Human Resources Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2006

[Mike Lake, Conservative, Edmonton—Mill Woods—Beaumont, AB]

I just want to quickly hear Mr. Sarlo's comments on that.

[Prof. Chris Sarlo]

You asked me about the role of government, and I actually haven't written a lot about that. I don't presume to talk about policy too much.

I would say that I don't disagree at all with Ross Finnie. I think there are policy experts out there. There are people who do research on what works and what doesn't work. As long as we have a framework that is accountable, that measures before and after the policy, and works towards things that would get people out of poverty, I don't disagree at all.

[Vincent Calderhead]

Maybe I could jump in.

Adequacy was referred to by Mr. Lake, and how do we know adequacy. I ask my poverty law students each winter, what do you think the eligibility rate is for a single person; and in terms of adequacy, how much would a single person on assistance get? They always overestimate by $300 or $400. They always give a rent figure that is $300 or $400 more than what they get on assistance.

In terms of what the federal government can do, in terms of the Canada social transfer now, it transfers money, but in terms of accountability and value for money it asks nothing. There are no standards. Unlike the Canada Health Act, where we know what we're going to be getting, the Canada social transfer asks nothing.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We'll move on now to the second round. We'll start with Mr. Regan, for five minutes please.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming today and for being present elsewhere.

My recollection of the LICO...and Professor Finnie, you talked about it being a percentage, that if a family spends a certain percentage on necessities, then under the LICO.... They were trying to define what the LICO was and setting it at certain levels in terms of dollar amounts. Was it 56%? Do you recall? I've forgotten the number--60%, 62%?

[John Stapleton]

It was 62% originally.

[Geoff Regan, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

It strikes me that the LICO is the most widely accepted measure. There's perhaps no perfect measure of this, but that's the most widely accepted, so we might as well use it, in my view, as the best measure we have at the moment.

It strikes me also, as we've seen from the Statistics Canada report earlier this year about the reduction in families below the low-income cut-off between 1996 and 2004, that there is an extent to which a strong economy can reduce poverty. But I don't think it does the whole job. I'd like you to talk more about the extent to which it can't do that and therefore what the strategy should be in terms of policies we have for people who are short-term and long-term low-income people.

In relation to the question of people who are on welfare, I think Mr. Calderhead can correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my impression that in Nova Scotia, for example, the welfare levels and the amount they provide are well below the low-income cut-off.

I invite the panellists to comment.

[Vincent Calderhead]

On that point, the National Council of Welfare is absolutely amazing in terms of providing and publishing authoritative, reliable, and recent information about social assistance adequacy. What it says is that the state of social assistance in Canada, in terms of adequacy, is outrageous. And the single most important thing the federal government could do would be to say, when we give you money, we want adequacy along the lines that we've agreed to in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

[John Stapleton]

I'd like to mention that in the report I was involved in, called the MISWAA report, we recommended that two measures be undertaken.

One is to take our various refundable tax credits that we have now--for example, between the federal government and the Province of Ontario, you have a property tax rebate, a sales tax refund, and federally we have a GST refund--and put all those credits together into one overall sustainable credit, which would speak to some of the things that Professor Sarlo said in terms of unreported income.

One of the real problems is that people's federal account is actually an account where they provide money to government in the form of taxes, or they have employment insurance deductions they must make, but at the same time they are not actually eligible for any benefits.

We recommended the idea of a very substantial refundable credit that would go to all low-income Canadians. But as part of that, we also recommended a working-income benefit. It's very interesting to see, for the idea of a working-income benefit, we had in the earlier economic statement of Mr. Goodale last year the introduction of the working-income tax benefit, and this same working-income tax benefit was taken up in the budget of the present government. So we have quite a convergence in terms of the acceptance of the idea that people who are working, and especially at low and minimum wages, need some form of income supplementation, and that's what we're recommending.

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

The research that the National Council of Welfare has put together on welfare rates and their inadequacy across the country is pretty clear. Frankly, no matter what poverty measures we want to use, as Mr. Stapleton pointed out, welfare rates don't add up under any of them.

I want to come back to underscore the fact that if we want to have accountability, if we want to be able to track progress, we have to take a strategic approach.

I'll give you a couple of quick examples of how that is so helpful and crucial.

The United Kingdom has a strategy to reduce poverty. In 1999 they increased the minimum wage and they set up a low-wage commission to actually study and track what impact the introduction of the minimum wage and raising it would have, both on poverty reduction and employment for low-income workers, as well as the impact on small business and stuff like that. So it's a very concerted effort to address poverty within the context of the whole economy.

One other example: Newfoundland and Labrador has a poverty reduction strategy, integrated across ministries, that involves addressing what each ministry can do to help contribute to reducing poverty in Newfoundland and Labrador. In their last budget, they raised social assistance rates and indexed them to the cost of living.

Another interesting thing they did, because they had this poverty reduction lens and strategy, was to realize that school fees were excluding many students from being able to participate fully in school. So they put in a special measure to reduce school fees, a special measure in the education budget which would not necessarily have made it into the budget if the education ministry had asked, what are the educational priorities we have to do? But because they took that inter-ministerial and integrated and strategic approach, they were able to identify that as one element in what they needed to do to achieve their goal of making poverty in Newfoundland and Labrador the lowest in Canada.

It addresses this issue of accountability too. If we have a strategy, choose what our measures are going to be, and then track what the outcomes of policy are, that will help us to address questions about the impact of discrete budget measures and things like that. We judge them through the lens of the effect they're going to have on reducing poverty and inequality in Canada.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. deGroot-Maggetti. That's all the time we have for that.

We'll have Mr. Lessard for five minutes, please.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I in turn want to thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts with us.

I've tried to see how we can go about taking effective action on poverty. In committee, for two and a half years, nearly all the files we've studied have led us to think about poverty, because all social measures of interest to the committee on human resources, social development and the status of persons with disabilities have a direct or indirect impact on the quality of life of the citizens who rely on them.

You seem to be saying that we should establish a comprehensive anti-poverty strategy. I think the National Anti-Poverty Organization is simply talking about a comprehensive strategy and saying that our national standards currently don't make it possible to establish that kind of strategy and that we would do better to rely on international standards in particular.

I took the liberty of trying to see which of those measures could be included in the national strategy with, of course, international elements. There's the employment insurance issue. I believe Mr. Finnie and others spoke about that. There's also the situation that we've put our programs in. There's the issue of affordable housing. There's also the minimum wage issue and, consequently, the unionization issue. We realize that wages are lower where there's no unionization.

Incidentally, the committee has just completed a tour to look into the employability issue. We see that a lot of people who receive a wage and who even work full time don't have enough money to make ends meet. They have to rely on food banks. There's a deficiency there. It depends on the regions, of course. In Alberta, the cost of living has increased sharply. That poses a major problem for low wage earners.

There's also the matter of a good child care system, as well as the literacy issue, which my colleague spoke about.

Mr. Finnie said that this didn't call for a single measure, but rather a set of measures. If I understand correctly, there is that set of measures I referred to. Are there others?

I'm trying to take a look at everything there is. Have I correctly summed up the measures that each of you has outlined in your own way? I think that a genuine fight against poverty depends on a firm will to remove the poor from their situation. The cause of poverty isn't always illiteracy. Some people who aren't illiterate are poor.

Our work is to try to convince the government to have that will and to subject itself to international standards. It's quite embarrassing when the UN points its finger at us regarding our social measures, when people say we're not even meeting our own standards.

Are there any other elements that we should include in this national strategy?

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

Thank you for the question.

The National Council of Welfare feels that it's important that Canada, the federal government, establish a national anti-poverty strategy, like the Province of Quebec has done, like the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador has done. We've indicated some measures that, from our research, we think need to be part of that, and you've named those.

It's not our role, though, to lay out the complete strategy. That's the task the government has to do in consultation with people who are living in poverty and with community groups, as well as with other orders of government, because it needs to truly be an integrated approach. And I'm sure that other measures that are going to be needed will surface in that process. What's important is to make that commitment.

It really, I think, resides on Canada's human rights obligations. This is the basis of why we need a national anti-poverty strategy. It has to underlie the Canada social transfer, for sure, but it should be the lens through which we evaluate all public policies. What effect are they going to have on making sure we reduce poverty and make sure people can be prevented from falling into poverty?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have.

Mr. Finnie, just quickly.

[Prof. Ross Finnie]

First, in Quebec, the postsecondary education rate is lower than in Canada. Why don't those people get an education? Is it because of cost? No. It's because they aren't interested in doing it. People have to be informed, interested and equipped to reach the postsecondary level so that they can enter society and the economy.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Martin, five minutes, please.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

Certainly so far this morning we've had the kind of discussion that is actually frustrating for a lot of people out there who want some action now to help them in their circumstances. I was in Calgary a week and a half ago. They now have between 3,500 and 4,000 people who are homeless in one of the richest cities. The economy is booming there, and I had over 100 people in a room wanting me to do something, to bring a message back here, to get some kind of strategy on the road.

They're tired of hearing which poverty level is going to picked. They're saying we should just pick one, any one, because that will be better than what's there now. Take the one that Mr. Sarlo suggested; it would increase the welfare rates in Ontario by almost 50%. We should just pick a level and do it, because that would be better.

The challenge is that somehow out there we have begun this conversation about poverty that circles around the deserving and the undeserving, around rights and responsibilities. How do we get back to a conversation about human dignity, about the right of every Canadian citizen to a dignified life and all that entails?

When people get together--for instance, the MISWAA group, or the study that happened in Ontario in the eighties with the Thomson report, the social assistance review--they come to the realization that we have to do something, and that we can. We have the resources. But when we put the plan forward, the political will isn't there to push it further.

That seems to be where we are at the moment. We're okay with talking about a labour market strategy to deal with that. We're okay with talking about post-secondary education. And I agree that's part of it, but we're not okay when we begin to talk about actually even using the word “poverty” and the right of every citizen in Canada and their children to a life that's dignified.

What happened? In the seventies and the eighties we used to talk about that. I use the example sometimes that if you walked into a room to talk about poverty and started to blame the victim, you'd be thrown out of the room. Now it's the first thing that happens, almost, when you go into the room.

I guess I'm just asking what happened here. What can we do to turn that around?

[Vincent Calderhead]

I'd like to pick up on a couple of the points.

I've appeared on many occasions before the UN committee that monitors our implementation of social and economic rights. In May of this year they looked at the delegation from Canada, looked at Canadian NGOs, and pointed out that we have something like a $12 billion surplus; we are a very wealthy country, with corporate profits at their highest in 30 years. They asked us, why on earth is there poverty in Canada? Why is there homelessness?

There is no reason for it. There is no necessity for it. This is not something that has to happen.

I agree with your point, Mr. Martin, that when we start talking about poverty, code happens, and it's code about responsibility. You're exactly right; the code means for many poor people that it's their own fault. We need to examine that language and examine our own assumptions.

On your last point, about what it is we can do, well, we had national standards around adequacy for 20 years. We repealed them in 1995. This committee should recommend to Parliament that we revisit the present conditionless transfer under the Canada social transfer and say that from now on, we want accountability when we transfer for social purposes, social welfare. We want our international obligations complied with provincially.

[John Stapleton]

Another important point is that we have in Canada started to take terms such as “child poverty” for granted. They have become entrenched; child poverty has become entrenched in our culture. Also, words like “the working poor”; we accept that there are going to be people who are working poor.

I'm here to tell you that especially in northern European countries, “working poverty” is considered an oxymoron; child poverty is something you should eradicate, not just deal with in some small measure.

The real point here, when we start looking at the continued erosion of our income security programs, is that there surely is an important role for responsibility, and individual responsibility; no one is denying that, and I can't imagine anyone being against individual responsibility.

At the same time, as we watch social assistance and employment insurance and the money being taken out of those programs consistently each year when compared with inflation, we're seeing those programs consistently eroding year after year without any kind of redress. So at the same time as we ask individuals to take responsibility, we have to be talking about governments taking responsibility, not just to measure but to stop that continual erosion.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Stapleton. That's all the time we have.

We are going to move to our last questioner, Mr. Hiebert, for five minutes please.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

Mr. Chair, it is a pleasure to join this committee. It is an interesting topic. I would like to say that I think something is working in a society where somebody like me, the youngest of four children in a single-parent home, can make it to the place behind this table in a very short period of time, and in a society when at the time there were not social programs as available as they are today.

That said, my first question is for Mr. Sarlo. It deals with the issue of homelessness, which typically comes up when we discuss poverty. I am particularly referring to the national homelessness initiative. I note, Mr. Sarlo, that in the past you've made some interesting comments. I would like to quote from your work and then have you follow up with a comment on this particular quote.

You wrote in January 2004:

Homelessness is a national tragedy. Human beings are dying or risking death every year because, for whatever reason, they have no shelter. Yet, we have apparently made no serious attempt to determine how many people are in this predicament and why. And, without this information we really cannot develop a credible policy for resolving the problem. Without it, we cannot even determine whether the problem is capable of resolution.

You said, “We have a program”—the NHI—“that is very heavy on social development jargon and very light on problem solving, specific deliverables, and value-for-money analysis.” It's an axiom in economics that if you can't measure it, you can't manage it, and I think that's what is at the core of your comments here.

I am wondering if you would like to elaborate on that particular statement.

[Chris Sarlo]

Not to any extent; I think I chose those words carefully and obviously meant them. I'm a scientist. I'm interested in measuring things. I think it's an important precondition to any kind of intelligent policy, so I'll stand by those words.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

All right.

Mr. Finnie, in his comments, suggested that 50% of the poor, by your definition—I'm not sure which definition you were using, and perhaps you can let us know about that—were a transitory element; that is, they were there for a given year, but they weren't there the following year.

I'm wondering, Mr. Sarlo, whether you could.... According to your basic needs poverty line definition, 4.9% of Canadians, you say, are under that limit. How many of those people do you think would be in a situation where it's a transitory state for them: they would not have been there the previous year, but they're there at the present time, and they likely won't be there in the future?

[Prof. Chris Sarlo]

I'll have to say a couple of things about that. One is that I don't study the dynamics of poverty. Other individuals have done that; I don't have the database resources to do it. My understanding is, from U.S. studies and studies in other countries—and also in Canada, although using the LICO, which I have difficulties with—that the majority of poverty is transitory. In other words, it doesn't last in the long term.

Beyond that, I'm not qualified to talk.

[Russ Hiebert, Conservative, South Surrey—White Rock—Cloverdale, BC]

Perhaps, Mr. Finnie, you could elaborate for us. I found this comment particularly interesting, the suggestion that when we talk about the poor—I am not sure what definition you were using—there's a dynamic to the term. It is not a static group of individuals in society who are stuck in that particular place, but it is actually an evolving or a changing circumstance for some people.

Could you elaborate for us what you were referring to?