Human Resources Committee on April 15th, 2008

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

I call the meeting to order.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we are continuing our study of the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada.

I thank the witnesses who are here this morning, and, of course, I bid them welcome. Our witnesses are from the Canadian Council on Social Development, the Canadian Association of Social Workers, and Infometrica.

I am going to ask you to introduce yourselves. I remind you that you have 10 minutes each to make your presentation. Following that, we will move to the question period.

Let us start with Mr. Shillington. We will go in the order indicated for your presentations. Afterwards, we will hear from Ms. Scott.

[Richard Shillington, Senior Associate, Informetrica Limited]

Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you once again about poverty in Canada.

I know the committee is interested in speaking about poverty definitions, but I'm only going to say a few words about that, because I think it's a diversion.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

I just wanted you to introduce yourself and your organization. We can start with Ms. Scott.

[Richard Shillington]

I'm sorry. I thought you wanted me to go first.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

There is no interpretation? OK, I will introduce you.

Ms. Katherine Scott is the Vice-President, Research at the Canadian Council on Social Development. Mr. Glenn Drover is a social worker and the Ontario representative on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Association of Social Workers. Mr. Richard Shillington is a senior associate at Infometrica.

Let us start with you, Ms. Scott.

[Katherine Scott, Vice-President, Research, Canadian Council on Social Development]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the committee for the invitation to come and speak to you today. Certainly it's a topic that's near and dear to our heart.

I'm with the Canadian Council on Social Development. For those of you who don't know the council, I always describe us as the grand old lady of social policy in Canada. We've been around for 80 years. Our earliest concerns date back to the 1920s and to poor children in the post-war period. We've evolved over that time and are now a large national non-partisan research body that focuses on social policy issues and has done research in the area of poverty and poverty measurement.

As Richard said, I understand you're interested in poverty measurement. I've been asked to talk a bit about a study we've done on urban poverty, so I thought I would start my comments by setting that frame about the work that we've done on the issue of urban poverty. Then I'd certainly be happy to entertain questions that you might have about poverty measurement and the like. We're actually in the process of doing a piece of work for a federal-provincial committee on poverty measurement, so I'm happy to field any questions you might have about that and about how we measure or don't measure poverty in Canada, as the case may be.

As I said, I was asked to come and talk to you about some work we've done for many years on urban poverty in Canada. It's been an interesting process, because for many years we didn't actually have any way of understanding poverty at the community level. We didn't have the data to do that. About 10 years ago the council, together with a number of municipalities and community-based organizations, got together to purchase the data necessary to start to understand what was happening in communities. The research that we published recently is based on the 2001 census, and you're lucky because the income release from the statistics of the 2006 census is due out in May, in a few weeks.

The work we've done based on the 2001 census begins to unpack some of the complexity of poverty at the local level. This was an important thing to do around 10 years ago because the understanding was that as the dynamics and composition of poverty changed, poverty was emerging as a huge issue in Canada's large urban centres. Certainly the work we completed over these past few years on the 2001 census data bears that out.

I'd like to start by saying very quickly this isn't to say that poverty isn't a very real and pressing concern in rural areas in Canada, but that in terms of sheer numbers and the acute character of poverty, it has emerged in Canada as a specifically important urban problem. There are many factors, if you're interested, and we can talk about why that is, but certainly Canada's largest cities have the highest poverty rates in Canada. Through the work we've done, we've been able to unpack some of that.

You've probably noted in many of your communities that you now are seeing local poverty studies, and different patterns are emerging. What's interesting, it's important to note, is that while it's highest in urban areas in Canada, the composition of poverty in individual communities is very local. You have cities such as Toronto, for instance, where you are beginning to see the emergence of the suburbanization of poverty. Poverty is now becoming concentrated in the inner suburbs of Toronto. Then you have cities like Saint John, New Brunswick, for instance, where they have a very deprived inner city core and so forth. In Vancouver the dynamics of poverty changed substantially through the 1990s, and you're beginning to see enclaves; for instance, the cities of Richmond and Coquitlam, which historically used to have fairly low poverty rates, actually have much higher rates of poverty because of the concentration of new immigrants.

So when we talk about urban poverty in Canada, I think it's really important to understand that it is really still a very local phenomenon and has everything to do with the composition of the communities and with the patterns and the particularly vulnerable populations in those communities.

I want to touch briefly on one comment I made about the trend toward the suburbanization of poverty. I think sometimes we're very influenced by what we hear about the United States, and certainly that has been an enormously important force in the United States, where you see the hollowing out of major cities and concentration of disadvantage in the Midwest cities and the like. That same pattern hasn't emerged to the same extent in Canada, although we are starting to see it in places like Toronto and Montreal, where gentrification has taken hold in the core and poor people are being displaced to inner suburbs and the like, or in Richmond and Vancouver, where they're going out to other communities.

It comes back to the point that it really does reflect the composition of the population in communities. Our study shows in some detail--and I hope you'll be able to look at some of the profiles we've done for individual communities--the different rates of child poverty, poverty among seniors, poverty among new immigrants, and in the west, concentrations of poverty among aboriginal populations. That has been very important. In cities such as Calgary and Edmonton, which have enjoyed reductions in poverty through the 1990s and continue to enjoy that now, you'll find that acute pockets of poverty have emerged. That's certainly the case among the aboriginal populations in cities in western Canada. I actually brought the entire report, and I'm happy to answer any particular questions.

When I come away and think about some of the major findings, really it is that Canada is not a uniform country in any way. Our diversity is very much reflected in the urban poverty landscape, and that fact, as you think about the solutions, needs to be taken into account. Certainly we can talk about it, and it's critical to create strong foundations and institutional supports, but local poverty reduction initiatives are really important in that context because the nature and character of urban poverty and community poverty in Canada vary so widely. That was certainly our main conclusion, based on the urban poverty report.

I am conscious of the time, but I wanted to talk a bit about some of the findings with respect to kids and immigrants and urban poverty as well.

The situation with children has been interesting. The findings in our report--and these data are based on the last census--show that back in 2001 roughly one in five residents in large urban areas such as Ottawa, Gatineau, Toronto, and Vancouver were poor, but that roughly one in four children were poor. I don't think that statistic is a surprise, because child poverty rates typically are higher than average poverty rates. When we looked at communities across the country, the highest rates of child poverty were in Montreal and the lowest were in Vaughan. You see quite a huge range between cities, but interestingly enough, you'll find communities where the child poverty rate is actually much lower than the city rate would suggest, and those cities are in Quebec.

What is interesting in this finding, and the reason I bring it to your attention, is that public policy can make a difference in lowering rates of child poverty or in targeting rates. In Quebec, of course, there has been an introduction of public policies that have targeted kids, and we're starting to see some evidence that it's making a difference.

Conversely, when we look at immigrants--and immigrants, by and large, are a group who have higher rates of poverty--it is only those communities with large populations of recent immigrants that experience the very highest rates of poverty. There you see differentials of 40 percentage points between the poverty rate of Canadian-born citizens and the poverty rate of immigrants, particularly new immigrants. Again, those are in communities such as Vancouver, Montreal, and Toronto, and again it comes back to the whole theme of diversity and of understanding that different policy instruments will be necessary to tackle these very serious issues.

I was struck by the literature when we looked at where to.... Even among the advocates of very locally based poverty solutions, we see an explosion of interest in poverty reduction across the country by community groups that are mobilizing and taking leadership on this issue. I commend the committee for taking this on. All of these groups come together and point to the critical need for a strong federal response to poverty reduction to create the foundation so that local solutions can thrive.

I am quite struck that we have a need on the one hand for universal or general policies that target all individuals, and a need on the other hand for spatially focused initiatives such as you see emerging. I think that's going to be a critical frame for this committee as it considers the federal contribution to tackling issues such as urban poverty in Canada. Without strong programs such as OAS and GIS, without a strong child tax benefit program, without a progressive tax system, without strong support for public services in health and education, any locally based initiative is destined to fail. I think it's important to keep that in mind.

Even when you look at some of the experimental literature on best practices from other countries--and we can talk about that--when we look at, for instance, the United States, which has some exemplary anti-poverty programming, the absence of critical infrastructure such as public health and the like invariably signals failure. They've not been able to move on their problems of poverty in the United States in the absence of those critical foundational pieces such as public health care, access to high-quality education, public health, and housing. Housing has actually emerged as a critical issue in urban poverty, and you're seeing that in transportation--

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

I have to interrupt you, Ms. Scott, because your time has expired. You will be able to answer questions in a little while. Thank you very much.

We are now going to hear from Mr. Drover and Mr. White, from the Canadian Association of Social Workers.

[Drummond White, Social Worker and Board of Director Member - Ontario, Canadian Association of Social Workers]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, and thank you very much for inviting us to join you this morning.

My name is Drummond White. I am representing the Canadian Association of Social Workers. That's a federal body consisting of nine provinces and the north. Our profession has as its guiding light the pursuit of social justice; the strengthening, of course, of our profession; and enhancing excellence in regulation. But the number one goal of our professional association is the pursuit of social justice. It's in that light that we have spent a great deal of time, effort, and our own resources in dealing with issues of poverty.

Today we're focusing here, as we have over the last several years, on women's poverty. We have sponsored a number of papers, The Declining Health and Well-Being of Low-Income Women in Canada: A Preventable Tragedy, from two years ago; Financial Security for Women Seniors in Canada, from last November; and Women's Income and Poverty in Canada Revisited, from 2004.

Glenn Drover, who is our social policy consultant, will be doing the majority of our presentation, and I certainly will be available for questions as well as Glenn.

I turn the floor over to Glenn.

Thank you.

[Dr. Glenn Drover, Social Worker and Social Policy Consultant, Canadian Association of Social Workers]

Thank you.

We had been asked to focus, I had understood, on more the strategies and solutions related to women's poverty rather than the facts and issues. We did give you a written submission that includes documentation on some of the issues related to women's poverty and also the policy challenges.

We'll try to highlight today a few of the possible strategies or solutions that we think might address women's poverty, but before doing so, there are just two quick points I'd like to make in terms of the issues.

One, the gap between men's and women's income and the relatively higher level of women's poverty in Canada is persistent. It's been ongoing for a long time. That gap has not been significantly reduced. Women more than men are likely to be poor, children in considerable measure are poor because their mothers are poor, and older single women are disproportionately poor because of their marginal location in the labour market.

Other developed countries, particularly in northern Europe, have been able to reduce the gap quite significantly between men's and women's income and the level of women's poverty more than we have in this country. We think the European countries offer you some good benchmarks in that respect. We understand you'll be looking at some of them.

We have four core principles, because we think principles are important when you're trying to look at the issue of poverty.

Fundamentally, in relation to women's poverty, a high employment rate is very significant for low-income women in developing sustainable jobs. It is essential to reduce poverty. As we see it, work is the basis of welfare.

Second, supportive social policy includes a family perspective and gender equality. They're fundamental factors to promote women's security and well-being.

Third, social inclusion and equal opportunity for women, as well as men, require adequate, accessible, financial, and sustainable social protection. I think that's just echoing what Katherine said a moment ago.

The fourth point is that women's stakeholders should be involved in the design, implementation, and monitoring of social programs that affect their lives and their livelihood. Very often, as you well know, these are designed by men.

There are, on the basis of these four principles, five multi-dimensional proposals that we think, if they were pursued, would help alleviate the poverty of women.

The first is to revise the poverty line, or low-income cut-off, so that it is more comprehensive and reflects the reality of women's lives. As Richard mentioned earlier, and Katherine, we do have a publication on that particularly in relation to women. I think it's been given to the committee. We think a composite poverty line is important in order to establish targets for a reduction in the rate of poverty.

The second is a proposed reform of welfare and employment insurance. It's based upon the model of the Caledon Institute. We presume you have that. We would just try to echo it and say why we think it's a useful model.

The third set is a promotion of active labour market policies for women, based upon particularly the European experience and European research.

The fourth is a proposal to improve retirement benefits such as OAS, GIS, and CPP. Unlike men, women primarily draw upon those for retirement. That is not the case for a lot of men.

The fifth is a modification of housing supports and subsidies. We think these can be changed to improve the accommodation of senior women and women in general.

I'll go over a few of those things, just to explain them a teeny bit, and then leave the rest to the discussion.

With regard to the composite poverty line, we think it's possible. You're familiar, I'm sure, with the UN index. Other European countries have developed a composite index on poverty. The advantage of doing it is that it doesn't rely upon just income. The research that's been done in England around that issue shows that in fact when you use other indices, you get different results. By having a composite index, you probably get a better picture of poverty. For women, certainly, a lot of issues just don't get picked up with income issues, because it's based upon household or family data very often as well as individual data. For women and families it says nothing about how those resources are used within the family. Very often women are shortchanged on that one, for sure.

So a composite index is kind of important, we think, and we stress that in our report. We elaborate in the report on how we think that can be done.

The reform of welfare and EI is a model that's been put forward by the Caledon Institute. It's a three-tiered system, as you probably know. The first tier is basic income support for anybody looking for employment. The second tier is more geared toward services operated by the provinces. The third tier is for the disabled, who will, I'm sure, elaborate on that when they speak.

We think it's of value for two reasons. One is that it gives the federal government the main responsibility for the income transfers and the income support. That's the level of government that can sustain and support these things much more than the provinces can, particularly around the welfare problem. Other countries in the world have done that.

Secondly, it is a clear division, we think, of the powers or responsibilities of different levels of government. That is a distinction that this current government has been stressing and that we support.

The third area is in terms of active labour policy. Recent European research confirms that active labour market policies of various kinds, whether in relation to standards, discrimination, equity issues, and so on, as well as various types of support, show that women disproportionately take advantage of those programs in Europe and end up employed quite significantly at higher rates than men. So we think that sector certainly needs to be developed within Canada more.

As part of that, we think also that child care is a very important part, because without that, certainly single-parent moms are not going to be able to move into the workforce in any significant way. And it's important to keep in mind also in relation to that child care—because arguments are often made in terms of the advantage to children—that it is also an advantage in terms of labour productivity. So keep that in mind.

The fourth area is improvements in the OAS, GIS, and CPP. I won't get into the details of that, but we can get into that, if you want, during the discussion. There are various ways in which we think those programs can be improved to assist women in relation to both the OAS and GIS in terms of making it more accessible to some women who are currently excluded, and also in terms of CPP, in terms of opening up that program a little bit. One of the disadvantages is that for women who drop out of the labour force for caregiving reasons other than for children—for example, in middle age, to take care of a senior member of the household, or to take care of somebody else—it doesn't have the same dropout provisions as child care for a mother does.

Finally, in relation to housing, again we won't get into details, but we think two aspects about that are important. One is to have a much bigger push in terms of shelter allowances, housing allowances. At the moment, almost all shelter subsidies are tied to social housing units. They're not free and don't go with the individuals. The other aspect is trying to move towards more mortgage accessibility for low-income women.

I'll stop there. Thank you, Chair.

[Yves Lessard, Bloc, Chambly—Borduas, QC]

You have a minute left, Mr. White.

[Drummond White]

We're fine. Thank you.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

Mr. Shillington.

[Richard Shillington]

I know this committee is interested in speaking about poverty definitions, but I'm going to say only a few words about that because I think it's a diversion.

I will illustrate with an example of why I downplay the definition of poverty. A single senior in Canada without an employer pension has an income of about $15,000: roughly $6,000 from old age security, on average $5,000 from Canada Pension Plan, and $3,000 or $4,000 from GIS. That is not a great deal of money. Roughly half of Canadians retire without a pension plan. This is the median: half are below that, half are above that. And 82% of single people who retire without a pension have an income below $20,000. Would we all agree that these people are living in straitened circumstances? Are they poor? It depends on your definition.

Let's talk about a single senior woman in Quebec with a median income of about $17,000. Some of them have pensions, some don't. I'm using the last year for which I can get comparable data, which is 2000. The poverty rate for single women in Quebec is 65%, with the median income at $17,000 and using the low-income cutoff before tax. If I had appeared before the committee 15 years ago we would have been done; we would have said the poverty rate was 65%. But we've made some progress. The after-tax LICO gives you a poverty rate of 38% for the same people. Their incomes haven't changed. Using the after-tax low-income measure, the poverty rate is 21%. Using the MBM, which was created by officials in the federal government, the poverty rate is 5%.

So we've made a great deal of progress. The poverty rate has come down from 64% to 5% and we haven't spent a penny. These changes in the poverty rate will of course have no impact on the well-being or standard of living of those women. The programs that influence the standard of living of poor seniors are not debates about poverty measures, they are programs.

So over the last 25 years, what have we done that may have influenced the income of those women? Old age security has been indexed to prices only since 1984 and hasn't changed except for that. With GIS, three years ago I would have said the same thing, but it was increased a couple of years ago by $36 per month. That's the only increase in GIS, the main program for low-income seniors, over the last 25 years.

CPP has gone up somewhat because of the increased participation rate by women and a greater participation rate in general. But the maximum CPP is $10,000, the average is $7,000, and the average for women is $5,000 per year, not per month.

We've made some tax changes. We've increased the age credit and the pension credit, and we've brought in pension splitting. None of that will have any influence on the women we're talking about. I think we'll all acknowledge that these people are not taxpayers.

We've increased the RSP limit--we found the funds to do that--in the last 25 years from $5,000 per year to $20,000-some per year. I suspect that won't have much influence on these statistics.

I'm going to talk about programs, but before I do, I've given the committee a poem, Poverty Is, from children in North Bay. These are not economists. They will not talk about before-tax or after-tax; they will talk about what it's like to be a child living in poverty. I want you to notice that they're not talking about malnutrition or housing; they're talking about social exclusion. That's what they see. If this committee chooses to think about poverty, they will think about social exclusion.

In my view, the anti-poverty measures we have brought in as a government fail because they are targeted at the poor. They are designed, implemented, and administered by an elite that has no contact with poverty and no understanding of the lives of poor people. I'm not exempting myself; I'm part of that elite, and I know I don't know.

We encumber our anti-poverty efforts with regulations and red tape because of our paranoia that they might be overly generous or abused by poor people. Our efforts to target them just lead to eligibility criteria clawbacks--disincentives that simultaneously help people up while holding them back. Virtually all our support programs targeted to low-income people encumber the recipients as the price for assistance.

These programs are narrowly focused to keep costs low. The narrow casting, based on mistrust and suspicion, creates inequalities, complex eligibility criteria based on income and asset rules that nobody in this room, I contend, knows in detail, creating marginal tax rates that are often more than 100%.

Most of the programs I'll talk about have parallel programs for comfortable Canadians, us, which are less encumbering and on which we spend more money and are more generous.

If I have a couple of minutes, I want to quickly go through a raft of programs through which, I think, we could improve the well-being of low-income seniors. I'm not interested in debating whether or not their income would go across that imaginary poverty line figure.

OAS. Very quickly, is everybody here aware that the amount of OAS benefit you get if you're an immigrant depends on which country you came from? Generally speaking you'll get more money if you immigrated from a developed country than from a South Asian or East Asian country.

CPP. If you're low income, you get CPP. It's clawed back out of your GIS. There are problems with CPP take-up and retroactivity. I've been talking about this for eight years. It is overwhelmingly women who are eligible for CPP. The government knows who they are and where they live. They're eligible for CPP and they're not receiving the benefit. When they apply late, they do not get retroactive benefits despite the fact that this is a contributory program.

GIS. There is a 50% clawback. The new $3,500 exclusion is a good step. But why is it for wages only? Why is it not for earnings? Why are we allowing $3,500 of wages to be excluded, but not self-employment earnings? Again, it's a narrow casting. It's trying to be restrictive.

Widow's allowance. If you're 60 to 64 and you're low income and you're single, you can get a relatively very generous income support as comparable to OAS/GIS if you're a widow, but not if you're single, not if you're separated, not if you're divorced. What's that about? If he dies the day before your divorce, you're eligible. If he dies the day after, you're not.

Twenty-four percent of the private sector has an employer pension plan. Eighteen percent of the private sector has an employer pension plan that you would want. We are going to have a lot more people in the future, and we know the coverage rates for pensions plans are going down. We're going to have a lot more people. OAS is $6,000. CPP is $10,000, with an average of $7,000, and an average of $5,000 if you're female. GIS is $3,000 to $4,000. The more income you get from other sources, the less GIS you get.

Eighty-two percent of people retiring without a pension have an income of below $20,000.

Do I have two minutes? I'll go very quickly.

Prescription drug plan coverage. Deductibles and copayment rates are much higher for the public plans than for the employer plans. The public plans--I mean the plans that are administered by governments--have formularies, lists of drugs they cover. The employer plans that most of us would have don't have that list. If your doctor prescribes it, you're covered.

Employment insurance. There has been a cut in benefits by one-third in the last fifteen or twenty years, and by one-half for poor people. The poorer you are, the less likely you are to be eligible for benefits.

Maternity benefits. Under EI, which about half of new mothers get, there is 55% replacement, no more than $400 per week, with a two-week waiting period. Under the employer plans, there is 93% replacement, no two-week waiting period, and no maximum. Look at what Quebec's doing with the Quebec parental insurance program. It's superb. It's not perfect, but it's a huge step in the right direction. Again, here's a benefit program for low-income people that is much more restrictive, targeted, and less generous than a program for “valued” Canadians.

Learner bonds. What a wonderful idea. This is a benefit to go into RESPs for low-income Canadians. The last I looked, the take-up rate was still less than 10%. This is money available free for people who are low income.

Student loans, millennium scholarships. We're going to give people money. Let's make it taxable and then some provinces take it out of their student loan.

learn$ave. This is a demonstration program to encourage savings among low-income Canadians. After the fact, Finance has decided it can't live without this money being taxable, which means it's clawed back out of your child benefit and GIS.

Child tax benefit. This is a wonderful program and a wonderful initiative if you're working poor. But you probably know how people on welfare felt about the child tax benefit and how it influenced them and how they were used as sherpas to ship money to the province.

The working income tax benefit. It's not a bad idea. You can't get it if you or your spouse have been a student for three months in the last year. Why are we doing this? I don't understand.

Child care. There's so much that could be done on child care.

Social housing.... On welfare, which is not a federal responsibility, we can do better.

Thank you for your attention.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

Thank you very much for keeping to your time. I know that we do not give you much, but you will have the opportunity to finish your presentation during the question period.

It is now time for members of the committee to ask you questions. I remind them that they have seven minutes. Ms. Sgro, from the Liberal Party, is going to start.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you very much.

I unfortunately have to go into the House, so I will just ask one question and then turn it over to my colleague.

It's impossible to know where the one question is. I want to first thank you for talking about solutions, which is very much what we're going to try to focus on in this study we're doing.

Mr. Shillington, we could go on forever with you too, and I don't know where to start.

I want to go back to Mr. Drover, in particular.

We talked about the composite index. Given the fact that we're trying to look at LICO and MBM, what is the number we're going to have to try to decide...is that number where everybody should be at? Could you elaborate on the composite index that you referred to? In particular, the concern was that with men and women, the gap is going to be there for, I would imagine, quite a few years before we can really narrow it down. You referred to it specifically for women.

[Dr. Glenn Drover]

What we did was look at the initiatives of other countries to get some sense of what they were doing. They didn't in fact specifically focus on women, but they did develop composite indices. Then we looked at the research around women's income, both within families and individual women. On the basis of that, we developed four indicators that we felt were important--from our research, anyway--to add, because it provides a multi-dimensional....

The good thing about the composite indices that have been developed in Europe particularly is that some of them show in fact that different people will turn up as being poor, depending upon the indicator used. And I guess it's reinforcing the point that Richard made--depending upon your definition, what you include.

We felt that for women in particular there were four areas: around education, because their level of education oftentimes is influenced considerably differently from that of men; health indicators, because life expectancy, maternal mortality, violence, and so forth affect women's ability to work; the quality of housing, and those kinds of measures, to some extent, have already been developed, particularly in the housing standards; and employment indicators, in terms of their employment, the record of employment participation, the longevity of their employment, things of that sort, and also in relation to the family support.

One of the astonishing things that still persist is this. Unfortunately I have not seen studies in Canada, but there are certainly studies done in most European countries and several countries around the world on the differential incomes within families. For a variety of reasons, low-income women are disproportionately disadvantaged in that respect. So we feel it would be important to have indicators related to what's going on within the family, around the kinds of supports they're getting, the kind of independence they have in terms of their income sources, and so on.

Those are the kinds of indicators we felt were possible. Those various indicators have already been tested to some extent for other groups in other countries, so they are possible.

[Katherine Scott]

Could I follow up on that briefly?

I think what's interesting in Europe is that a number of countries have actually adopted a suite of indicators to track poverty and material deprivation. In fact, I think one of the troubles or stumbling blocks that we voice in Canada...because we've obviously been in this place of limbo for many years around whether the LICO, for instance, the poverty line, is not a poverty line. I actually have to take Richard's point of view, that these sorts of things are a bit of a diversion. Any measure is going to be as good as it is designed. Measures are targeted to reveal particular things, and there will never, ever be one perfect poverty measure. I think what we need to understand is that we may well need different types of measures to track different types of important things.

The LICO, which is much maligned, actually is a very important historical measure. It has been a very credible and rigorous tracking of low income and income inequality in Canada for these many years. We do not have measures, for instance, for material deprivation, and that's what Glenn was talking about.

In Europe they've actually supplemented their relative income poverty lines with a series of deprivation indices, and they report on both. Ireland has taken this step and created a combined measure. If you look at England, when they announced their target to reduce child poverty significantly by 2020, they introduced three different income measures to track their progress, some of which were better targeted to actually tracking program outcomes, and others were tracking income and inequality outcomes, both of which were important.

The idea that we need one measure, I think, is wrong-headed, and maybe the committee could think positively and constructively of a suite of measures to move our agenda forward on this very important topic.

[Drummond White]

Perhaps I might speak to that point as well.

Very simply, I would suggest that if we look at a very simple measurement, we may end up with a very simple solution. I would suggest that the address to poverty should be of broad scope, which includes the access to employment, which includes a range of services, such as child care. We were talking about family formations. Who has access in the family to the resources of that family? If we have two people working but only one person has access to the finances, is that an equal family? Those are the kinds of issues we need to address in a wide-ranging way. So if we look at a narrow definition of poverty, I don't think that will address the issue. I don't think that will produce the solutions we need to produce a more equitable society.

Thank you.

[Ruby Dhalla, Liberal, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you very much to all of you. I think your presentations were excellent, and definitely engaging.

There are lots of questions, as my colleague Ms. Sgro said. I'm going to direct mine to Mr. Shillington, in view of time from our chair, who tells me I have two minutes.

First, what are your thoughts with regard to the composite poverty line that's being proposed by Mr. Drover and Mr. White? I believe it focuses on the four factors of education, health, employment, and family support. Do you think we need a basket of measurement?

Second, you were going to touch upon some more solution-based options that exist for child care and for housing to help reduce poverty in the country. Could you elaborate on that, please?

[Richard Shillington]

I'm not going to answer your question about poverty because I don't think there's a consensus in this country about what our obligations to low-income people are. To me, a poverty line reflects an acknowledgement that there is a political or a cultural obligation. Is our obligation to the poorest of Canadians that we will keep them alive from Monday to Tuesday? If that's your view of our obligation, that welfare will be money sufficient to keep them alive for another day, your poverty line will reflect that. How many people have enough money to stay alive?

If you believe your obligation is that the money should be more than that, that the money should be sufficient so the people in the family can participate in society with some level of dignity, then you will have a broader poverty line.

If you believe the children in the family should be able to go on the field trips that schools run—read that Poverty Is poem—then you will have a different poverty line than if you believe, no, because that child is poor, we understand that the child will not be able to take music and art classes in the school that require extra money; the child will not go, and that is fine with us.

To me, before you decide what your poverty line is and whether or not it's absolute or relative, whether or not it changes with social conditions, you will have acknowledged whether our obligations to low-income people are a basket of services that will keep them alive from day one to day two or whether they are sufficient resources to participate in society.

And I haven't answered you on child care and housing because I want more time.

[The Vice-Chair, Bloc, Yves Lessard]

Thank you, Mr. Shillington and Ms. Dhalla.

We now move on to the Bloc Québécois.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

Thank you , Mr. Chair.

Ms. Scott, in the documents that our research service has provided us with, we are told that your association came up with the idea of splitting the Canadian Health and Social Transfer into two. One transfer would go to social programs and the other to post-secondary education.

Do you still claim ownership of that idea? Could you tell us the pros and cons?

Then I have two questions for the other witnesses, but let us start with you.

[Katherine Scott]

Yes. A number of years ago, we made a recommendation--at the time when the CHST was still one transfer--to break out the health transfer and the social and education transfer. That, of course, was done three years ago, and we subsequently made a recommendation to break out the social transfer from the PSE. That was nominally done in the 2007 budget. We felt very strongly that--given the origin of funding for social services, and in particular, anti-poverty programming that traced its roots back to transfer programs after the Second World War and most recently in the Canada assistance plan--it was certainly, in terms of accountability, much better to break out the transfers in order to clearly track whether the actual level of transfer was sufficient to meet need in the provinces and programming in these areas.

These funds have been nominally divided. I don't think they've...[Inaudible--Editor]...as I understand it, in the 2007 budget. The analysis that we did at that time suggested the level of funding--including the formula to bring all provinces up to a single standard, a single per capita formula that's going to be introduced in 2009--for social programs is still less than it was when CAP was rolled into the CHST in the mid-nineties. Certainly we have ongoing concerns about the level of funding to support anti-poverty programming. We do think that the division has been important in that regard, to help us track and understand that.

[Réal Ménard, Bloc, Hochelaga, QC]

I am very pleased to be part of this committee study. At the same time, the more we hear from witnesses—we are just starting the study, of course—the clearer it seems to me that the committee has to avoid falling into a trap. The trap lies in the fact that the federal government does not provide services directly to our fellow citizens, with the possible exception of people with disabilities in sheltered work situations. The federal government plays its role more through the tax system. We could mention the Canada Child Tax Benefit or the Guaranteed Income Supplement. Measures like those go directly through the tax system. The government does not play a direct role in health and education.

However, there are two things that the federal government could do directly, and I would like to know your opinion on them. First, there is the whole question of discrimination. Is it not time to add social condition—as this committee could recommend—as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act? You may know that eight provinces have already prohibited it in their legislation. Some people think that it would allow legislation on reservations to be challenged, for example, or maybe the Liberals' bill to increase the number of hours required to qualify for Employment Insurance.

So I would like to hear your views on the matter of discrimination. Would you join me in pressing this government to include social condition as a prohibited ground of discrimination under the Canadian Human Rights Act?

[Richard Shillington]

About seven or eight years ago there was a Canadian Human Rights Act review panel, a review of the Canadian Human Rights Act. I wrote a document of about 50 pages on exactly that topic, about whether some prohibition against exploitation on the basis of social condition was feasible within the Canadian Human Rights Act.

It's not a simple thing. If you can't decide who's poor and who's not, then it's hard to decide when people are being discriminated against on the basis of poverty. I think it can be done. There's an extensive paper there that basically talks about.... There are obviously people who are being exploited because of their financial vulnerability. If you think about it that way, could you write legislation that prohibits the exploitation of vulnerable people because of their financial situation? Of course you could.