Human Resources Committee on June 10th, 2008

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, everyone.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), we will continue our study on the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada.

I want to take this time to thank our witnesses for being patient. As you may be aware, we had a couple of votes in the House, and we've just finished those off.

I'd like to welcome, from the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Honourable Shawn Skinner, Minister, Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment . Minister, welcome. We're looking forward to hearing what you have to say today. We also have Lynn Vivian-Book, the assistant deputy minister of income, employment and youth services; and we have Aisling Gogan, director, poverty reduction strategy division.

I would like to welcome everybody. I apologize if I got your names a little bit wrong. You'll correct me, I'm sure, as we move forward.

I understand, Minister, that you and then one of your officials will be presenting for 10 minutes apiece. We ask you not to race through your presentation too fast for our translators. They need to keep up as we move along.

I will turn it over to you guys, so take it away.

[Shawn Skinner, Minister of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador]

Thank you very much, Mr. Allison. I do want to thank you for the opportunity to present to your committee today. Lynn, Aisling, and I have presented now to three different committees of the federal government, but they've been Senate committees. This is the first time we've had an opportunity to present to a House of Commons standing committee, so we appreciate this opportunity.

As you've indicated, I do have a couple of people with me whom I'd like to introduce. Lynn Vivian-Book is with me. She's the assistant deputy minister of income, career and employment and youth services, as well as being responsible for the poverty reduction initiative and for persons with disabilities. Also with me is Aisling Gogan, the director of our poverty reduction strategy. I thank you for the opportunity to have the three of us present to you.

The Government of Newfoundland and Labrador made a commitment in the 2003 election that we were going to transform the province of Newfoundland and Labrador from the province with the most poverty to the province with the least poverty by 2014. So this was a 10-year strategy and a 10-year commitment.

In our 2005 Speech from the Throne and in our budget in 2005 we committed to developing a comprehensive, government-wide poverty reduction strategy. We've done that. To date, as of the most recent budget in April 2008, we have an ongoing annual investment of new initiatives that now exceeds $100 million for our poverty reduction strategy. This is not old money that we've recycled; these are new initiatives.

Our poverty reduction strategy is entitled “Reducing Poverty: An Action Plan for Newfoundland and Labrador”, and it was released in June 2006. It outlines some guiding principles, some goals, and some objectives for our evolving, long-term, 10-year strategy. One of the key things that it does is commit to regular public reporting on the results and progress of the strategy, as well as regular consultations with members of our communities here in Newfoundland and Labrador.

I do want to point out to your committee that we took a very broad definition of poverty. Our definition of what we mean by poverty encompasses social exclusion. so it's not just money that we're talking about here. In our definition of poverty we wanted to make sure that we consider things such as a person's ability to participate in their community, a person's education level, a person's access to adequate housing, a person's access to essential goods and services, and a person's access to health and their own personal health status.

Our approach is comprehensive, government-wide, and integrated. We have a very strong leadership committee that's overseen by a committee of nine ministers of the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador. Over half the ministers in our cabinet are members of the poverty reduction ministerial committee.

One of our key focuses is a prevention initiative and an early intervention to break the cycle of poverty. So we have three key points. As I said, we have a prevention initiative, another direction we've taken is to reduce poverty, and the third is to alleviate poverty. So our strategy basically revolves around initiatives and interventions that prevent, reduce, and alleviate poverty.

The other point I want to make to you is that our poverty reduction strategy is very much an action-oriented strategy. We used evidence; it's evidence-based. We monitor our progress and we track our results, but we also act, in terms of the initiatives we've taken. We didn't want to get bogged down in talking a lot about what poverty is, the definition of poverty, where the poverty line is--who's above it, who's below it. We felt that those kinds of things would drag on forever and ever, and we wanted to make sure that we just started to deal with it. In our discussions with our community partners, one of the things they indicated to us was to make sure we got involved in acting on poverty as opposed to talking about poverty.

I want to speak to the federal role, as we see it, in terms of our poverty reduction strategy. Our government is committed to act in areas where we have the capacity and the jurisdiction to act relative to poverty reduction, but we believe that in order to be successful, many partners are necessary. The federal government is one of those partners we have to be committed to working with, and we believe we can work cooperatively with the federal government in terms of addressing poverty in our country. In the action plan I referenced earlier, we highlighted the need to work with the federal government, amongst many other partners, to ensure that the change that needs to happen will in fact happen.

I'd like to take a minute to highlight some areas where we need to work cooperatively, where we believe the province and the federal government can work together. Our experience, like that of other jurisdictions that have managed to significantly reduce poverty, shows that a coordinated and integrated approach is necessary. We need to work together on this.

If you are serious about tackling poverty in Canada, the federal government needs to join the provinces. They need to develop a comprehensive strategy in conjunction with the provinces and the territories to combat the problem of poverty.

In respect of the federal government's role, in our action plan we developed a number of priority areas. We highlighted areas that the federal government could be involved in, areas in which we could work together with the federal government. I'll address those briefly.

One was to address issues related to income tax and the unintended combined impacts between provincial and federal programs. We also referenced working with aboriginal people to improve their quality of life. We referenced improving programs and services for persons with disabilities. We talked about addressing justice-related issues such as funding for civil legal aid. We talked about increasing the availability of affordable housing. We talked about creating a new labour market development agreement that is more responsive to the needs of the people of our province. In each and every one of these, we have initiatives that we can speak to in more detail, and we can talk to how we believe the federal government could be involved.

Another area is the area of child benefit programs. We believe that we need to strengthen child benefit programs. We need to work on improving government student loan programs, with respect to access to education and people being able to afford education. Also, we want to increase access to literacy programs and funding for non-government organizations in support of literacy delivery.

Finally, I want to speak to a couple of other areas in which we believe the federal government has a role to play. The first is a renewed focus on children up to the age of six, with particular attention to supporting early childhood development. We also believe there's a role for the federal government to play in a national pharmacare strategy, the Canada health transfer, and improvements to our EI system, particularly in the area of parental benefits. I also believe the federal government has a significant role to play in leading the development of best practices relative to poverty reduction and in developing improved measures for how we monitor, track, and quantify our progress in poverty reduction.

At this time, I will stop and turn it over to Aisling Gogan, who will say a few words, and then I hope we'll have a chance to dialogue a bit. Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Minister.

[Aisling Gogan, Director, Poverty Reduction Strategy Division, Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador]

Thank you, Mr. Skinner.

I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the structure we have in place, our overall approach, and what we're doing in the area of measurement. I understand that this has been a particular interest of yours.

Our poverty reduction strategy is overseen by a committee of nine ministers. That's been really important. In addition to the ministers in social areas, it includes our Minister of Finance and a number of ministers in the more economic areas. That's been an important part of the success and the work to date. There's also a deputy ministers committee and a working group of primarily director-level representation. Having the right players has been important to our strategy.

We've been taking a comprehensive and integrated approach, a government-wide approach. We meet and try to look at things from the perspective of people living in poverty. We look at what they need rather than at traditional departmental mandates. It's a real challenge for government. Previously, representatives would come in and look only at what their department could do. Although that's part of it, it's not where we start. We consider what people living in poverty really need and then what we have to do to meet those needs.

I wanted to touch on measurement. We did a fair bit of work early on in the strategy to look at how we might measure poverty. At the same time, we developed initiatives for looking at the issue of measurement. All the measures have strengths and weaknesses. They all have different flaws. We looked at all the best practice literature and what's done in other countries, and we studied all the available measures to track our progress. We haven't settled on any one measure; instead, we've been looking at all the available measures.

In doing this, we realized that none of the measures allowed us to track what was going on in different areas of our province and at the community level. We developed a measure of our own, taking the methodology that HRSDC developed in conjunction with provinces and territories. We developed in Newfoundland and Labrador a market basket measure. It is a little different from the national one in that we use income tax data rather than survey data. As a small province, we have issues with all the national measures with respect to sampling error and our ability to look at different populations, whether by geography, different family types, or subpopulations. We're just getting ready to release this measure, which uses income tax data. It will be available publicly on our community accounts system, which provides access to data through a website. This information will be available to our community partners as well. That's been an important part of our process, the involvement of our community partners.

We have regular consultations with our community partners. Every second year, we go out more broadly to speak to them and check in on how we're doing and what we might need to do differently. We're getting ready to start that process again now.

[Shawn Skinner]

That's it from this end. We'll turn it back to you, Mr. Chair, to see if we have any questions that we can answer for you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Minister. I think we'll have a couple for you, and maybe a few more than that.

We're going to start with the Liberal Party. Ms. Sgro.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Mr. Skinner, it's great to see you moving so quickly, along with your colleagues, on what is clearly becoming a more important issue every day. This of course applies to the provinces, but also at the federal level, where we're doing a study on poverty. Our hope is to pull all of it in line so that my province of Ontario and your province and others can take a serious look at what we can do to alleviate poverty.

I'm pleased that you're here and speaking to us today. I certainly wish you a lot of success.

The fact that you're action oriented fits in with what we are looking at here in Ottawa. We are investigating solutions to problems rather than continually rehashing what didn't work. It's great to hear your comments. Your comprehensive approach is the only way, many of us believe, to get concrete results.

You talked about community partnership with businesses. What about your local communities, your small communities, your city of St. John's? Are you working with them as well in trying to find solutions?

[Shawn Skinner]

Yes we certainly are, Judy. We're doing that, and I'm going to ask Aisling to give you a bit more detail in terms of the process we went through on that. There was a fair amount of consultation done up front to involve the cities, the municipalities, and other community-based groups. Then as Aisling has referenced, every two years we go back and reconfirm that what we're doing is working for us, by getting the feedback from our community partners.

But I'll ask Aisling to speak to that a bit for you.

[Aisling Gogan]

When we did our original consultations, we had some municipal representation, both at the political level—we had municipal politicians come to our consultations—and the staff level. It's an area we're really looking at now: how to involve our municipalities more as our strategy matures and develops. So one of the focuses of consultations this year, which we're just launching now and we'll really get fully under way in the fall, will be to really speak to our municipal governments across the province, both to get their views on what we're doing and also to see how they might want to be further involved.

In terms of here in St. John's as the largest urban centre, we have been involved on the housing front with some of our partners, with the City of St. John's, looking at the issue of housing and looking ahead. As we're in a period of rapid economic development, this is just making sure we're planning properly and considering issues around homelessness that might arise, and that sort of thing.

So we have been working with our municipal partners, but it's an area we're looking at doing more in. I'm not sure if that fully answers your question.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

You mentioned the issue of what some of those roadblocks are and what you are identifying early on as the causes of poverty. We see the homelessness on the streets of many of our cities, and we realize how finding answers to the housing shortage is going to be a critical part of dealing with poverty.

You mentioned as well the issue of early learning, in the zero to six age range, which of course I still say is the biggest disappointment I have. It's more than losing the election, from a personal perspective; it's losing what was to become one of Canada's greatest social programs. How are you dealing with that in the province of Newfoundland?

[Shawn Skinner]

I referenced in my opening remarks the areas of prevention, reduction, and alleviation of poverty. So the initiatives we take really fall under one of those three areas, and we target. In some cases we may target persons who are younger, increasing child tax benefits. We provide free textbooks now in all our schools, from kindergarten up to grade 12. There are a number of initiatives we would target at specific populations. So what we try to do is identify the population group we wish to deal with, we consult with the community partners to see the kinds of challenges they have identified, and then we in turn try to have policy initiatives that will respond to those challenges.

Lynn, would you like to add a bit to that?

[Lynn Vivian-Book, Assistant Deputy Minister, Income, Employment and Youth Services Branch, Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, Government of Newfoundland and Labrador]

I would, Minister. Thank you.

In terms of the goals of the poverty reduction strategy, one of the five key goals was an increased emphasis on early childhood development and its importance foundationally in terms of success at learning, success in employment, and success from a health perspective. I think that's been woven each year into the direction our working group and committees have taken as they bring forward initiatives for funding in each budget cycle. One of the initiatives funded this year, for example, was additional support to healthy baby clubs, which is a comprehensive, holistic approach to working with pregnant women and supporting them with food supplements, nutrition, and other aspects of issues related to lifestyle and support in pregnancy. So these kinds of very early childhood development supports are interwoven.

Also, government has developed a 10-year early learning and child care strategy to increase focus on spaces and increase options for child care, particularly in rural areas of our province, where there are very few options for child care.

So the poverty reduction strategy is not working in isolation. There are other strategies across government that are working together. But I'm very pleased to see that one of the five goals of the strategy is embedded in supporting early childhood development.

[Judy Sgro, Liberal, York West, ON]

I defer to my colleague for another quick question.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Savage.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you.

Minister, it's a very impressive story that you and your colleagues are telling us. I come from the beautiful province of Nova Scotia, not too far from Newfoundland and Labrador, and we're always impressed with how aggressive Newfoundland and Labrador has been in taking on important challenges when it comes to poverty. The future of your province is bright, but you've had a lot of challenges in the past; yet that has not stopped you from taking on the issue of poverty.

I'm going to come back with some questions later. I only have a second or two here. I want to ask you about post-secondary education.

Last year, we of the Liberal Party had our national caucus in St. John's and took 30 or 40 or maybe 50 of our colleagues to Memorial. We met with Axel Meisen and Noreen Golfman, and we talked about the great stuff that's happening at MUN. Can you talk about what you've done with tuition at Memorial and how post-secondary education plays a part in your poverty reduction strategy?

[Shawn Skinner]

The government certainly believes that post-secondary education is very critical to our success and to the success of our citizens. We want to make sure it's accessible to all people who wish to participate. As the first thing we've done, for the last five or six years and maybe longer we've had a freeze on tuition rates. We've actually committed to freezing them for the next couple of years as well. Our tuition rates are now, I believe, the lowest in Canada, next to Quebec's.

The second thing we've done is this. In consultation with various student groups—the Canadian Federation of Students, our own Memorial University student groups, and others—we did a revamping or revisiting of the student loan program. In the past, people would have to borrow a certain amount of money. It used to be up to $140 a week that they could borrow. We now allow them to have up to $70 a week of that as a non-repayable grant, and then if they need more than that, they can borrow from $71 up to $140 per week.

The third thing we've done is reduce the interest rate on the outstanding loans that students may carry, so that it is now basically prime interest that's being charged. In the past, it used to be, if memory serves me correctly, prime plus 3%.

All three of those initiatives are things that we will revisit each budget year to see whether we can make any improvements on them. Those initiatives were not government initiatives in the sense that we created them; they are initiatives that were brought to us by the student body, which said, these are three things you can do for us that will make it better for us, so would you please do them. We were able to deliver on that.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, and thank you, Mr. Savage.

We're now going to move on to the Bloc for seven minutes, and Mr. Lessard.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

I also would like to thank the Minister, Ms. Vivian-Book and Ms. Gogan for coming to tell us about their experience which, I am sure, will certainly enlighten us on your commitment to alleviate poverty. It is impressive that results are already visible.

Of course, we would like to see if some elements of your strategy might guide us in our study, particularly as it concerns the measures that we will suggest to the Canadian government.

Minister, you referred to the federal government as a partner, which is totally understandable. You also spoke of your expectations, among other things in regard to the partnerships in the fields of early childhood development, social housing and employment insurance. I shall not refer to each of them, but you have made reference to a whole gamut of social measures.

Close to nine years ago, in February 1999, your government and that of other provinces, except Quebec, signed a framework agreement with the federal government. This framework agreement on social union included a commitment to find measures that would guarantee to all Canadians access to comparable essential programs and social services, assistance to persons in need and that it would promote the full participation of all Canadians in the social and economic life of our society.

You said that financial help is not enough for these people and that it is also necessary to fight social exclusion. I think that the 1999 agreement took these two elements into consideration.

What has happened with that agreement and that partnership? Have you established your poverty reduction strategy based on those commitments? Has the federal government taken part in that process?

[Shawn Skinner]

Thank you very much. I will ask Aisling to try to give you some information to respond to your question.

[Aisling Gogan]

Thank you.

In developing the areas in which we felt working with the federal government would be beneficial, we certainly looked at past agreements and past areas. We didn't consult directly at that time with the federal government to any great extent. We did reach out and had some very preliminary discussions, but we didn't find a lot of engagement on the issue at the official level back in 2005, when we were doing most of the work on this.

More recently we have started to discuss this more with our federal colleagues. I'm not sure if that answers your question or if there was a specific area you were interested in.

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

Maybe my first question was encompassing too much, so I will better target this one.

What is left from the 1999 framework agreement whose goal was precisely to alleviate poverty?

[Aisling Gogan]

I think there's still a lot of work left to be done.

Minister, I don't know if you would like to comment.

[Shawn Skinner]

In terms of what remains of the 1999 agreement, I really wouldn't be able to give you a comprehensive answer to that, because in terms of building our poverty reduction strategy, we have really started with what we believe to be a new strategy. I have not referenced the 1999 agreement in terms of the initiatives we have brought forward. So I'm not able to give you too much information from where I am today, because I have not really referenced that agreement in terms of the strategy we are currently dealing with.

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

I understand your answer, but I find it very surprising. In fact, if there had been something, you would have based your strategy on it in 2004. However, there is that framework agreement. It takes into consideration the concerns that have been expressed here. I am surprised to see that commitments have been made by the federal government concerning poverty. We shall not come back today on the fact that they were not respected, but I think that we must make sure the measures that are taken now will be adhered to.

Let us take social housing, for instance. As concerns poverty, you said that you took a market basket measurement. Everybody agrees that housing is a very important part of that basket. You have also mentioned that fact.

What help could the federal government offer to you, if any, to support your efforts on social housing, for example?