Human Resources Committee on Nov. 23rd, 2006

[France Bonsant, Bloc, Compton—Stanstead, QC]

You also know that a lot of people 65 and over who don't receive old age pension benefits don't even know they're poor. A lot of seniors are living in run-down places and are quite happy to get $500 or $600 a month. Are you promoting the guaranteed income supplement, which is intended for people 65 and over who have incomes of less than $13,000 a year? That belongs to them, because those people built our villages, our provinces. You could let these people know about the guaranteed income supplement in order to get them out of poverty and give them the dignity they deserve.

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

That is the issue of seniors who are eligible for the guaranteed income supplement but aren't accessing it. It is something that has been a concern for the National Council of Welfare, and we have advised previous ministers about that issue. If that continues to be a problem, we will make sure to raise the issue again to ensure that the government tries to put in place strategies that will effectively enable people to access the guaranteed income supplement that they're eligible for.

I will bring that back to the council.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's all the time we have. We'll have to catch that on the second round.

Mr. Martin, seven minutes please.

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

Thank you very much.

I want to thank the committee for having this brief review today, and I want to thank the members for coming.

We've heard quite a bit of very valuable information this morning. I've been dealing with and looking at this question of poverty for quite some time--as a member of the Ontario parliament and now at the federal level--and it's difficult to find one particular answer. I get frustrated when we get into a panel like this one, where some say poverty exists and is growing, and others, it seems, have spent a lot of time trying to define poverty. At one point I thought they were actually going to define it right out of existence, but that hasn't quite happened yet. Other people are trying to come up with labour market strategies to deal with poverty. It seems to me there's an underbelly to this that is challenging and problematic.

To Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Calderhead, and Mr. deGroot-Maggetti, obviously you've all done studies indicating that poverty exists in Canada and is growing. That's what the National Council of Welfare said, that it was deeper and more pervasive than ever before. We have Mr. Sarlo saying that we can't measure poverty, that we don't have the vehicle to measure poverty; it's a data question. What we have, I guess, is a problem with data, not poverty.

Maybe you could comment on that.

[John Stapleton]

I'll start by saying that in looking at Professor Sarlo's material, he has managed to persevere through what he considers to be bad data in order to come up with a poverty standard for a single person. If I've read it correctly, that standard is over $10,000 a year.

Just to arrive at this $10,000 amount, looking at Professor Sarlo's absolute poverty line, would require in Ontario a 51% rate increase in social assistance. That's just to arrive at that poverty standard. Looking at the amount that people actually live on, we can guarantee you that, yes, about 100,000 single individuals in Ontario, for example, live on $6,500 a year. That's the maximum you can get. So you would need a 50% increase just to get to Professor Sarlo's line.

This is certainly not the case if you go back to 1992, when the social assistance rate for a single person was $8,000 a year in Ontario. The Fraser Institute poverty line at that time was also $8,000. So as just one very simple measure, you'd need to raise rates in Ontario by 50% just to get back to where they were 14 years ago.

It seems to me that, various statistics aside, Mr. Sarlo has provided us with a very good set of measures. We're glad he's persevered in order to allow us to make this point.

[Vincent Calderhead]

Perhaps I can add to that.

The sense one gets from the Professor Sarlo approach--he stressed this in his conclusion--is that we shouldn't take any steps before we've agreed on statistical methodologies and so on.

The effect of this would be to induce a kind of paralysis: “Oh, this is complicated. Oh, this is controversial. Hmm, we can't do anything until we've figured out how to do it.” Meanwhile, people are homeless. People are living in hunger. Those are the realities, in this paralysis-inducing approach, that Professor Sarlo begs us to hold off on.

The second thing is that we're talking about fundamental human rights--fundamental, worldwide, shared human rights. Do we ask ourselves how we can minimally avoid those, how we can prevent ourselves from engaging and respecting them? The Prime Minister was abroad recently saying that human rights are so important and we have to live up to them and fully respect them. That won't happen if we sit around asking how we measure it. We look at the realities of poverty and say that people have a right to dignity and a right to an adequate income.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Sarlo, did you have any comments?

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

Actually, if you don't mind, it's my round. I would like to hear from Mr. deGroot-Maggetti first—

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'm sorry, I thought he had his hand up.

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

—and then perhaps Mr. Sarlo.

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

The one thing I would observe or add is that it's not entirely true to say we've not made any success in reducing poverty. When you look at seniors, the rate and depth of poverty since 1980 has come down, and come down dramatically. It reflects, in part, public programs that have been put in place specifically to address poverty among seniors.

So the lesson is, even if one were to say that the low-income cut-off is not the perfect measure of poverty, it nonetheless can show us that we've made substantial success in reducing poverty among seniors. But there are other groups in society—children with families, lone-parent families, working-age adults—where we haven't made success.

We have to decide. Let's have the government chose what is going to be the official target measure or benchmark, and then put in place a strategy to reduce poverty. We've had success in reducing poverty among seniors; we can do it among other members of the population.

[Prof. Ross Finnie]

Could I make two quick points in response to Professor Sarlo?

First of all, on the measurement issue, I think he's wrong. I think there are good data out there. I've used them myself. You can go and read my report, published by the C.D. Howe Institute, on anti-poverty policies. I can give you the precise reference.

There are different kinds of data. He referred to one data set that was based on surveys. That's how data used to be collected, because that was the only way we could do it. There are now other ways to collect data, in particular, and it's done very carefully, very confidentially. All individual identifiers are eliminated. But referring to tax data, where we can get it, many of the issues he's talking about.... Most of the income data now coming out of Statistics Canada use those data because they are available, because they're able to use them, and because they provide better measures. So many of the problems that Professor Sarlo was talking about are history. It's not like that anymore. There is a variety of data sets. That's basically what Statistics Canada is generally doing.

Secondly, should there be an official line? First of all, I don't speak for Statistics Canada; I'm a visiting fellow there, as an academic, but I'm not an employee. The issue there is that they don't think it's the job of Statistics Canada to define the measure of poverty, precisely because it is subjective. It's not a statistical exercise, it's not a scientific exercise; it's a subjective exercise. So it is the job of other organizations, and individuals such as Professor Sarlo himself, to come up with a measure, which is a good one, among many. I believe that is why Statistics Canada has done that over the years.

If the government wished to define poverty itself, that would be the job of the government, I think, not the job of Statistics Canada. In fact, I think one of the advantages of studying poverty in Canada is that we now have a suite of measures. None is right; they're all reasonably good and have their advantages and their disadvantages. So we can use Professor Sarlo's measure; we can use the LICO; we can use the LIM; we can use the market basket income.

In the end, though, we're still going to have Renaissance Montréal, which sees that there are things you can do to help people who are poor get back into the mainstream. So we can still do it; we can still adopt measures.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Okay, that's all the time we have.

Mr. Sarlo, did you want to make a comment?

[Prof. Chris Sarlo]

Yes, thank you.

Very briefly, first of all, I'm not here to disagree with anybody. I really appreciate the comments that are made. I am not in favour of any kind of paralysis. I think we need to take poverty seriously. There are people who are really disadvantaged in Canada. So I want to make that clear.

The issue of data, I think, is a serious one. I think we have to take a closer look at it. I'm not convinced that databases drawn from tax data or any other kind of source that we have conventionally are going to do it. I don't know that that's accurate, but I think it needs to be looked at.

Finally, I think one way to do that is to take a suggestion that was made earlier today, and that is a national anti-poverty strategy. In such a strategy, all researchers could take a closer look and have a good debate about what is and what is not valid. The ultimate goal is to help those people who are in difficulty, and I think we're all on the same side on that one.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Sarlo.

We're going to move to the final individual. Mr. Lake, for seven minutes, please.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for coming here today. I think this is a very important issue. There are a lot of people who need help.

Part of the problem I have centres around a lot of the discussion I've heard already about definitions. For example, I heard Mr. Calderhead, I think, referring to “adequate social assistance” and “basic requirements” and “poor” and “poverty”, and yet I don't know what the definitions are for some of the terms I hear there.

I think Mr. Finnie was the only person I heard so far who used the term “responsible” in conjunction with the term “rights”, and I appreciate that. I think that any time we're talking about rights we should be also using the word “responsibilities” in conjunction with that.

Mr. deGroot-Maggetti, I noticed that you have a definition of poverty, a poverty line that you referred to throughout your document and through your talk. Really quickly, I'd like you to tell me what is the definition of poverty line, as you've used it. You're putting some statistics in there, so there must be a specific definition for poverty line. Could you please comment?

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

Simply, to answer, it's pretty straightforward. The National Council of Welfare has consistently used the low-income cut-off measures as the measure for poverty in its studies.

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

Can you briefly--maybe it's not a brief thing--explain what the low-income cut-off is? Is it relative or is it absolute? I guess that's the first part of the question.

[Greg deGroot-Maggetti]

Those terms, “relative” and “absolute”--and Professor Sarlo too has pointed this out--are not very good descriptors of the different choices among poverty lines. There are consumption basket measures, and there are income basket measures.

I think Statistics Canada refers to the low-income cut-offs as the point below which people are in straitened circumstances or...I forget the other descriptors that they use for low-income cut-offs. Certain studies have been done looking at, for example, functional health of children who live in families with certain income levels. When I have compared that to the low-income cut-offs, in families whose incomes are below the low-income cut-off, the children have a much higher percentage of poor functional health. So I think it's a relevant indicator.

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

Okay, I'll stop you there now, because I want to move to Mr. Sarlo.

Mr. Sarlo, what do you think of the use of the low-income cut-off as a measure of the poverty line?

[Prof. Chris Sarlo]

I've written about that consistently over the years. I do have some difficulties with it. I think that it was designed in the sixties as a measure of low income. It is complicated. It's very difficult to explain. I would say that there are only a few people who could explain it articulately in Canada.

I would say it's in the realm of an umbrella of relative measures because it is connected intimately to average living standards. I know what the provinces have said about it. It was clear. I've been at meetings where the provinces have been strongly against it.

I'll just repeat what I said. I think we do need alternative measures. I think we should measure inequality. We should also measure the number of people who just don't have all the basics covered.

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

Right.

Mr. Finnie, you were talking a little bit about the data. I think it's important for us as a government to have a target to shoot for, something that we're trying to accomplish. We are spending, as Mr. Sarlo said, billions of dollars on this, and for us it seems as if there's conversation around a whole bunch of.... You talk to different groups across the country, and we're talking in a whole different language about what we're trying to accomplish. I think it's important that we get a little more focused in terms of where we're going.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on what the role of the federal government is, and then I'd like to hear Mr. Sarlo's thoughts, as well, on the role of the federal government in reducing poverty in Canada and what specific actions we should take.

[Prof. Ross Finnie]

The LICO is historically rooted, but basically they estimated how much families spend on necessities: food, shelter, clothing. They calculated that and then said, let's have a line. If a family, by their income level, spends more than a certain percentage of their income on these necessities, we'll call them poor. That's how they find that line. It's partly relative because that package they decided on back in the 1960s was an arbitrary decision the same as these other sorts of measurements that measure what is actually spent and what is poor in an absolute sense--it's always there.

In terms of measures, we need them, and again, I would emphasize that any of these measures are useful for measuring progress or movement in poverty over time. Whether you use the LICO, the LIM, the Sarlo measure, or the market basket, they are all useful. You put them all together and you can get a good idea of what you want to do and what you're measuring.

In terms of the government's role, I'm all over the map. What I mean by that is that I believe in strong government action when government action can be effective. I think the role of government--and I can talk to people from the furthest right to the furthest left in Canada, and they can agree on this--is that we identify what works best and then put our resources there. It requires one thing: identifying what works best.

I'd say there actually is more research than people have suggested up here. It's an ongoing process profiting from our improved data over the years, and that should continue to put resources into identifying what works, what doesn't. That's basically a research question. That's being undertaken by your department, in fact.

Secondly, identify what works best and put the resources there. I don't think Canadians want money thrown down a well, but I think most Canadians will support measures that are effective in terms of spending money to help individuals, even if those programs are expensive, because if you can bring one of these long-term people out of poverty into the economic mainstream and you fix that person's problem for their lifetime, you remove that person from the government rolls.

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

It sounds like you're talking about value for money.

[Prof. Ross Finnie]

Absolutely.