Finance Committee on Oct. 27th, 2016

[Fraser Reilly-King, Senior Policy Analyst, Canadian Council for International Co-operation]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and members of the committee. Thank you for inviting the Canadian Council for International Co-operation to appear before the committee today.

As some of you may know, CCIC is Canada's national coalition of civil society organizations working globally to achieve sustainable human development. Our 80-plus members represent a broad range of CSOs working in international development and humanitarian assistance from faith-based and secular groups to labour unions and co-operatives to professional associations. Some of our members, including the Canadian Food Grains Bank and Oxfam Canada, have already appeared before this committee. Together with eight provincial and regional councils, our collective membership is more than 400 organizations strong.

Today, I'm here to speak on behalf of a broader range of groups. From Canada Revenue Agency data, we know that our country is home to approximately 2,400 registered charities that focus on international aid and development and, including not-for-profits, that number is almost double. In total in 2011, charities working in this sector reported $3.9 billion in revenue and $3.6 billion in direct expenditures. These charities received $1.2 billion in tax-receipted gifts and $600 million from the federal government. They employ over 14,000 full-time staff and 32,000 temporary staff.

What of our work? The global context has changed substantially, even in the last decade. With globalization, issues that affect other countries almost always spill over into our own backyard affecting both Canadian society and the Canadian economy.

At home, Canadians have felt the impact of health pandemics like SARS, the avian flu, and Ebola. We've welcomed tens of thousands of refugees into our country as a result of the civil war in Syria. A financial crisis that erupted on Wall Street and in Europe shook the foundations of the Canadian economy. The impacts, both social and economic, of these and other challenges, like humanitarian crises, climate change, or inequality, are well-documented, and are being profoundly felt both at home and, in particular, in developing countries.

It's in the immediate interest of Canada and Canadians and, indeed, of the planet for the government to make significant investments in tackling these global challenges. It should be patently clear that building a fair, more sustainable, and safer world is in everyone's interests and we believe this government and this country has the opportunity to be a leader in realizing that vision.

In the next few months, Global Affairs Canada will release a new policy statement outlining the government's approach to international assistance, but this cannot just be a plan for Global Affairs Canada. It must be a plan for all of Canada. It must lay the foundations for a coherent, whole-of-government strategy that engages a host of government departments as well as civil society and the private sector on issues of diplomacy, development in trade, yes, but also on migration, economy, environment, and peace and security among other things. It should be accompanied by a whole-of-government support in budget 2017 for a five-year international assistance funding framework.

Budget 2017 should include a timetable of predictable annual increases to the international assistance envelope or aid budget. This timetable should put us on a fiscal escalator to at least double the aid budget and it should be framed within the UN and Canadian-designed target of reaching 0.7% of gross national income.

Right now, Canada sits at about 0.26%, up from 0.24% two years ago. These figures matter to Canada and how it's perceived internationally by its peers. Without substantial increases to our aid envelope in the coming years, this government risks having the worst record in Canadian history in terms of investments in international assistance.

The chart and table identify three possible scenarios for these increases, as well as the timeline to reach various milestones depending on which scenario is selected.

Canada can have greater impact with this increased investment, through greater country or thematic focus as it has done in the past or through increased and targeted investments that reflect the government's ambitions, for example, in women's rights and gender equality or investing in the poorest and most marginalized and fragile states. Canada and the Canadian economy prosper when the world prospers.

In conclusion, in budget 2017, we hope to see substantial new investments in Canada's international assistance envelope.

This would allow Canada to make a more significant contribution to solving social, economic, and environmental global challenges through its international assistance. We believe it's time for Canada to reassert its leadership on the global stage.

Thank you for listening, and I look forward to your questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you for your brief and your presentation.

Mr. Keshen, welcome. The floor is yours.

[Bryan Keshen, President and Chief Executive Officer, Reena]

Thank you.

No home, no job, equals negative economic impact. Mr. Chairman, committee members, thank you for including me today. My name is Bryan Keshen, and I'm the president and CEO of a small social service agency serving children, adults, and seniors with developmental disabilities.

As the CEO of a small non-profit, I recognize how budgets send a message. From my perspective, you have a chance to send a message about the inclusion of people with developmental disabilities into our society in the next budget.

What federal measures would help Canadians with a disability maximize their contribution? I can think of nothing better than housing. To invest in housing creates a gateway to personal independence, while reducing costs, increasing engagement and productivity, and creating healthy communities. With your support, the federal budget can send a leadership message that is inclusive and proactive in support of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities by committing and dedicating 5% of any funds flowing through the national housing strategy to housing for people with developmental disabilities, making it a requirement for provincial housing programs.

In combination with a Canadians with disabilities act, and expanding employment efforts for disabled Canadians, this would transform the lives and quality of contribution of those with developmental disabilities to Canada's economic growth.

I speak today not only on behalf of our agency, but the 37 other agencies in the Toronto area serving, providing, and managing over a billion dollars' worth of housing assets. Our budget alone is $40 million in annual operations, managing $80 million in property. We serve over 1,000 people. We also support 150 people in affordable public and private rental units. We know housing. We know housing matters. We know that across this country those with intellectual disabilities are among those most at risk.

With extraordinarily high rates of homelessness, those often living in inappropriate settings such as shelters, hospitals, long-term care, and prisons, cost governments two to three times the cost of independent living. Ninety per cent of adults with developmental disabilities live below the poverty line. Seventy per cent have experienced abuse. Among the women who are developmentally disabled, it's higher.

This is a vulnerable population where we know supportive housing, safe housing, can make a difference and improve the quality of lives. My message is that it is imperative that those with developmental disabilities have a choice to be included in the community, rather than languishing in hospitals, shelters, or being locked in basements. The cost to our health care system, our municipal social supports, to provide inadequate and inappropriate care, is driven by the absence of housing.

In September 2012, in the riding of King—Vaughan, Reena opened one model solution that provides apartments for 84 adults with developmental, cognitive, physical, or mental health needs. The residence is designed as an intentional community for individuals with special needs. The residence received federal-provincial funding, and raised the majority through philanthropic giving. The residence provides a home for people who otherwise would not have a home.

Recently, the Ontario ombudsman's report on developmental services highlighted the issue. Minister Helena Jaczek recognized the community residence is one model that works at solving the issues for people who are in critical need.

I invite you to go into your communities and your hospitals, speak to your care providers, and ask those who are vulnerable in your community what they need. Housing will come up front and centre. We did, and we met a young man named Mark. Mark had been living in a hospital for 15 years. We were able to provide a home in the community. It's given him a life. I invite you to meet Mark. Anyone who wants to come to see our centre, please meet Mark.

But Mark is in every community across this country. People are looking to have a life. The message is the same: people with developmental disabilities are not a priority right now. They're not seen or heard from. You need to send a different message.

With a consortium of eight organizations, we are developing similar models across Ontario. We invite you to participate. We invite you to take a leadership role, and we invite you to be engaged in helping those most vulnerable. It does not require any new investment; it requires taking a planned investment and directing it to those who are vulnerable.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you very much, Mr. Keshen.

From the National Angel Capital Organization, we have Mr. Navarro

Go ahead, please.

[Yuri Navarro, Chief Executive Officer and Executive Director, National Angel Capital Organization]

Thank you very much, Chairperson Easter, and to the committee members for inviting us to present today.

I think of all the organizations here, we're probably one of the ones that are least used to these opportunities, so we appreciate the opportunity.

We're here today because we wanted to bring an opportunity to the government to make a small investment to try to solve what is a critical problem by leveraging the private sector to support economic development through innovation. We think this small investment will have a huge impact in creating the infrastructure, really, that will allow private sector investors to deploy more capital to support the development of new technologies and new companies that will really become the future employers for our country.

Because I don't know all of you, and I haven't had the chance to meet all of you, I want to give a bit of background on who we are and what we represent.

Since 2002, NACO has been the national industry association for the angel investor community in Canada. Today, we represent a community of 41 networks and 3,000 investors across the country. That started with 100 investors who came together many years ago simply to talk each other into making some investments and to help each other avoid mistakes. Really, our community today spans across the country, everywhere from Victoria to St. John's to Yukon to Winnipeg. We're in every community, and that's really what makes angels unique.

Our organization's mission is to grow and develop the Canadian investor community and evolve it into an asset class of investment that can be there to drive economic development. Our vision is for a broad-based community that exists in every community where there are entrepreneurs. I can guarantee each of you that in your riding you've met with young promising entrepreneurs with ideas who are looking for capital and who are having difficulty finding that capital.

We do three things for our community. We bring together the angel investor community by identifying them, by recruiting them to join our nation-building initiative. We connect them together to help each other to share ideas, share best practices, share deal flow, collaborate, pool capital together, and fund those companies. We also help them improve outcomes through research, through education, and through best practices by that same collaboration. Finally, we act as a voice for that community by telling their stories, by telling the stories of the investors and of the entrepreneurs, and through that by trying to drive the kind of cultural change that we need in Canada in order to generate the culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking that's going to be necessary to compete in the long term on the global stage.

What are angel investors? For those of you who don't know, angel investors are high-net-worth individuals—and this is defined in regulation—who are usually entrepreneurs and professionals. They have large social networks. They usually are locally focused, so usually it's about giving back to their community and to people and entrepreneurs in their community. They enjoy investing in early-stage, high-risk entrepreneurs—in people, essentially, who most other people wouldn't invest in. Certainly financial institutions wouldn't invest in them because the economics are just much too risky, but angel investors do it because they know that they're giving back.

The problem with angel investors is that they often invest alone. They also often lack the awareness that they are angel investors, or the awareness of how to invest or of what leads them to invest, and therefore they make mistakes. Unfortunately, they don't invest in themselves and in their processes; they invest only in companies and entrepreneurs. That means it's quite difficult for entrepreneurs to find them. It's quite difficult for entrepreneurs to pool larger rounds of capital, to get to the point where a VC or institutional investor will actually take a look at them. That creates a gap. We call this the “funding innovation continuum gap”. Really, it starts somewhere around the point where incubators and accelerators can no longer support these companies and its lasts until the point at which the VCs would come in, which usually is about the $5-million investment mark. So anywhere between $50,000 and $5 million there's a massive gap that everybody is always relying on private individuals to fund. We connect that community together to help them overcome the “valley of death”. That valley of death can take three to 15 years, depending on the company and the industry. It's a critical component of funding the innovation continuum.

Angel investors invest their own capital. We break this down into three types of capital: financial capital, intellectual capital, and network capital; in other words, their money, their networks, and their experience. They bring that to bear to help the entrepreneurs build the companies, grow them, and scale them.

The important thing to understand here is that angel investors are literally everywhere, but we need to help them identify and be more coordinated. Without that, the entrepreneurs are often forced to move to urban centres. You hear a lot about entrepreneurs having to move to one of the four or five key urban centres. That's not really necessary if they can find the investors locally and if those local investors can help them to find more capital outside that local market.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Yuri, can you go to the recommendation?

[Yuri Navarro]

Yes, the recommendation here is that we want to support the national expansion and national collaboration of these angel networks. Until now we've been supported at the community level through regional and local programming, but that has created a disparate kind of growth. We have growth in certain urban communities but not in rural communities and not in certain underdeveloped communities, like indigenous and minority communities. We want to ensure we're looking at growing this critical component from a national approach.

The second thing we wanted to recommend is that the government continue to fund some of the programs through organizations like FedDev, Western Diversification, FedNor, and ACOA, at a local level to continue to build the local networks, but that it also look at coordinating data and research at a central level to make sure we have the insights we need to support the development of this community.

[The Chair, Liberal, Wayne Easter]

Thank you, all. We have to stop at 6:30, unless we have unanimous consent. If we're going to get five questions in total, at five minutes, we need to go a few minutes beyond 6:30. Do we have unanimous consent to do that? It wouldn't be any later than about 6:40.

We have unanimous consent.

Okay, starting with Ms. O'Connell.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you all for your presentations.

I want to start with the presentation from Reena. Mr. Keshen, thank you for your presentation. This is an issue very near and dear to my heart. I'm not sure if you're familiar with DAFRS from Durham Region, but I was vice-chair of that organization until recently. I know the issue of housing, in particular for persons with disabilities and cognitive disabilities, fairly well.

One of the points you made in terms of the strain or the burden by not having proper housing for people with disabilities is hospitals, but we found as well that young people with disabilities are going into nursing homes because their families can't handle them and there's inadequate support, which I think is an absolutely horrible situation.

I want to make sure I understand your presentation clearly in terms of the 5% of funds for housing. You mentioned the model that your organization just offered, 80 units I believe you said, but that's not the only model you're suggesting, is it? You want housing available specifically for persons with disabilities, because I understand some people's needs might be greater than others. Some can live in a fully integrated system just with support services. It's not the model you're advocating for, just as long as there is dedicated funding. Am I understanding that correctly?

[Bryan Keshen]

You're correct. It is a model, not the model, and the expanding opportunities for independent living is crucial for everyone.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'm going to move on to the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association. I found your brief particularly of interest. We know that Canadian telecommunications companies have some of the highest profits in the world. We have the highest rights to consumers in an eight-country study. Your brief mentioned your industry has invested $55 billion, but here's the number I find most interesting. Since 1987, that's just a few years younger than me, have you invested enough in infrastructure to support your own industry, especially considering your high profits and extremely high consumer rates?

[Kurt Eby]

Most definitely, if you look at what I discussed in my presentation, and the same stats are in our submission, the Canadian network relative to Europe, in particular its size, just in our areas that are covered is bigger than the U.K., France, Spain, Germany, and Italy combined. That's the entire land mass of those countries, not just their network footprint. Right away there's size.

Then you look at Canadians being the fourth highest users in the world, behind only Japan, Korea, and Sweden, and Canadians having access to among the fastest network speeds in the world. So certainly, yes, and that investment must continue to meet that demand.

The CRTC released information yesterday that said in the most recent year it studied, wireless data use increased by 44%.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Perhaps you should come to my community of Pickering—Uxbridge, because I can assure you we don't have very fast Internet speeds. We're just outside of Toronto. I have a rural component but forget the rural component for a second. In my urban, suburban municipality directly on the border of Toronto, we can't get more Internet. You asked for spectrum, and I find this particularly interesting. Part of our problem in getting Internet, to my community in particular, is that the spectrum is combined with places like Toronto. The big telecommunication companies don't need to invest in Pickering—Uxbridge or some of the other communities because all their consumers are in Toronto. They then don't allow any of that higher spectrum to be sold to companies that can actually deliver to rural or suburban areas.

Do you feel that if the government were to release spectrum—

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Ms. O'Connell, would you quickly state your question, please?

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

Sorry. My question was that if you don't use the spectrum then you lose it, and it has to go back onto the market.

[Kurt Eby]

Right. There is a “use it or lose it” clause already in most spectrum licences and we support that.

[Jennifer O'Connell, Liberal, Pickering—Uxbridge, ON]

More competition in the market would help. Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, NDP, Guy Caron]

Thank you.

Mr. Albas, you have the floor for five minutes.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair. In this light you look 20 years younger.

I'd like to thank all of our witnesses today. I appreciate your bringing ideas. We unfortunately don't have a lot of time, so I'm going to make my questions and comments as brief as I can.

I'm going to start with Clean Energy Canada. Thank you, Ms. Demerse. In your brief, there are a couple of things I agree with and a couple of things I profoundly disagree with. Hopefully we can have a good discussion about some of these things. First, I agree that there is an opportunity for innovation on electrification, particularly with some of the older pieces of legislation.

One thing I would just ask you is this. In your brief, you talk about interprovincial and regional co-operation. Most of our population, as you know, is close to the United States border. When you say regional co-operation, does that include the Americans or is that just within Canada?

[Clare Demerse]

We think it makes a lot of sense to also exchange electricity across international borders. For example, when we had the Three Amigos Summit here in Ottawa, there was a North American clean energy target signed between the three countries. Canada is the furthest ahead on this continent in terms of the percentage of our grid that is clean. We offer a resource, obviously predominantly to the United States rather than to Mexico, where we could be having this type of exchange.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

I'm happy to hear you say that. I'm from British Columbia. We have a lot of hydroelectricity, a lot of capacity. We'd love to share it with Alberta, and we'd love to be able to share it with whoever would like it. Obviously there are some issues. We've been burned before by sending electricity to California, but I agree with the concept of it.

In your brief you talked about the utilities legislation. For example, we have the BCUC, and its slogan—I guess its raison d'être—is low-cost electricity for generations. The one thing I see is that you're asking for things to be changed so that there is a preference toward clean energy production.

I totally disagree with that. What's happened in Ontario is that those kinds of market-distortion activities have created a situation where there's a lot of hardship on a lot of seniors. Would you agree that there's been a fair bit of upset within this province about how the Green Energy Act has translated?

[Clare Demerse]

I think Ontario's feed-in tariff program provides an important model. We saw a good effort to invest in clean energy. We have some leading companies that have been nurtured by Ontario's approach. There are obviously also elements where it could have been managed better.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

On the flip side, in British Columbia with BCUC, because we're at the end of W.A.C. Bennett's legacy where a lot of hydro power projects were made, at 60 years a lot of that has to be renewed. In fact, we have to expand. When I door knock, I hear that seniors are being hit with 8% per year. To me the best model would be to allow just a point over a longer time, a per cent every year. That doesn't allow for that.

I appreciate your making the suggestion that it should be there, and I do think that it needs to happen. However, with this being under provincial regulation, it will be very tough. I do appreciate your suggestions and, like I said, I agree with some of it.

[Clare Demerse]

Thank you.

[Dan Albas, Conservative, Central Okanagan—Similkameen—Nicola, BC]

I'd like to quickly go to the Consumer Health Products association.

Interprovincial trade has been an intense passion of mine. I've heard that in British Columbia, it could be up to seven years before Health Canada makes a switch, allowing for something to be safe for self-care.

Is this an area that should receive more attention?