Health Committee on Oct. 26th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Mr. Batters, your time is gone, but I'll allow a quick answer.

[Lisa Oliver]

The tax credit could help with diet, but the point of the credit is to take care of children, not to provide food for families. A low-income family might take this $1,200 and use it to buy food, but still the child care has not been addressed.

I don't think the money should be used for food. It should be used for child care.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

We'll move on to the next questioner.

Madame Neville.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for your presentation. I'm not usually a member of this committee, but I'm very pleased to be here today.

I wasn't going to take this line of questioning, but I really want to know from you what steps you think the federal government can take. I want to put it in the context of the two policy initiatives that have been referred to already.

We've just heard about the supplement to families for child care, which is really, in my mind, a family allowance. Yesterday I happened to be part of a presentation that indicated that it was the single-parent family who received the least amount if they were...for comparable families earning $50,000. The least benefit of all applied to two-earner families between $30,000 and $40,000.

So even for child care, or for however everyone chooses to use that $100 a month, it is those you're referring to who have advantage from it. There's also the fact that the child tax supplement of $249 has been removed.

Earlier we heard about the tax credit for sports. Very recently I was approached by a community club in my own community of Winnipeg, where, I've been advised, what's actually happening with the tax credit--they're gathering some information for me--is that those who have are registering for sports, and those who don't have, who were once subsidized, are not now coming forward for sports registration. To my mind, this all has a negative impact on low-income families.

I found your presentations very interesting. Do you have any constructive suggestions in terms of low-income families? Obviously there's increasing employment insurance and increasing the social safety net, but what within the federal jurisdiction would you advise this committee to recommend to government?

[Lisa Oliver]

In terms of my research that looks at neighbourhoods and obesity, it can be difficult, maybe, for the federal government to implement something at the federal level to influence all neighbourhoods in Canada. Different neighbourhoods have different needs, so there may not be a one-size-fits-all policy for all places. All neighbourhoods may not have the same issue with crime.

So different places have different factors from place to place. But I would like to see the federal government take initiative on this issue and perhaps engage in a dialogue with the municipalities about what factors in neighbourhoods are influencing their communities. So there should be a dialogue with provinces and municipalities to address this issue.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Okay. Thank you, Professor.

Professor Tarasuk, can you comment?

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

I think there is no way out of it. If you want to make an impact on the extraordinary health disadvantage that is faced by low-income families, you have to tackle the adequacy of their incomes. I think other kinds of programs--tax credits that are targeted or labelled, targeted interventions--are simply a waste of taxpayers' dollars. We need to be targeting the problem, and the problem is inadequate income.

Those people can be identified easily. Every time there's another national survey, we find the same thing. It's not hard to pick these people out of the pot.

There are ways for the federal government to have an impact on family-level income through income redistribution. The national child tax supplement was an attempt at that. It didn't work, because the federal government enabled provinces to claw back that money, but—

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Not all of them did.

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Not all of them opted to do it, but everybody had the opportunity, and sadly, many took it, so it didn't have the impact on welfare recipients that we would have liked to have seen.

I think that has to be the route, to get more money into the pockets of low-income families. Honestly, I think other attempts at pigeonholing and targeting are really very inefficient. They're much cheaper, obviously, but they have way less impact on the problem.

[Anita Neville, Liberal, Winnipeg South Centre, MB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Ms. Davidson.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to thank each of the witnesses today. I certainly have enjoyed their presentations.

In this committee, through the past few weeks, we've heard a lot of different areas being addressed. Certainly today's area is focused on low income and the inability of low-income families to purchase what we're going to call good food, or nutritious food, or non-fattening food, and so on. I think that's a huge issue. We all recognize that.

Valerie, you talked about—I think this was in your report—your preliminary results and the 65% who reported food insecurity in the past twelve months. I think you said that you used a fairly generous income threshold. What threshold did you use, do you know?

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Yes. The income variable that has been appearing in recent years in Statistics Canada publications is something called household income adequacy, and there are five levels to that. If you look at some of the other graphs in my presentation, you'll see that we've used that variable to talk about purchasing power or the likelihood of food insecurity.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Right, but do you have a dollar figure for that?

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

It varies depending on the household size. That's one of the good things about that measure. So we have taken the third level of the five-level variable. The majority of Canadians are sitting with incomes at levels four and five. We went as high as number three so we could include the working poor in our study, and in fact we did.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Okay, that's good.

I have a further question for you, then.

So you didn't use the top or the bottom; you used the middle, basically.

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Yes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Okay.

We know that social assistance rates are set by the province. It's a provincial responsibility; it isn't a federal responsibility. But we've talked a lot about it here today. Do you know what the different thresholds are across this country? I think they are different. I don't think they're the same in all provinces.

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Yes, that's true.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Is that an area that we need to have discussions with the provinces about? I think you've indicated in some of your responses that we need to tackle this threshold. So how do we do that when it's not our responsibility?

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Well, it used to be a federal responsibility and you gave it away.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Well, that might be, but that doesn't help.

[Dr. Valerie Tarasuk]

Okay, but it's gone now. I get that part.

[A voice]

Did you give it away?

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

No, I didn't, but somebody might have.

So do you have any suggestions, and can you tell me what the different thresholds are across the country?