Thank you very much.
Good morning. I am a human rights lawyer from Halifax. I practise exclusively in the area of poverty law. I do that domestically and through international human rights litigation.
Good morning. My name is Vincent Calderhead, and I live in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
I submitted a copy of my presentation to you this morning. I'm sorry, but I didn't have enough time to have it translated. I also submitted a copy of a UN report to you.
My presentation is essentially around the principle that Canada must comply with its international human rights obligation by establishing conditions that will underline the Canada social transfer. My message is that these conditions should not be national standards, Ottawa-imposed standards. The Canada social transfer should be revisited and renovated so as to incorporate the standards that are in the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. Those are the standards that should condition Canada's social transfers to the provinces.
As a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Canada has fundamental legal obligations in the field of social and economic rights, including the right to social assistance—and including the right to adequate social assistance.
For two decades Canada reported both to Parliament and to the United Nations that the Canada assistance plan was the method, the cornerstone of its implementation—a big part of the implementation—of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. The Canada assistance plan, it may be recalled, structured federal transfers to ensure that people in need were eligible for assistance and that they were entitled to their basic requirements.
In 1996 Parliament repealed the Canada assistance plan, thereby stripping low-income people of their right to social assistance, their right to their basic requirements. What was crucial at the time, but hardly a word was said in Parliament, is that while rights were stripped away from poor people, they were obviously maintained for the health transfers. You had an anomalous position whereby health transfers, then and now, are rigorously maintained so that people's fundamental right to health is maintained. In terms of low-income people's rights to assistance when in need, there are no longer any rights.
The Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which reviews Canada's implementation, has repeatedly, in 1998 and again in 2006, stated that the standards that would permit Canada to ensure that all provinces are maintaining the basic human rights—and I'm talking about human rights here—to adequate social assistance must be re-established. The committee asked why it is that health care standards are maintained, but in the area of social assistance for the poor nothing is in place. In May 2006, when Canada's performance was reviewed, the committee was extremely critical of Canada for a lack of redress, a lack of remedy available to low-income people for inadequate social assistance, the lack of a poverty line, and the lack of federal standards.
I'll refer you to the back side of my presentation. About halfway down, there's a bulleted paragraph in bold noting that the committee said Canada should remedy the fact that "federal transfers for social assistance and social services still do not include standards" in relation to the rights in the covenant.
What was very important during this last review of Canada was that anti-poverty groups from Quebec and anti-poverty groups from the rest of Canada grappled with this problem of national standards—Ottawa standards—and said this is unacceptable. What all groups representing low-income people at the United Nations agreed to was that this historic problem can be resolved by saying these standards won't be national, won't be Ottawa standards; they will be the standards that pervade the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, which Canada has agreed to. In other words, these will be worldwide norms, standards that 150 other countries have agreed to.
Constitutionally, not that many people are familiar with subsection 36(1) of the Constitution Act 1982. Subsection 36(1) is interesting. Subsection 36(2) is one a lot of people will be familiar with; it's the one that enshrines the constitutional obligations to the principle of equalization.
Subsection 36(1) is a joint federal and provincial constitutional commitment to three things, the third of which is the provision of essential public services of reasonable quality for all Canadians. Accordingly, subsection 36(1), together with Canada's international human rights obligations, can be seen as both a source of and a vehicle for the Government of Canada to revisit the Canada social transfer to re-establish meaningful conditions to the Canada social transfer.
In conclusion, Canada prides itself in being a human rights respecting country. This government has recently said that their domestic obligations will be honoured and they will fight for human rights internationally. As a human rights respecting country, it is incumbent on Canada to revisit the Canada social transfer and, in the course of doing so, embrace and adopt the international human rights norm in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.
Thank you. Merci bien.