Human Resources Committee on April 10th, 2008

[Frank Fedyk]

I would say it's more to measure progress. They say they're using this indicator. I don't believe any of the provincial jurisdictions have said, “This is our official measure”. They've used the indicators in order to measure progress against their strategies.

The only countries that have set official poverty measures are the United Kingdom and Ireland.

[A voice]

And the U.S. with—

[Frank Fedyk]

And the U.S., yes.

[Sheila Regehr]

If I could just add to that a little bit, yes, as these people have said, the other countries went out and, to my knowledge, a number of the.... The United Kingdom, for example, did a major consultation and asked people about measures. They were looking for one, and they realized very quickly that it wasn't going to happen either.

Most of the countries have decided on a core, and it's usually quite small; it's usually about three. It's something that gets at the kind of thing the LICO does, where you're really close to the line and you might be doing okay, but it won't take much to really put you into hardship; and then something that reflects a real depth, a real persistence of poverty, the more chronic kinds of things; and then others have been combinations of things to get at different aspects of poverty.

So they've adopted those as official measures. But they're not an abstract; they are a goal. Our goal, despite whatever measure you pick, is that each of those three things has to start coming down or we're not doing our job properly. So it's linking the objectives to the measures, and then, as Frank said, there is a whole other array of indicators and statistics that can be used by different people for different things.

Market basket measure is being used and adapted beautifully by Newfoundland and Labrador to very specific geographical locations and in a very transparent way, so people know what their communities look like and the sort of income distribution and poverty issues they're dealing with.

One of the things that has been a preoccupation with the National Council of Welfare for a long time is the fact that social assistance rates are set according to nothing that anybody can determine. To us, there would be a tremendous advantage to having something like a market basket measure, so that it's a commitment to the population that says, “We think this is what a reasonable standard of living is”, and welfare rates should have something to do with that. They shouldn't just be a number pulled out of a hat.

That's the other value of measures and indicators, so that people can understand why things are the way they are, why your cheque is this much money and not something else. So there are governance and transparency issues involved in all of these.

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

I have just a couple of short questions.

I've heard all your reports, and about the populations most at risk. I call it the face of poverty, but none of you referred to female. I know it's inferred and it's there, as lone parent is. Is that for some reason?

[Frank Fedyk]

[Inaudible--Editor]...the detail with our colleagues at Stats Canada for those in persistent poverty, those who are male- and female-headed.

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

Under the rubric of “social inclusion”, there's this question: are we including females in a way that's adding to their ability to take care of themselves and their children, and to thrive, which is one of the European concerns, as I read the material I'm getting? Are we leaving that out purposely?

[Sheila Regehr]

I think it's a question of 10 minutes.

Almost all the plans everywhere internationally, from Burkina Faso to Sweden, have gender equality as a central tenet of an anti-poverty strategy. It's part of the UN framework for doing things. I don't see why Canada would want to do anything different. Most of the publications we produce, wherever we can, things are aggregated by sex, family type, all those things. We have a wealth of information. We need to use it more.

If I can take one more second, the other critical element that very often doesn't get factored in but is key to the gender equation, is having time-use statistics. Canada has tremendous capacity in that regard too, and we don't use them well enough. And this is the conundrum for most single parents. It's the trade-off between time and money. They don't have enough time to make money, and unless that's factored in, you're going to have real trouble finding workable solutions.

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Michael Savage]

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We'll move to the parliamentary secretary, Ms. Yelich, for seven minutes.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Thank you to the witnesses.

First, before I ask Stats Canada my question, to Sheila, you have identified a lot of the poverty groups and some circumstances; however, I'm wondering if you have looked out there in some of the communities. Some groups are working very well on the ground, and I'll throw one out. Pathways in Toronto is actually working for specific groups. Many of these aren't even government-funded, and I know myself, in my own city, lots of community living hardly gets any government funding; yet it gets out there on the ground and has been trying to help a lot with poverty.

I wonder if you would agree that perhaps what's missing here is sometimes just connecting some of these good groups and this good work that's already being done out there with people like you. You seem to have the statistics, even though you're not really giving us numbers; as you said, you're giving us circumstances and different scenarios. We have a lot of those scenarios coming, and what we're hoping to do is have a solution-based poverty study so that we can bring people who have already got some really good solutions but who want to be heard and are crying to be heard. I think it would be great if you could pull some of this and perhaps see some of the groups or help us coordinate some of the groups that really do want to get the government's ear, that feel they can attack some of the problems you have in your presentation.

But most important, because this is a poverty study, I wanted to start our first.... I tried to get some sort of definition, some way of measuring it. You were very guarded, Sylvie, on making sure we don't use LICOs. I'm wondering about the measurement to do this right. I don't think we can break it down into groups and demographics, and of course in a country as big as Canada, I don't think we're going to be able to do anything but try to find where the persistent poverty is. So what is going to be the ideal way to do it as well as we can?

I'll start with Sylvie, and then we can perhaps go to others.

[Sylvie Michaud]

There are definitely limitations with the LICOs. Because the cities are all together, the 500,000-plus, the MBM in that sense gives us a more detailed breakdown.

We're working closely with HRSDC to see at some point if we can release MBM at the same time as the LICO. I think Statistics Canada has been guarded, and I think CCSD would agree with that. What we don't want is to define and then to measure poverty. We could be accused of bias. So we'd like HRSDC to take the lead.

Stats Canada's best scenario was more for HRSDC to take the lead with various organizations to come up with the official measures the government would like Statistics Canada to be producing. Then we'll be happy to provide the methodological ground, the support, and all the statistical things behind the measure. So we've been working with HRSDC on that particular aspect.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Would you see the MBM being a good starting point to try to define poverty? That's the inability to have the necessities of life, which is the poverty level we're looking at.

[Sylvie Michaud]

I'm not going to comment on the choice of measure. I'll provide you with statistical background, but we wouldn't want to say. But for sure, the MBM provides more geographical detail, and to my mind it's a good thing.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Would you say it works better because we're a confederation in which we have to deal with different jurisdictional issues in provinces?

[Sylvie Michaud]

Yes, but I wouldn't want to comment, because Statistics Canada's role is in providing the data and the support on the issue. We feel that the definition, the choice of the measure, has to be done through the political system. That's why we wouldn't want to define it. If the MBM were chosen by government as the measure through which they now want to report or measure progress, we would be happy to see how we can support that work.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Along with the LICO.

[Sylvie Michaud]

Of course, along with the LICO. As has been mentioned before, the LICO has the time history and I think it's an important thing.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Once the MBM gets some history behind it--

[Sylvie Michaud]

We could provide both. If the government decided this was becoming the official measure, what would have to be put in place is probably an agreement on the methodology and also how regularly it would be updated, the mechanism for a transparent update.

What you need are the necessities, and the cost of the basket will change through time. Right now we say in transportation, for example, in a rural area you need to buy a five-year-old Chevy. Maybe 20 years down the road Chevies won't exist any more and it will be all green cars with very different methods.

There needs to be an update at some point. Computers or the Internet may be a basic necessity. The basket needs to be refined. What we'd like is to have a process to be able to update the basket in a transparent way, in a regular way. If that's done, if it is decided by the government, we'll be happy to report on it.

[Garnett Picot]

Perhaps I could add to that.

From an analytical point of view in trying to figure out what's happening, this is not from what should be our official poverty line because we're not going to choose that.

As Sylvie has said, the market basket measure, because it's more of a cost-of-living-based measure, is definitely more useful when comparing cities or provinces in Canada, for instance, than the LICO, because the LICO doesn't really account for cost of living differences, and that's important. The MBM is good for that.

The LICO has the time series and you can see a long history. If you want to see what's happening now as compared to 20 years ago, you're pretty well stuck with the LICO.

There are two other measures that I would definitely pay attention to. One is the persistent low-income measure; that is, using longitudinal data to ask who is in chronic low income. A lot of people who show up in the LICO, for instance, may be in low income only for a few months or a year. Who are the people who are in low income for four or five years? I would definitely want to focus on chronic low-income measures, and that's exactly what HRSD has done in the identification of those five groups.

There is one other measure we haven't mentioned here at all today. We've been talking in terms of the measurement issue about the low-income cut-off, or what the line is below which you are said to be in stricken economic circumstances. We haven't talked about the depth of low income.

If the low-income cut-off, for the sake of argument, is $20,000, but most of the poor people are at $18,000, that's one situation. You could still have a 10% low-income rate. If the low-income cut-off is at $20,000 and you still have 10% of the population below that but they're at $10,000 average income and not at $18,000, that's a very different situation. Those people are much poorer. Nowhere, if you're only talking about low-income cut-off, do you actually see that, because it's going to look the same; those two scenarios will look the same at a 10% low-income cut-off. So the other issue is the gap or the depth of low income.

Another reason that's important is that a lot of government programs, such as social assistance, for instance, will often increase their income. They stay below this cut-off sometimes, but their income rises. If you're only looking at the low-income rate, you won't see that improvement. You have to look at the depth of low income or how far below the cut-off people tend to be.

That's another measure I would pay attention to if I were trying to figure out what's happening.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Has it gone anywhere?

[The Vice-Chair, Liberal, Michael Savage]

We'll have to come back on the next round.

For the information of our witnesses, we have finished one round of questions. We're going to have a second round. Most of you have appeared at committees before. We have a prearranged schedule. In this case it will be Liberal, Conservative, Bloc, Liberal, Conservative, NDP. That's how the questions will come at you.

We'll start with Judy Sgro.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

I was going to follow up on what Lynne was saying.

Could you just quickly go into that whole issue? You have some measurements on how you'd measure the depth of the low income. Can you supply the committee with it so we can move down that avenue?

I'll just quickly try to get a couple of questions in here.

[Sheila Regehr]

I have just a one-second answer on that. Our poverty profile historical series calculates LICOs, and percentages below the LICO and around the LICO, so we've done that historically over a while. You can see who is 50% below, for example.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

You can supply that to our researchers so that we'll have that information.

I have questions about a couple of things.

On the issue of education, based on the last Statistics Canada numbers--2001 and 2002--44% of people in my riding do not have a high school diploma. I have some very significant areas of really serious problems. Have you actually done some studies on the issues of education? We talk about programs for early learning--Best Start, the kinds of things that all of us talk about for providing that opportunity for kids at the very beginning. Have you done any statistics on children who have been provided that opportunity from zero, one, two, or whatever it is, on where they end up when it comes to this whole issue of poverty?