My presentation will be in English, but I'll be pleased to answer questions in French.
I've enjoyed this very much.
I am going to give a slightly different perspective. I think I've been invited because of my work on studying the aspects of poverty in an empirical manner, that is to say, to look at the data--what does poverty look like?--and then extending to poverty discussions, and that will be the focus of my remarks. I would have been glad to jump in and participate in these others, but....
First of all, measurement, the measurement issue. I'm sure Professor Sarlo will talk about that. I'm not going to talk about that. It's a difficult issue. You can measure poverty in lots of different ways. Should it be relative, should it be absolute, should it be a mix of the two? These are important issues, but one way or the other, at the end of the day we're going to be left with a number of people who are poor. We can discuss whether it's 15% or 12% or 20%, but there are the poor.
What is the nature of the poor? First of all, one of the things I've been able to do...and I might say my research was financed by the Department of Human Resources Development Canada over the years, and I'm very grateful for that. It's been a delight to work with those people, actually.
About half the poor in any given year in Canada are long-term poor, the other half are quite short-term poor. That is to say they move in for a year or two, and then they move out. That's an important statistic.
Also, if we look at it another way, about 40% of the poor in any year are very long-term poor, who comprise only about 6% of the population. That is to say we have a very small core of the population in this country who comprise a great percentage of the poor in any given year and over time. That suggests a sort of strategy where, yes, there are short-term poor, and we might have certain kinds of policies for them, but we also have the long-term poor, and we would have a different set of policies for them.
The best set of policies, of course, is to prevent them from ever getting there in the first place. It's enticing from a policy perspective because there's just this very small group of individuals we need to get at, and if we can fix it for them, we'll slice the poverty rate in half forever, every year. The problem, of course, is that it's a tough nut to crack.
Also, of course we can talk about certain groups--single mothers have high rates--but I was pleased to hear the mention of single and unattached individuals, for example. Most people, when they think of the poverty problem in Canada...a large percentage of it is unattached individuals. A lot of it is couples, families with children. While I'm of course in favour of helping those groups that suffer particularly high rates, single mothers, elderly women, we need some sort of policy that's going to get at those large groups, because that's where most of the poor are.
I might also say some of my own more recent research suggests that if we get that small group out of poverty in a given year, there are important intergenerational effects. There's a strong link from one generation to another. So if we get those people out of poverty, not only will the long-term poor be out forever, but also their children are much less likely to be poor. We can get them out of poverty, prevent them from ever entering.
What do we do? First of all, as I say, the best strategy is to prevent them from ever getting there. That's a post-secondary education strategy, and it's access to post-secondary education, which happens to be the other area in which I do quite a lot of research. What are the issues there? I won't go into those in depth--I have other research, other papers in that area--but it's an issue of access. Who doesn't go to post-secondary education? It's people from lower-income families, lower-education families.
Most important, it's a cultural issue, I would say, more than a money issue. The student financial aid system is important, the cost is important. I've written on that. But the most important aspect, I think, is the culture of going on to PSE or not. That's what their problem is. That's what our policies need to address, I think. It's not a guarantee that if someone goes on to college or university they will avoid poverty or long-term poverty, but it's a very good chance that they will be able to. It's a great place to start.
Other programs. Once they're into the labour market, the task is to identify in particular those long-term poor and target specific programs on them. When I was doing this research, one of the most profound experiences I had was going to a place in Montreal called Renaissance Montréal. It's an anti-poverty organization, and what they do is take people at the social assistance level, marginally even at the social assistance level, they bring them into their organization, and they give them jobs. Most important, right from the top, is the question of responsabilisation, which is a beautiful word in French. We don't have it in English, but it is more or less making people responsible.
So they give them opportunities with the one hand. Those people can walk in practically off the street. They have nothing. They don't know how to bathe, necessarily. They don't know how to show up for work, and they don't have the clothes. On the first day they're told, “This is what you need to do. Here are some clothes. And by the way, they're on your account; you will pay those off as you make some money.”
They help them with their psychological problems or sociological problems, and they have a relatively high success rate. A success is, say, a floor-level job at Zellers, which can then lead to an assistant manager position at Zellers, which can then get them into society. Again, it's a question of culture.
What do you need for that? A combination of programs, I think, to make it worth working and to give support for those individuals who need it. With the psychological and sociological problems they have, they're not tuned in the way the rest of the mainstream is. You have to make work pay, but you have to give them a chance, with the support they need, to get into the labour market.
So we need a suite of programs that are basically tailored to individuals who identify these problem individuals. And you can do that; you can identify, based on people's characteristics and past records, who is likely to be a long-term poor person. You need to target these policies on these individuals so that, again, work pays and so that the individual gets the level of support they need to develop the culture, to know what it is to work, to know what it is to show up on time for a job. We need a mix of policies like that.
I will leave my remarks at that. It's very exciting to be here, and I thank you very much.