Thank you to all of you.
Welcome to Prince Edward Island.
I also want to acknowledge the contribution your team makes to these deliberations.
Thank you for having me here today.
My remarks are made on the basis of the studies and presentations that I've had access to over the last 20 years. The overarching theme that I'm asking the committee to consider is, for all the policy proposals you're going to consider, that the lens used to assess them is, how are they affecting the most vulnerable around us?
Effective policy should allow us to draw a straight line between the policy and the effect it has on people living in poverty, those with mental and physical health issues, or those living with disabilities, one-parent families, especially single mothers, children, and our first nations communities.
The corollary of this principle of looking at how it affects the most vulnerable is that we need not actively pursue policies that focus on benefiting the wealthiest among us. They're doing quite fine.
The social analysis I'm using is one that's been used for a long time, which is “see, judge, act”, and you can enter that circle from any point. I'm asking the government to act quite quickly on two particular issues. This could be a dissertation, but I just want to focus on two particular issues right now. They are housing, and employment and income. The actions there will lead you into that same circle of see, judge, act, but it needs to get started immediately.
We need reliable and predictable investment in public housing stock. There are plenty of good experiences with programs such as home retrofits, but we need an expansion of multi-family units in public housing right across the country. I'm asking the government to recommit to co-op housing, not just to the existing co-op housing, but also to the expansion of the co-op housing stock over the next 20 years.
Just a few blocks from here, walking through the streets, we can see the places where we're asking our families, friends, and neighbours to live in substandard conditions. It's really unacceptable in Canada in the 21st century. We recognize the efforts of landlords to make some of that housing affordable, but we see people living in places that are overcrowded, dingy, cold, and dark. We're asking those families to raise their children in that kind of environment, which makes it very difficult to nurture a sense of hope and optimism for the future.
We can study it. We can act. There's a number of programs that the committee can be recommending over the next few years, but we also need to start expanding to see what the future is going to look like. It is going to take time to build the stock and plan around it. We need expansion and maintenance. We have to look at civil society groups to invest their own time and energy in building these communities. The outreach needs to begin immediately. The conversations need to happen at food banks, soup kitchens, churches, and service organizations, but they need a message that change is not just around the corner, it's here.
Second, in terms of unemployment, as we know, most of us want to be in charge of our own lives and our own decisions and to feel that we have a high degree of independence. The ability to exercise control of our spending starts with our income. We need to broaden the discussion, as we heard earlier, about the precariousness of employment. In P.E.I., if you work full time at a job at $11 an hour job, you're making just over $21,000, which is almost $3,000 less than the low income cut-off. We're asking workers to live in poverty.
We need to move more quickly on wages. The federal government could take the lead by increasing the federal minimum wage and encourage provinces to do the same. We also have to encourage workers to organize and to make it easier for workers to organize and for unions to be certified. If you're living in poverty and are dependent on the income you have, you're not going to take very many risks to jeopardize that, because for the future, losing that, as little as it may be, is pretty bleak.
Federal government transfers to individuals can be helpful, but the evidence also says that federal government investment is needed in social infrastructure: a national child care strategy, pharmacare strategies, and a housing strategies are all essential. Stability comes from that. On the increase in direct and indirect transfers, a move to a basic income guarantee would be a major advance.
The final request to the committee is for movement on national revenue: simplify the tax forms and bring back the links to basic personal exemptions at federal and provincial levels. P.E.I. has dropped the basic personal exemption in real terms, and it has the most drastic effect on people who are living most precariously and with the least ability to benefit.