Human Resources Committee on Dec. 1st, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We'll be brought back to order here this afternoon pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and our study on the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada.

I want to thank our two witnesses for taking time out of your busy days to be here with us today.

You may or may not know that our committee has been studying this issue for over a year now and into the last Parliament. We have been out east and we've had a chance to hear from people in Ontario. This has been part of our western swing and it was suggested that we try to get to some northern communities. I'm not sure who on the committee suggested it, but it has been a great idea. We've had some great testimony this morning, and certainly some things that we had not heard before. Certainly some things are a little bit different. You are going to tell us a bit more about some of those things this afternoon.

I will start with you, Ms. O'Donnell. Kate, I believe you are with Maryhouse. Maybe you will tell us a bit about what Maryhouse is and what you do and maybe some of the suggestions you have for us as a committee to take back and put into our report to make recommendations to the government.

Ms. O'Donnell, welcome. You have seven minutes. If you have more to say, that's fine. If you have less, that is okay too. Then we'll have some questions and answers after both of you get a chance to give us your testimony.

Once again, thanks for being here. The floor is yours for seven minutes.

[Kate O'Donnell, Director, Maryhouse]

First, I'd like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to speak here today.

To understand how Maryhouse touches those who are deemed to be poor, I would like to give a short account of our beginnings.

In 1954 Bishop Jean-Louis Coudert invited the Madonna House Apostolate in Combermere, Ontario, to open its first field or mission house. Bishop Coudert asked that we come as a presence in the city and that we try to answer the needs of the people. It's a rather broad mandate.

One of the immediate needs was to provide safe shelter for folks who were coming to Whitehorse for medical reasons. This primarily included pregnant women who were coming in from the communities near their due dates. The doctors asked that they come in. We also had a shelter for men: those coming into the territory to seek employment; those coming from the various communities for medical reasons; and of course those who, because of addictions, needed a place of safety for a night or two. Bishop Coudert also asked us to answer other needs, such as the need for clothing, food, and so on.

In June 1954 three staff workers from the Madonna House Apostolate arrived and began our work. Basically, we answered the door. I believe that on the first day we arrived, a group of Americans travelling through to Fairbanks—soldiers and their wives—had no place to stay here in Whitehorse. Because they were not Canadian, they had no access to any kind of assistance, so we provided a place for them to stay. I think it was just in the front room of Maryhouse. And that's how we started. It was just kind of what we had.

Madonna House and its missions live by begging. We are not funded, so we really do depend upon the providence of God through our friends. As people came to our door looking for help with shelter, clothing, and food, we answered as best we could. If we had the items for their request, we would answer.

Maryhouse and the Salvation Army were the emergency food programs until the Whitehorse food bank opened this spring. Right from the beginning we were handing out food. I believe the Salvation Army was here and then came back, so it wasn't until a little later. We never said we were the food bank, but we were there.

We have clothed many people. Some are the men on the street. Some are people who have arrived here in the Yukon with very few resources. We have helped people re-establish themselves after being in difficult situations. This has included people coming to our shelters trying to get established and women trying to get away from difficult situations. I think we did that right up until 1997. I think it wasn't until right around then that they opened the shelter for women in Whitehorse. I'm not sure.

Sometimes our response has simply been to share a cup of tea or some sandwiches with those who come to our door. We have been of assistance to people needing to leave the territory because of family illness or death who had no other means of leaving. Sometimes—and this is really basic—it is just providing a tank of gas for people so they can get out of town. People would come to us and we would try our best to help them.

This is one example. A few years ago, two women arrived at our door looking for help. They had come in on a bus at 4:30 in the morning, and they were moving from the southern U.S. to Alaska. Of course, they did not realize what going by bus from the eastern part of the southern U.S. to Alaska would entail. We were able to provide them with a place to get cleaned up and we gave them some food for their journey so they could keep going.

Oftentimes when we talk about the poor, we think primarily of the economically poor. However, Maryhouse has tried to respond to all who have come to us. Throughout the years, many people have come to us when they have found themselves in different situations and now and then when they just needed a friend.

Today we continue to give out clothing to people who may technically have a house but who live on the street.

The other day a man came to the door. Oftentimes the men on the street come to the door and ask for mitts, hats, toques, especially in the winter when it's cold. I said to the man, “We don't have any. We're all out. We've given them all away. We have to wait until more come in in donation or we get a chance to buy some.” He said, “I didn't think I needed them, so I left my pair at home.” It was just an interesting thing.

Due to mental illness or addiction, they are unable to maintain employment. Sometimes people come who are indeed working, and some have even more than one job, usually part-time, and they have no benefits. When the car breaks down, the washing machine breaks, injuries or sickness happen, they do need assistance.

I believe that today it is harder to simply categorize people as poor. We do have a lot of hidden poor. Perhaps they are receiving assistance, but it is never enough, and quite truthfully I don't think it will ever be enough, because we live in a society where to outward appearances all is fine and we can get clothing that is decent-looking cheaply, but they would still be living below the poverty line.

People continue to knock on our door, asking for clothing, especially in the winter. A few days ago a man arrived from another province and needed to get clothing to work. We were able to outfit him with some good outdoor clothing and even had a pair of boots that fit. As we were trying to find the items, he told us that he needed it because of his job, which was snow removal. Snow removal is not a good-paying job. It's what you can grab.

A woman whose husband is unable to work and whose grandchildren are experiencing difficulties has come to ask us for help. It's been an ongoing thing. She does have a job, but it's the multiple problems that are going on there.

Through the emergency food program, we know that many people would factor us into their budget. When we had the emergency food program and the Salvation Army also had the program, people would be able to come to us once a month and receive groceries. It wasn't a lot of groceries; it was primarily to help them get over this change between when their cheque ran out and before the new one came. Then, also, when they were able to they would go to the Salvation Army. They had a different timeframe for coming for help.

They did factor us in. Then oftentimes people would say we have the same people, yet we did not have the same people all the time, because if people were able to get work, seasonal work, they didn't come. They didn't need us. They were okay.

I know over the years people would come to us. Oftentimes, people coming in from the communities, men coming in from the communities, would need a place to stay. They have relatives in town, but they still need a place to stay. The relatives would let them stay but it would help if they had a bag of groceries. That was a way of enabling themselves to have safe caring, and of helping their relatives.

We still have a man who would come to the food program and only ask for one or two items. He still comes. He knocks on the door every once in a while and says, “Do you have any Chef Boyardee ravioli? I just need one can. I just need two cans. Do you have any hot sauce?” It's always just one item. I think, why is he still coming to us, but he does. So when we've got it, we give it.

One thing I'd like to say is that at Maryhouse we were invited by Bishop Jean-Louis Coudert, and our mission was for Whitehorse. It's broad. But I don't think Maryhouse thinks in terms of serving the poor. We really try to serve the person who is at the door, and not lump everybody in together.

Thank you for listening.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Ms. O'Donnell. That was very nice.

We have Nyingje Norgang, who is from the Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre.

Welcome. The floor is now yours. You have seven minutes.

[Nyingje Norgang, Women's Advocate, Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre]

I thank you for the opportunity to address you today. I hope to share with you some of the sights, sounds, sensations, and tastes of the Yukon.

It's a beautiful place, but as a women's advocate at Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre, I do not experience the beauty you see on a travel brochure. I see beautiful young women believing, in their youthful way, that they're invulnerable, the excitement of the possibility of their lives overflowing into laughter. In a few years, when other young women are fulfilling the promise of their youth and coming fully into the blossoming of that possibility, I see these young women who are now old in body and spirit.

They are many years younger than I am, but their skin has now aged, their teeth are falling out, their bodies are bent and spent, and their spirits are suffering. These aged young women tell the tale of abuse, substance use, and poverty. They are a stark reminder that we need gender-informed solutions to poverty.

There are gender differences in alcohol and drug use, from pathway to use to effects of use.

In terms of pathway to use, violence against women is a major factor. Girls who are physically or sexually abused by dating partners are more likely to be at risk for substance use. They have a 2.5 times greater likelihood of heavy smoking. They have a 1.7 times greater likelihood of binge drinking. They have a 3.4 times greater likelihood of cocaine use, a 5.7 times greater likelihood of considering suicide, and they attempt suicide within a year of the abuse at 8.6 times the rate of the rest of the population. Alcohol and other substance use problems have been found to be up to 15 times higher among women who are survivors of partner violence than in the general population, and as many as 80% of women entering treatment for substance use problems have histories of abuse or assault.

Just as there are gender differences in pathways to use, there are gender differences in the effects of drugs and alcohol. Basically, women get sicker quicker.

It is not enough to treat the addiction; the causes for the addiction need to be addressed. Poverty action needs to take into account that addiction can be a way of adapting to desperately difficult circumstances. People cannot be cured of adaptive strategies unless better alternatives are available to them.

I live on the route the ambulance takes to the hospital, and each time I hear its siren, I wonder if it is one of my clients. Is it the young woman who had no place to sleep and ended up back with an abusive man? Has she been beaten so badly that the ambulance was called? Is it someone I saw this afternoon looking for some food from the outreach van, too unsteady to hold the hot drink, its contents spilled down the front of an already soiled pair of pants? The woman who wasn't heard when she asked for help today, maybe the relatively inexpensive help of a clean bed, will now receive the expensive response of an ambulance and then the intensive care unit at the hospital. Not treating poverty is expensive, both financially and in human terms.

I smell the stink of some of the places where Whitehorse residents pay high rents to have a room, living with the smell of vomit, pee, and mould. It contrasts with the smells I think are natural to the Yukon: sage underfoot, wild roses blooming in summer.

We need national policies that make affordable, safe housing available to all. We need social policies and supports in place to enable the people who live in this housing to move forward in their lives, to be healthy, and to live lifespans that are the Canadian average.

Some days I feel cold seeping through no matter how many layers I'm wearing. I'm grateful to have a warm place to work and live. I think of the young person shivering on the street, telling me she still had hours to go before she could get into the room she rented. Staying with a personal acquaintance has been her only recourse; it is financially lucrative for the acquaintance, but exploitive of this young woman, who is not allowed to have a key and has to wait for the owner to return, maybe after work, maybe much later. She would keep checking back, hoping to be able to get inside. She has no phone, no warmth, and no shelter. She is a homeless person despite having a place to sleep at night.

As is the case with one per cent of people born in Canada, some of these people have fetal alcohol syndrome disorder. They are vulnerable to sexual abuse, physical abuse, and manipulation and exploitation by people who have greater mental ability than they have. Girls and women are particularly vulnerable.

Some of the women feeling the bite of the Yukon cold are HIV positive. Harm reduction is an important tool to address the poverty and health implications of substance use, especially for women. HIV rates are higher for female injection drug users because they're often second on the needle.

I taste the delicious hot meal the community kitchen serves to women for whom that may be the safest and sweetest meal of the week. They ask for a loaf of bread or some extra fruit to stuff in their pockets. They could get a meal at the Salvation Army, but that may not be safe. This is true for many of the women who come to Victoria Faulkner.

It is true for the woman too tired to be embarrassed about the bruises on her face. She knows many of the women at the centre have seen this, and worse, before. The food tastes good. She declines more solid food. It would hurt to chew it. Her teeth are not so good for chewing.

What I see, hear, smell, feel, and taste tells me viscerally that the Yukon needs gender-specific responses to poverty. Addressing poverty means addressing the issue of violence against women. Addressing poverty means addressing the different pathways to use and the different consequences of drug and alcohol use. Addressing poverty means providing safe, affordable housing for single women, mothers, and old women.

Addressing poverty means providing gender-responsive programs that would consider the needs of women in all aspects of design and delivery, including location, staffing, program development, program content, and program materials.

Addressing poverty in a gender-sensitive way means providing gender-informed services. These services would take into account our knowledge of the impact of trauma, understanding that many problem behaviours originate to cope with abusive experiences and recognizing the impact of violence and victimization on development and coping strategies. They would employ an empowerment model and strive to maximize a woman's choices and control. They would be based in relational collaboration and would create an atmosphere that is respectful of women's need for safety, respect, and acceptance. They would minimize the possibility of re-traumatization. And they would be culturally competent and would view each woman in the context of her life experiences and cultural background.

Thank you. May we see, hear, smell, feel, and taste the changes that reducing poverty in Canada would mean in women's lives.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Ms. Norgang.

We're going to start with Mr. Savage, from the Liberal Party. He has seven minutes.

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

Thank you very much.

Our committee, as the chair mentioned, has done some travelling. We're happy to be here today to hear the experience of those who are working with people who are living in poverty. We hope to hear from people who are living in poverty as we continue. We've had some of that.

It's a very powerful message from both of you.

I'd like to start, Kate, if I could, with you. I like what you said: it's your obligation to serve the person who is at the door. It's not to look for the poor but to serve the person who is at the door. We sometimes have this idea that we have to determine who the deserving poor are. I would think that people who show up at Maryhouse or people who show up at the Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre aren't there because they have a lot of options and a lot of alternatives. We really don't need to determine who's poor, right?

We had a member of Parliament this week, from my own province—and we're not being televised or anything, so I'm not trying to pick on this particular person--who referred to people in Halifax as no-good people living on the street. There is still a view among some people that not everybody who's living in those conditions should be. But everybody is a human being.

It seems to me that anybody who would show up at Maryhouse or at the Victoria Faulkner Women's Centre needs help. And it's not your job to.... I appreciate that point of view. You serve people who come looking for help.

[Kate O'Donnell]

Yes. Every spring, the churches get together and have a food drive to support Maryhouse and the Salvation Army, and now they do it for the food bank. One time this one man, who was kind of responsible for organizing it—he was from an evangelical church—said to me that it says in the Bible that if you don't work, you shouldn't eat. I said that a lot of the people who come to us who need food are working really hard to work the system to be able to eat. It's not that they're not working. They're just not employed, or they're not getting cash for it. But they are working, and they go through the hoops to get what they need.

It's true that when people come to the door, we don't ask if they need it or if they want it, because they wouldn't be there. They would not come to us if they had access to other stuff.

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

I'm interested in the name of your house: Maryhouse. I come from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, which is probably about as far as you can get from here in Canada. There's a multi-faith food bank in Dartmouth called Margaret's House, which is named after my mother, whose name is Margaret, who had the same philosophy: that the last thing we need to do is determine who is poor. There was, at one point in time, a group that thought that a lot of these people weren't actually poor. We don't go and ask them, “Are you poor?” If you're lining up in the cold in Yukon, I imagine it's because you have to.

Nyingje, I was struck by something you said about people needing better alternatives, because you have to treat the whole person. I remember being in Kenya a few years ago. We were in a community where there was a very high rate of tuberculosis, HIV, and co-infection. They could treat the tuberculosis with TB pills, a six-month rotation. The problem was people would start to feel better, but they had no food, so they would stop taking the drugs.

We have to look at people in a holistic way. I think you're talking about that. If somebody has an addiction, you can help them clean the addiction, but if they haven't got food, shelter, or some kind of a supportive network, we're not really fixing the problem. We're just hitting around the edges. Is that an accurate reflection of what you're telling us?

[Nyingje Norgang]

I would just like to respond to what you said before about the deserving poor. Yesterday I was at the women's correctional facility. I was doing some self-esteem work with women. If people have been abused, if people have been assaulted, and if people have been through the system, they feel pretty bad about themselves, and it becomes hard to expect something different. You become much more vulnerable to an assault, to an abuse.

You could treat, for example, an addiction for someone like that, but if you don't treat the trauma that led to the addiction, it will happen again. Anyhow, I had some quotes for the women to pick, maybe about twenty quotes or so, with five women. One of them picked one and tears were rolling down her cheeks. She was so struck that this quote should say that all people have human rights. It wasn't that she, by virtue of being jailed or by virtue of having used, was now somehow no longer meriting decent treatment. Just the thought that being a human being accorded you a certain preciousness, that if you made mistakes you still kept that preciousness, was overwhelming to her.

When we talk about deserving, we must say that all human beings are deserving. Even when you make mistakes, it doesn't mean you fall out of the category of deserving a meal or a house.

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

Absolutely right.

You also referred to not treating poverty as expensive, and this is something that I think is getting more traction now. The cost of not addressing poverty is going to be a lot greater than the cost of addressing poverty when you look at addictions, when you look at jail, and all the people who get trapped into very expensive systems, which we don't seem to mind spending money on, as opposed to providing a house, a bed, some food, and that sort of thing.

[Nyingje Norgang]

I worked in the hospital, and we just see a revolving door of people who don't have a place to live, who don't have their addiction treatment, and who cycle through intensive care. It's very, very expensive treatment. They're back into the same situation and then they cycle back in again. It would be much, much cheaper and much more valuable in their life to give them a place to live and support to actually live.

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

We seem to wait until people have no other options and then we put them in jail or things like that, when we could be dealing with harm reduction, prevention, and community health.

I think I'm done, am I? Can I keep going?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

If you have another question, go ahead.

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

I'll come back.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Okay, sure, let's come back. We'll go back around. We have a lot of time.

Mr. Martin, seven minutes, sir.

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

Thank you.

Thank you for coming today and sharing your experience and knowledge and stories with us.

Both of you are obviously people who are in the trenches every day, working face to face with those for whom we're trying to put in place some kind of a national plan, who it will address. They seem almost a million miles apart, this national plan and how we can get it to you so that you can do what you do. I guess ultimately it would be great if we had a system that didn't need you, but my hunch is that that's not going to happen, so how do we address that?

Kate, you talked about the evolving role of Maryhouse. It started out as a place where people who came to town for health care would stay, and men coming looking for work would stay, and now it's more dealing with those who are already here and who are looking for sustenance on a daily basis.

Now that the food bank has come and is picking up some of the work, is there an evolution in what you're doing? Where do you go from here? And what is it that you would think we, as federal members of Parliament looking at a federal plan, could do that would be most helpful to your work?

[Kate O'Donnell]

I don't know where we're going. You know what? We're still answering the door, and that's really our simplicity. As a mission house of the Madonna House Apostolate, our thing is to be available and to answer the needs at the door, so it continues. For us, a lot of the people who are coming to us are the people who are on the street in the summer. Usually in the winter they have a house. As one person said years ago when they were doing a study on homelessness, if you have any way to get out of the Yukon in the winter, you do. You go down to Vancouver so that you can be warmer than up here.

They're coming for clothing, and we still serve kind of a boxed lunch two days a week, and people do take advantage of it. Not many, but they still will come and ask for it occasionally. And sometimes, like one man who we know fairly well, they'll come and they say, “I missed the soup kitchen”—for whatever reason, he couldn't get to the Salvation Army or he couldn't get to the weekend food kitchen—“Do you have anything?” And so it really is that.

I don't know how to help people, but one of the things we saw over the years with the people coming to the food program is that if they got a job, it might be part time, and here in the Yukon, if you get a job and you're part time and you've been on assistance, you have to pay back the assistance. If it's a man, you have to pay back the assistance. So if you get a job, the first thing is that it's not going to be, generally speaking, a very well-paying job. And then you have to pay back what you have received in assistance, and then you also lose the benefits. You lose the health benefits. You lose other things. And so I think if there was some way we could work it so people could get a job and still maintain some benefits, so that they're not out there all by themselves—it's like it's better to be receiving assistance than to get a job and be up against it. I mean, you have a lower lifestyle when you get a job. We all need jobs to feel good about ourselves. It helps us when we can do that, but every time you get a job, you're kind of penalized for getting a job.

I don't know how to work that out in the government, but that's one way of helping people to go beyond where they are.

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

In Ontario, between 1995 and 2003, in order to move people off the welfare rolls—there was this welfare wall they talked about getting in the way—instead of making it more attractive to get work and keep your benefits they reduced the contribution for those who had no work. It was punitive. We need to get our heads around what works and what doesn't.

I want to ask Nyingje about the work you do and this whole issue of violence against women. More and more as we hear from people we see that violence against women drives women into poverty, if they're not already there. And if they are there, it drives them into deeper poverty.

This seems to be another layer of focus for the government. How do we create the kind of massive change that's needed in terms of attitude and education, and ultimately working with men to stop them from doing that? I know it has caused me some concern in terms of my political career back home, because I live in a riding that's half rural.

The events in Montreal—the anniversary is coming up in a few days—created a greater awareness, and the government came forward with a proposal to register guns. I looked at the numbers because I really had to think my way through this in order to take a position back home. I initially thought the gun registry was simply an imposition against farmers and hunters and people like that. But I looked at the statistics after a few years of its existence and I listened to the police talk about what gives them a level of comfort when they're called to a domestic situation, which is often a man beating up his wife or his children and sometimes using a weapon.

We, as a Parliament, are about to do away with that registry. I would like you to talk a bit about the impact that will have. You live in a area where there's hunting, trapping—maybe not so much farming, but I'm sure there's probably some. Guns are used to feed oneself.

It's probably difficult, but what is your position be on that be in terms of this question of violence against women?

[Nyingje Norgang]

I'm certainly sorry that things have gone in the direction of repealing that. It makes no sense to me, given what we know about the use of guns even here in the Yukon. People say long guns are used for hunting. Well, long guns are being used to kill women. The incidence of violence again women with the use of guns is high. So that does not make sense to me.

When we know there are various levels of violence against women—hitting, stabbing, burning, shoving, shooting—and when we know that affects women and those women's children, and when we know that those children grow up to do those same kinds of behaviours, addressing the issue of violence against women is.....

We have a campaign going on at Victoria Faulkner, with the Yukon Aboriginal Women's Circle and Les EssentiElles, to lead up to the anniversary of the Montreal massacre and also acknowledge the more than 520 aboriginal women who have disappeared or been murdered. We are asking 521 men to sign a card that they won't commit or condone or remain silent about violence against women. We want them to not only sign the card but say what they're going to do to end violence against women. We're asking men to step up to the plate. We're saying that men's violence is harming our world: do something about it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You're all done, Tony, but do you want another question?

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

I want to say, in trying to put together a report to the House of Commons on poverty, would you recommend, then, that there be a piece on violence against women as a prerequisite to dealing with poverty?

[Nyingje Norgang]

If you think that 8.6 times as many women who.... These are people who experience physical or sexual abuse by a dating partner. We're not even talking about the long-term consequences of abuse over and over that many women face, who are attempting suicide within a year. Or if 3.4 times as many women are using cocaine, then we know how that affects your life in terms of your health, your ability to have a sustainable life, the health of your children, of your family.

I do not think poverty can be addressed without a gendered lens. A gendered lens on poverty recognizes the extreme impact of violence in women's lives.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, Tony.

I'm going to move over to Ms. Cadman.

[Dona Cadman, Conservative, Surrey North, BC]

I only have one comment. I'd like to thank you very much for coming and explaining a lot. I hope the men around here are listening, and I hope they can take it back with them.

I really don't have a question. You've simply astounded me. I can't say anything.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'll maybe ask a couple of questions before I pass it back over to Mike.

Kate, I was going to say I'm a recovering evangelical. I grew up Baptist.

That was supposed to be a joke.