Mr. Chair, honourable members, let me first say thank you to everyone for the opportunity to participate in this very important pre-budget consultation.
The Vanier Institute of the Family is an independent national research and educational organization and we're committed to the well-being of families in all of the various dimensions that entails, including health in children, right down the line. We've been in existence since 1965, and over our 45-year history we've continued to document the status and well-being of families in all of their diversity, and we continue to try to understand better the challenges and opportunities that are ahead for Canadian families.
In the first part of my presentation, I'd like to share with you some of the key trends that we've taken from some of the research that we and others have done around Canadian family finances. I think it helps us better understand the impacts of what families are going through in this particular recession, and I think it says something very important about what we need to be doing with respect to budgetary spending as we look forward to the future security of families.
It's very important to stress that I think there are what we might call reactionary changes that we could put in place in terms of budget responses to the current economic crisis, but I would also urge those who are considering various programs and options for the budget to look forward, to look at this as not only a reactionary budget, but also perhaps as a transformative budget. I think there is opportunity within this challenging time to achieve these things.
I'm going to put the three recommendations of the institute on the table and then back up to talk about some key trends. I want to make sure I get these out here. We think there's action required on several broad fronts. I want to talk a little bit less at this point about the nuts and bolts of this and really talk more about thematic and directional shifts in the budget that I think would be in the interest not only of Canadian families but also of the Canadian economy.
I think we do need to shore up some of our key income security programs for working-aged families and for seniors as well.
We need to invest in community infrastructure. We can build roads and we can build bridges, but there is an important community infrastructure that's experiencing real stresses and strains now, and it's going to be a very important part of our economic recovery. I think some of this budget needs to look at innovative ways of supporting community infrastructure development.
Finally, I think there is a need to continue with efforts to introduce appropriate safeguards, policies, and practices to achieve higher levels of financial literacy.
I'll come back to each of those, time permitting.
I do want to talk a little bit about some of the key trends that we've been looking at. I was going to start by talking about some of the impacts on Canadian families, and I think those around the table here are familiar with those, whether it's seniors who are looking at savings that have plummeted and are now wondering about their retirement decisions, whether they can do that or not. We see young people who are struggling in terms of entering a difficult labour market at a difficult time, and we certainly see the numbers on the unemployment side of things.
As tough as all those things are in a recession—and indeed they are—what's interesting to understand is that those impacts are even more jarring when families are, as we would say, “living on the edge” of the monthly budget. This really takes us back to our longer-term analysis of what's been going on in the area of family finances. What we see when we cast back 15 or 20 years is that the changes families have had, the incomes that they've been bringing in from employment have been essentially stagnant on an individual inflation-adjusted basis.
How have families responded? One of the things they've done is put enormous amounts of time and energy into their workplaces. That's good to the extent that it has helped bolster those family incomes by a modest amount over that time, but they've done it by putting more time in the labour market. This is really important as a backdrop to these recommendations, because we know about time stress. We've had enormous sophisticated research analysis that has told us about the impacts of work and family imbalance. We know this has a negative impact within workplaces; we know it has a negative impact within communities. Recent numbers have shown the ability of people to volunteer is going down. We certainly know that it has an impact on public health, just in terms of well-being. Finally, of course, it has a tremendous impact on family life itself.
So families have been putting more time in, and what they've been doing, if you look at not just the income side but also the expenditure side, is spending as if they've actually been accruing real income gains. So their spending has far outpaced any income they've had coming in. What you end up with is a squeeze-play. I think of the analogy of a car with a shock absorber, where you hit a bump at the end of the road—