Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I'm glad to be here representing Citizens for Public Justice. We're a national organization primarily of Christians concerned about promoting public justice in Canadian public life. In my presentation I'll briefly summarize the main recommendations, and then I'd like to focus on one facet: our call for the need for a Canadian poverty reduction strategy. Then I'll welcome questions from committee members on why we need a poverty reduction strategy and more details about what that needs to be.
Let me start by telling you some of the key recommendations we see. Canada's poverty reduction strategy needs to include several things. It needs to include timelines and targets for reducing poverty in Canada. It needs to include specific measures of progress. We have many different measures of low income in Canada. We just need to decide on one or another by which we're going to measure our progress in reducing poverty.
We need to produce social forecasts and social audits, as well as our fiscal and economic forecast and audits. The strategy has to be an integrated strategy across departments of the federal government and across levels of government. The strategy also needs to include some focused strategies to address the causes of poverty among groups most affected by poverty--aboriginal people, recent immigrants, lone-parent families, people with disabilities, women, single adults, and young families with children.
In addition to an overall poverty reduction strategy, there are some things that can be done immediately to help reduce poverty in Canada: raising the maximum Canada child tax benefit to $5,000 per year to reduce the rate of debt of family and child poverty; investing in early learning and child care to create spaces, to increase the number and skills and remuneration of early childhood educators, and to reduce the cost to parents of early childhood education; increase investments in affordable housing programs; make employment insurance more accessible and create ways for workers and business to tap into employment insurance during periods of training to upgrade skills. Raising the minimum wage to $10 an hour and indexing it to inflation would be another step to help reduce poverty in Canada. The last recommendation is to split the Canada social transfer into a Canada post-secondary education transfer and a Canada social transfer, with increases in both, including strong principles for the Canada social transfer to ensure social assistance and disability programs that provide an adequate income.
Recently in the news I've seen a couple of headlines about poverty reduction strategies. The other day, the Toronto Star had a front-page story saying that the poor need a strategy to reduce poverty. That's true. People living in poverty in Canada need a strategy to help reduce poverty and get them out of poverty. There was another interesting headline in my own local paper. I live in Kitchener, Ontario. The Kitchener Record the other day printed a speech that the president of the University of Waterloo, David Johnston, gave to the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce.
As I look around the room, I notice a number of people have BlackBerrys. I would just remind you that BlackBerrys are a product of Research In Motion, one of the most innovative and competitive of Canada's businesses, which is a product of the University of Waterloo. The founders of the organization, and many of its employees, came from the University of Waterloo.
The other day the president of the University of Waterloo, David Johnston, laid out a blueprint for greatness for the Waterloo region. It's good to have local people laying out ambitious programs for their own communities. In this program he set forth an agenda to make the Waterloo region the knowledge capital of Canada. He laid out ten goals....
I see I have one minute left, so I'll look forward to lots of questions.
Goal number 8 is to reduce poverty in their region. He points out that even though the Waterloo region has one of the lowest rates of poverty, it still means 50,000 people in the region are living below the poverty line. It's deeper now than ever. Then he points out that the irony is that this region has the lowest rate of unemployment in the country. So we need to help working poor with support services, affordable housing, and access to training.
The insight Mr. Johnston has is that in order for the local community to achieve greatness and success, and in order for Canada to achieve greatness and success, we need a strategy to reduce poverty as well. One specific facet of that is to address this problem of the high number of low-wage jobs. We've managed to reduce unemployment, but a lot of folks are working in low-wage, low-productivity jobs, and it is not really helping them to exit poverty and it's impeding the success of Canadian businesses.
I'll just draw the committee's attention to two articles in a recent issue of--