Thank you.
I am Jill Black, and I was the co-chair of the working group for the task force for modernizing income security for working-age adults, sometimes called MISWAA. John Stapleton, the other co-chair, and I are sharing the presentation today, and we want to thank you for enabling us to be here.
The task force was formed in September 2004 by the Toronto City Summit Alliance, or TCSA, and St. Christopher House. The TCSA is a broadly based coalition of civic leaders that has launched a number of initiatives dealing with issues facing the Toronto region, ranging from accelerating immigration settlement to helping stimulate tourism post-SARS. Our 2003 action plan for the Toronto region, called “Enough Talk”, highlighted the issue of income security as being critical to major cities—not just Toronto, but cities across Canada. St. Christopher House, a multi-service neighbourhood centre in Toronto, was the ideal partner in forming the task force because it had extensive experience in involving the community in formulating policies and programs to help improve the situations of people living on low income.
The task force was made up of a steering group of about fifty leaders from business, labour, community organizations, advocacy groups, academia, policy institutes, foundations, and government. Working with St. Christopher House, we put together a community reference group of low-income people—who were directly involved in formulating the recommendations—as well as an extensive community consultation process with almost 300 low-income adults and a similar number of staff from community agencies. Finally, we had a working group that included policy analysts from the Conference Board of Canada, the C.D. Howe Institute, T.D., Scotia Economics, the Caledon Institute, CPRN, the Canadian Labour Congress, and a number of community and advocacy groups, including the Daily Bread Food Bank and the Workers' Action Centre.
We believe the task force was unprecedented in a number of respects: in getting leaders from all those sectors, including business, together at the same table to talk about income security; in having all of those think tanks involved in one working group; and in the extent of the involvement of people directly affected by the problems with the system. We didn't obtain consensus on all of the recommendations, but everyone agreed on the issues. Members are united in the belief that the system is broken and that all orders of government must come to the table to secure the needed reforms. Our submission sets out recommendations, and they may also be found in our report “Time for a Fair Deal”, at www.torontoalliance.ca.
Many members of the task force believe the federal government needs to be accountable and play a more prominent role in the income security for working-age adults, much as it does today with seniors and children.
I'll turn it over to John to elaborate.