Human Resources Committee on June 2nd, 2009

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

So lack of child care—

[Sultana Jahangir]

Lack of child care is the main cause of women's poverty.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Okay, so it prevents them from being able to go to language training or upgrading, to look for proper work in their fields, or to get credentials. In essence, it's a major barrier. I understand that. I know the community well, but I just wanted to get this, because you represent not just the Bangladeshi community figuratively for me, but you also represent all of the other immigrants who are facing the same problem.

[Sultana Jahangir]

You know better than me, because you've been here for almost 17 years in our community. I'm very new. But as a newcomer, what kinds of problems do I face? From my expectations, from my experience and the community's experience, I saw this scenario: there is a lot of—

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I meant that the experience of your community is not different from the experiences of other communities, whether they are African Canadians or—

[Sultana Jahangir]

There is one difference between our community and other communities. Bengali women—

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

They are very highly educated.

[Sultana Jahangir]

Bengali people will find a way to come together and step forward to say these things. We see a lot of inequality in our community. Our surveys say that 80% of the women are eligible for subsidy, and only 14% get the tax subsidy, while other parts of the city get 50%. We are not given that equal opportunity. Because we are poor, we need more support, more subsidy, more child care services in this area.

What happens? Poor people always get hit first by the recession. We lost our jobs first. We lost our child care opportunities first. There is a child care centre in town; if you do a survey to find out whose kids are going over there, it's the kids whose mothers have the ability to give money to the child care centre—outside kids, not the poor people's kids, because they are not getting any subsidy right now.

There is a huge backlog. There are people who are eligible for the child care, but still there is no solution coming.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you very much.

My time is up, and was up long ago, I guess.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mrs. Minna, and thank you, Mrs. Jahangir.

Now I'll give anyone who doesn't understand French a moment to put on their headsets. Our next question is going to be in French. We don't want to cut into his time, so we're going to do this now. When you're all set, I'll turn the floor over to Mr. Ouellet.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Shapcott, earlier you said something that was very disturbing, namely that one quarter of Ontario's population, if I'm not mistaken, cannot afford housing that the government qualifies as affordable.

Could you elaborate on that statement? Is this situation unique to Ontario? Are other provinces facing the same problems? How can we remedy this as quickly as possible?

[Michael Shapcott]

Thank you, Mr. Ouellet.

The problem emerges from the Canada-Ontario affordable housing agreement, which is similar to the agreements that are signed between the federal government and every other province and which defines affordability using the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's private rental market survey.

Affordable housing is defined as the rent that a private landlord charges for a unit. That, in fact, is not affordable, as you well know, Mr. Ouellet; it's simply what landlords charge to tenants. Many tenants cannot afford private rents, and that is one of the reasons we have a very serious housing problem across the country. However, all of the federal-provincial agreements, in their affordability definition, set that as the benchmark. That's why, when we finally got the federal government to release some information about what actual rents were being charged, we were disturbed but not particularly surprised to find that they're just barely below the private market rents.

We're providing a subsidy. I could tell you the exact subsidy that the federal government is providing in Ontario for those 1,000 units. It is $26.5 million in the fiscal year 2007-08. For that, we're achieving rents that are just barely below the average market rent. As I mentioned to you, that means, for many households whose incomes are not sufficient to afford the average private market rent, that this program is not working for them.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

What measures need to be taken immediately by the federal government?

[Michael Shapcott]

There are two things that need to be done.

First of all, we need to take the existing programs and make sure they actually work. The old social housing programs and affordable housing programs, which were all cancelled in the 1990s—and in 1996 the federal government downloaded most of its responsibilities—and many of the social housing programs that exist in Quebec and several other provinces use an affordability definition tied to the ability of the household to pay. It's typically either 25% or 30% of the household's income.

That's the affordability definition that needs to be written into these laws.

If I may say so, there's a political calculation that comes into the affordability definition. If you want to appear to be doing more and funding more units and so on, then you make your affordability as unaffordable as you can: you bring it up close to the private market level. You get lots of units, relatively speaking, but those units are simply not any good for low- and moderate-income households. If you want to reach down, then you have to change that affordability definition.

The first thing you have to do is change that definition.

The second thing is, inevitably, that more money is required, because to reach down to ensure that the housing is truly affordable for low- and moderate-income households, more money is required.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Do you believe the concept of social housing administered by a municipality or government is a thing of the past? Should the concept be retained at the very least for the poorest, for immigrants, for single mothers or for persons who find themselves with little or no income for a period of time in their lives?

[Michael Shapcott]

Social housing is a success story in Canada. It has been a success story in many provinces. In the provinces of Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia, just to name three, they all had provincial social housing programs that complemented or worked with the federal social housing program. Those programs were very effective and they continue to be recognized around the world. I continue to get calls from housing experts who come to visit Canada and want to see our highly successful housing programs. All those social housing projects were funded under programs that were terminated in the early 1990s. We have a relic of a program that continues to provide good homes.

Incidentally, the federal government did fund over 600,000 truly affordable, good-quality homes from 1973 to 1993, right across the country. Those homes still provide good-quality, affordable housing for the people of Canada. We don't now have a national social housing program. The federal program provides a small capital subsidy to assist the housing developer to build a project. That subsidy varies among particular programs. It can go from as small as $25,000 a unit to $65,000 or $75,000 a unit, but it isn't a social housing program. Many social housing providers are finding, under the federal program, that they simply cannot develop units.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Do you belive social housing is a thing of the past? Should it be reconsidered as an option for certain categories of persons, such as the homeless who could move from the streets into social housing for a period of time and later transition to affordable housing or something similar? Do you believe social housing is a thing of the past?

[Michael Shapcott]

It's absolutely not a thing of the past. Social housing is widely used in many developed countries of the world as part of the total housing spectrum. In many countries of the world, in fact, social housing represents a significant portion. In Canada, less than 5% of our overall housing stock across the country is in the social sector. That puts us, among the developed countries, second to the bottom. The only country that has a worse record is the United States. European countries and other developed countries of the world, such as Hong Kong, all have a significantly higher social housing sector.

Mr. Ouellet, there are some provisions in the old social housing program and lots of regulations that were perhaps harsh and needed to be changed. No one is saying we should simply wind the clock back to 1973 and pretend that we can reintroduce the same old programs, but the concepts that were so successful in developing hundreds of thousands of units can be brought forward to today.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Ouellet.

I'll turn it over to Mr. Martin for seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

To the witnesses, thank you for being here today.

John, I want to ask my first question to you. I also want to thank you for the really good work you're doing to raise this issue of the plight of the not-for-profit and front-line agencies that are delivering immediate assistance to people who are really struggling. I would anticipate that as people run out of EI and drop into the social welfare system, and discover how difficult and mean-spirited it is, your problem is going to grow exponentially.

What do we need to do?

[John Andras]

Oh boy, do you have a day or two?

There are a lot of things that need to be done. Obviously, funding is a huge priority. The agencies are starved. They're being forced to cut services at the very time that demand is increasing. The quality of service is deteriorating. There are stories of inadequate nutrition in feeding programs just because there's not enough money and not enough food available from food banks to provide adequate nutrition. There are stories from the shelter system of endemic bed bugs, where they're literally eating people alive as they sleep.

As the pressure on the agencies increases, the standards are deteriorating and the quality of service being provided to people is deteriorating. Just using Sketch as an example, which is the one that's closest to me, as I mentioned, we had to cut at least $80,000 in our current year's budget, and we'll probably have to cut more next year. It means that we cannot run the program we used to run to give bursaries to street-involved youth to allow them to get back to school, to pay for tools, or textbooks, or relocation. So there are probably a dozen youth who will not be able to move on because of those cuts. We've also had to cut staff, which also will impact their ability to move on with their lives. That's replicated in virtually every agency.

What we're seeing is that people are hitting a wall and they're not able to move forward because the agencies can no longer provide the kind of service that they used to. There are agencies that literally are teetering on the edge of insolvency.

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

You had said a while back--I'm on your e-mail list--that we had about six months before a lot of the agencies would go broke. Is that still a realistic timeframe?

[John Andras]

I believe it is. A lot are cobbling through. You have executive directors who aren't being paid because they're putting the funding into programs, and that can go on for only so long. An immediate help would be to double the level of funding to programs like HIPPY, back to the funding levels that they once were. That would help. Also, I think there needs to be a very close examination of what the essential services really are to ensure that the agencies that are delivering those essential services are adequately funded to provide the services.

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

Okay, I want to shift over to Tim for a minute.

Tim, you mentioned a couple of things that I thought were important. You said, let's eradicate poverty tomorrow, let's not wait 25 years or whatever, or five years. I couldn't agree with you more. As a country, we've done some of that with CPP, with health care, with EI. We decided we were going to do something big, and we did.

You mentioned, as a way to get there, a guaranteed annual income, a basic income. Do you want to talk a bit more about how that would happen, what it would look like?