the day of the budget, while we were all conveniently located in Copenhagen and could say nothing about the largest cuts in history to social security, what Lloyd Axworthy said to me--and I think I can now share this--was that our country had taken an entirely new direction, that the finance minister had completely changed everything, that it was fully undemocratic, and he was in full despair about the future of our nation. I had to agree with him, and I have to tell you that in my line of work and what I've lived through and what I've seen in my community, what I've experienced with my children, it was indeed a massive change that caused a great deal of suffering for everyone.
Lastly, I want to point out that while all of the recommendations here are very valuable and I fully support them, I think we need to take some other measures that respect human rights so we can use human rights commitments and standards and obligations to get provinces and the federal government to do things like look at corporate law. Corporations have no right to be running away and leaving people stranded without severance packages and the like. These are the kinds of things we have to start looking at. They are doing an awful lot of rampant, unfettered activities that are causing more harm and more poverty for more people.
So it's not just strictly social security issues or social security policy that we have to examine when we look at poverty in general. I think we also have to construct accountability mechanisms that can influence things like corporate law. If we don't reform the corporate law and our economic framework, we're not going to make very many strides, because the context will continue to undermine everything we do. I think that's crucially important, and I hope this committee looks seriously at creating the sorts of mechanisms that can allow that to happen.
3:50 p.m.
Conservative
The Acting Chair Conservative Maurice Vellacott
Thank you, Josephine.
We'll turn to Maria, who is going to lead off with seven minutes. She'll direct her questions to any one of you, or maybe several of you, and then we'll proceed from there.
3:50 p.m.
Liberal
Maria Minna Liberal Beaches—East York, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you all of you for your presentations this afternoon.
As I did earlier in the day, I'm going to start by saying that I don't have disagreements with anything that was said with respect to the needs and where we need to go and the issues. A lot of you have made a lot of the same recommendations in terms of legislation, in terms of the national child care program, housing--the planks of a national anti-poverty strategy, what they are and what they should be, and the determinants. So I won't go into the specifics again and bore you with them.
I will ask some questions with respect to expanding some areas and maybe just getting some stuff on record.
The first area has to do with gender. In the presentation of the Lone Mothers group you mentioned that the current system with its gender-neutral approach isn't working, and of course I agree with you. I don't know if you read the gender budgeting report that was done by the Standing Committee on the Status of Women. We did hearings a year ago and we came out with a report. By gender budgeting we mean gender analysis in all government programs, budgeting processes, and other programs the government would be involved with implementing or developing. Gender analysis is critical to being able to ascertain whether or not a program is leaving women out, whether it's intentional or not, but women are being left behind, as is the case, as some of you have mentioned, with some areas of EI and other programs.
First of all, I wanted to know if you'd seen that report and how it would fit into any work that you've done, because you obviously had some specific things to say when you mentioned the gender neutrality problem. Maybe you could expand on that. I know we did a study, but there might be some stuff that....
3:55 p.m.
Research Director, Lone Mothers: Building Social Inclusion
I haven't read the report.