Agreed. Yes, I've got a lot to cover, and it's going slowly, it feels to me.
There's a lot in the work the National Council has done on solving poverty that looks at things more from a governance model, which means that anything in there applies to any order of government or even communities. Most Canadians, when we talked to them about these things—we thought they were going to be considered esoteric or too complicated or something—understand, too, that you have to have a vision of where.... Even at a household level, when you're raising your children, you have to have a vision of what you want down the road. You have to have some plan in place to get there. You have to assign some resources. You have to figure out who's responsible. You have to do all of those things. You have to involve the people. As your children get older, you involve them in your own plan for their future.
All of these things are important, no matter at what level of government. So solving poverty, as people have mentioned, is a national issue. The federal government has to be involved if it's going to work.
It's also really important, I think, especially for the federal government, to recognize that people who are already marginalized have to be involved and that poverty has to be seen, as most European countries see it, in the context of larger social and economic objectives, not something on its own.
I want to reinforce that Canada has already made commitments in human rights instruments, both nationally and internationally, to do the work that most poverty advocates say needs to be done. Leadership also involves recognizing a good idea and running with it. The federal government did this with Tommy Douglas's idea for medicare, but it wouldn't have happened on a national level if the federal government hadn't picked it up. CPP is a similar kind of situation. Another leadership role is that you don't have to be the first out with the good idea, but the support and the championing matters.
I won't talk a lot, either, about the direct action role the government has, because my colleagues here in HRSDC have talked about that. I think one of the things we really have to look at carefully, and I understand some committee members are doing this, is the role of the income tax system. That deserves a little bit more mention, and I think I'll talk about that later, in the next section.
Again I want to stress that income matters, but income can't replace services like health care or a child care system, just as individuals are never going to build the system of highways. So that matters tremendously.
There are many areas. When I started outlining this presentation, I thought, “Okay, let me see, where are the direct federal actions and where are the really, really clear provincial things?” It's not clear, and it's not clear to most Canadians. Quite frankly, most Canadians we've heard from are just fed up with how complex it is. It's more and more complex the less and less income you have, because you don't have anybody to help you sort it out. So that really matters.
On measures and indicators, a lot has been debated. I think our bottom line on this is that there's been enough talk. Let's pick a small selection. Let's just decide, do them, learn as we go, get better, and have some official measures. The council would agree that this is not Statistics Canada's role; this is part of our governance structure, and governments need to decide that.
There's also a role for things like the kind of reporting the employment insurance system does, so you know who's getting benefits, how much they're getting, who qualifies, who doesn't. We get a sense of what kind of impact this is having. I think something similar to that in many more program areas would be valuable, and that leads directly into my final section, which is about financing the solutions.
Here we would encourage the committee members to read our Cost of Poverty report. There's a more recent example that's very interesting as well that the United Way of Calgary has done on the external costs of poverty, and by “external” it means that this is the amount of money it takes, not to pay welfare recipients but to pay for the costs of increased crime, obesity rates, diabetes, and health care problems. And things that we don't prevent come back to haunt us later on, so I think sometimes we don't do a full enough accounting of things.
I also want to give a few examples of how we need to think of it outside the box. There are good examples of things we've already done, which some of us know about but which are not well known. One that strikes me is a study I know about lone parents, which was done by Gina Browne at McMaster University. She found, I think, rates of something like--and don't quote me on this--80% for clinical depression among a group of lone parents she was working with in this particular project. They looked at what kinds of different solutions there were. The obvious one would be to send these people into the health care system and to psychologists and psychiatrists, and that would cost a fortune. What they discovered was if they could get their son into a football program, or if they could get their daughter into a ballet class, and somebody else looked after their child for a few hours a week, their mental health problem was not a mental health problem. So we really need to ask the right questions.
The NCW's Justice and the Poor report, I think, is really valuable too. We didn't bring it, but it's one of our most highly requested publications, and we're almost out of copies. It shows just how easy it is when you're poor to get incarcerated, and then your learning comes from all the other criminals around you. It's quite astounding how that perpetuates the kind of thing we don't want, whereas prevention would save us all a lot of money.
The last example I want to give is a series of examples. This is a publication from 1976, so all of the data in it is obviously really old, but it's called The Hidden Welfare System, and the subtitle is about the personal income tax system in Canada. It shows that compared to how much money we distribute in welfare to the very lowest-income Canadians, we're distributing so much more and so much more security to people who already have lots of resources.
In terms of financing the solutions, I think there's a combination of things that includes better planning and policy design, some reallocation of resources, and some new investments that provide a good return over time, which actually result in cost savings. One of the arguments the Calgary United Way paper makes is that no matter what you feel about the causes of poverty--and you may feel that a lot of people have brought their own misfortune upon themselves--the cost of poverty is so high to so many people that finding solutions is worth it to you.
It really is about values, about vision, about leadership. What we need as a country can't be accomplished by individuals, families, charities, or communities, even though all of those things are important. Ensuring that ordinary citizens are treated fairly and can live with decency and respect is the responsibility of democratic governments.
Thank you.