Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, members of the committee.
The National Council of Welfare is pleased to have the opportunity to appear before this committee on an issue that's central to the council's mandate. I hope the committee will also refer to our written brief.
For over 25 years the council has published detailed statistics on poverty in Canada, with its most recent reports released in July and August this year. Over that time, poverty rates among seniors have improved dramatically. However, poverty rates for all other age groups, including children, are about the same as they were almost a quarter century ago.
Many people living in poverty are employed. Almost a million poor families and working-age singles earn half or more of their income from paid jobs. In one-quarter of families living in poverty, the major income earner works all year long at a full-time job, but their average earnings are only $9,500.
Many jobs simply pay too little to allow people to pull themselves and their families out of poverty. More people live in the deepest poverty than ever before. Most notably, the number of working-age singles living on incomes of less than half the amount of the poverty line tripled from 162,000 in 1989 to 552,000 in 2003.
Why have we not made any sustained progress against poverty? A woman from Nova Scotia recently contacted the council after hearing of our questionnaire about poverty, which I will explain a little bit more about later. She reflected upon the supports available to Canadians in the past compared to those available today. This is what she wrote:
I was raised by a single mother. The combination of lower tuition, easier access to student loans, affordable housing and job availability made it possible for my sister and me to go to university and become professionals. We met our husbands at university, both who are now professionals. Our children, who are being raised by parents who work as professionals, have a good standard of living, good health, and are likely to have good jobs themselves. If my mother had raised us in this climate, we would not have had access to the same opportunities and it is doubtful that we would have had the opportunity to complete our university education or meet our future spouses. My children would not have had the same standard of living or health that they enjoy now.
We know that things were not perfect in the past. Many groups, such as aboriginal peoples, people belonging to visible minority groups, and mothers in need of child care, were left far behind. However, as this person has noted, things are far from perfect today.
Today our challenge is to build on or restore our damaged social infrastructure and move beyond it to confront new challenges of the 21st century. In the past, the welfare wall has been a key issue, meaning that many people who are trapped in welfare do not have opportunities to get off social assistance.
The council would suggest that there's also a low-wage wall behind which hundreds of thousands of workers are trapped in poorly paying jobs. These jobs usually do not come with benefits, such as workplace pension, health, or dental benefits. These jobs offer almost no opportunities for education, training, or advancement, and even act as barriers to those objectives. Many workers who occupy these jobs are working long or irregular hours, and many are also working far below their level of education and training.
In order to deal with this issue, we have to identify and overcome both the barriers to getting an entry-level job and the barriers to moving beyond low-wage jobs. Another issue facing low-income workers is the inadequacy of minimum wages. It used to be that a person working full-time at a minimum-wage job would earn enough to keep them above the poverty line. That's no longer the case. The meagre increases in minimum wages over the years have not kept pace with the cost of living. Families and individuals dependent on minimum-wage jobs work hard, but still live below the poverty line.
We're pleased to see that a recent report reviewing Canada's federal labour standards recommended that the federal government reinstitute a national minimum wage. In addition, the report recommended that the new national minimum wage should be benchmarked to the low-income cut-off index or some similar standard and should be adjusted automatically at intervals of one or two years.
Changes to employment insurance present another challenge to workers in Canada. Employment insurance now provides coverage for only 40% of unemployed Canadians compared to 80% in 1990. For those few low-wage workers who are eligible for EI, their EI payments will cover only 55% of their average income, which leaves most below the poverty line. We need better EI coverage for those in precarious work, as well as increased rates to assure that being unemployed or sick or caring for a newborn or a sick relative does not mean you live below the poverty line.
Other factors that are important when talking about poverty include the inadequate number of affordable and high-quality early learning and child care spaces in every province and territory in Canada. Child care is especially vital to allowing women, particularly lone parents, to hold paid jobs instead of being forced to rely on welfare.
The decline in welfare rates over the last 20 years in terms of real purchasing power, coupled with increasing barriers to access to welfare, is another major problem. And then there's the decided lack of investment in affordable housing in Canada over the past years. Waiting lists for housing are long, and many families struggle to find housing that they can afford.
The council feels that the issues just discussed are important factors that have aggravated poverty in this country. However, the overall policy measure that we think is crucial is the lack of a national anti-poverty strategy. Without a national strategy, we do not have the targets or timetables for reducing poverty, we don't have mechanisms for poverty reduction in partnership with other levels of government, and we do not coordinate programs within and across all levels of government.
Other countries such as Ireland and the United Kingdom have anti-poverty strategies. In Canada, both Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador have their own anti-poverty strategies. The goal of the plan in Quebec is to progressively make Quebec one of the industrial nations having the least number of persons living in poverty by 2013, and the goal in Newfoundland and Labrador is to become the province with the least poverty in this country.
The council believes that a made-in-Canada national anti-poverty strategy is one of the most important new initiatives that the federal government could undertake to reduce poverty in Canada.
This fall the council launched a Canada-wide online questionnaire about the issue of poverty and the need for a national strategy. Any individual or organization can participate by simply accessing our website at www.ncwcnbes.net, or by filling out a paper version of the questionnaire.
Over 2,000 people and organizations have already filled out a questionnaire. The results will be tabulated, analyzed, and presented to the Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, as well as made public. We would hope that committee members themselves would answer the questionnaire and encourage your colleagues and constituents to do the same.
Thanks very much.