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--