Human Resources Committee on June 10th, 2008

[Shawn Skinner]

There are a number of current agreements. There are three agreements that currently exist for which the funding expires in March 2009. The federal government could certainly look to continue funding in those areas, because we believe that all three of those agreements have been successful agreements. The federal government could look at continuing funding for those agreements.

There is also a declining federal contribution to the existing social housing stock in the province. I believe, in our case, that the total funding being committed will expire in the year 2039. So it's declining every year. We believe the federal government needs to continue to invest in our existing social housing stock, never mind creating more spaces, because we need more. The federal government needs to help us maintain those we have.

And the demographics of our population are changing. A lot of the units we currently have in our existing portfolio are three-, four-, and five-bedroom units, and the needs we have today are one- and two-bedroom units. To provide funding to help transition, renovate, or refurbish those units into one- and two-bedroom units to meet the needs we have today would be something the federal government could assist with.

There is affordable housing, there is aboriginal housing, there is crisis housing, and there is existing social housing stock. All those things, we believe, the federal government can help us with by partnering with us to help alleviate the concerns we see in the province.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Lessard.

We're now going to move on to Mr. Martin. You have seven minutes, sir.

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

Thank you very much.

And thanks for taking time to be with us today, all three of you. I met with you when I was in Newfoundland and Labrador, I think last February. It was cold.

[Shawn Skinner]

You'll be happy to know that it still is.

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

Well, it's hot up here, in more ways than one.

I met with government and NGO officials. I also remember hearing you make a very good speech at a dinner in Ottawa a few months ago, put on by the National Anti-Poverty Organization and some of its partners. You spoke of your plan that evening. You were also very clear that your plan wasn't going to be successful unless there was a national plan in place and that there needed to be a partner.

Today I want to ask you specifically how a national plan would help your province and your poor. How would that work?

[Shawn Skinner]

First of all, Mr. Martin, let me say that we will be successful with our plan because we are committed to it. If the federal government comes on side with a national plan and works with the provinces, we believe we will achieve success that much earlier. We've made a commitment to this as a government, so we're going to make sure that we succeed. I just want to make that point.

I don't want to leave anybody with the impression that our plan will not succeed if we do not have federal engagement. We will make it work. We and our community partners are committed to making it work. I believe it will be harder road for us to be able to do it, and it will take more time, but we will get it done.

There are a number of areas in which the federal government can engage with our province in helping us, and I did indicate some of them to you.

Certainly the housing that Mr. Lessard just spoke to is something in which we believe the federal government has a significant role to play. We need the federal government's engagement, and it has been difficult for us to get that in terms of the federal-provincial-territorial housing ministers. We are hoping the federal government will become more engaged with the provincial-territorial housing ministers in trying to address the concerns we have around some of the housing issues we face in this country. A lot of the issues are common to a number of provinces and territories.

I referred to issues related to persons with disabilities. Again, we believe the federal government has a role that it can play relative to persons with disabilities. The experience shows us, and the statistics show us, that persons with disabilities tend to be in deeper depths of poverty, find it more difficult to engage in the workforce, and find it very difficult to get adequate housing. So there are things there we believe the federal government can help us with.

I also mentioned the education and literacy areas. Certainly the federal government has a role to play in the area of literacy programs and funding for non-government agencies in providing literacy training. Newfoundland and Labrador unfortunately still has a very high level of people who need literacy assistance. It's something on which we are working very hard as a government. But again, the federal government could help there.

I referred to the national drug program. In our province we've brought in a low-income drug program. It's a very extensive program, and it's a very expensive program for a province such as ours to be able to deliver. But we've made the commitment to deliver it, found the funds to deliver it, and we will continue to deliver it, because it's the right thing to do. The federal government can help with that.

Those are just some programs. There are many other areas. I don't want to go on too long, but those are some very critical areas where the federal government has a role to play and can certainly help this province and other provinces achieve the goal of reducing, preventing, and alleviating poverty. We would be very happy to partner with them to start to do that.

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

What I hear you saying is that a national initiative could run parallel to a provincial initiative, be complementary, and work in that way.

One of the comments you made in your presentation this afternoon was that you didn't spend a whole lot of time trying to come up with ways to measure poverty, progress, and those kinds of things. We had a discussion around this table that it is probably important that we all have some understanding of a clear measurement of some sort and, out of that, implement programs or launch a strategy so we're able to measure progress. You're saying we need to get on with this, and I've been saying that for years myself. We've spent the last 10 or 15 years in an intellectual exercise of trying to define poverty and not really doing much about it. But you're saying that in Newfoundland and Labrador you've decided to just get on with it.

If we were to launch a national strategy that was somehow complementary to your own, how important would it be for us to agree on some definition and measurement?

[Shawn Skinner]

Having a measurement and a baseline by which to judge ourselves was important. It wasn't that we didn't recognize the importance of it, but we recognized around the table, in discussion with the community, that it was going to take some time. People did not feel it was appropriate for us to wait until those discussions had occurred and those measurements and baselines had been established before we started on our reduction strategy. So we got at it and started the poverty reduction initiative, with the understanding that by the end of the second year we would try to have some of those measurement tools in place. We now have our own Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure that we will use.

While the definition of poverty is important in referencing progress, I don't believe it is as important as being able to address the issue of poverty. The point we're trying to make is that we can talk and determine what poverty is, where people fit, and how we measure it until the cows come home, but we need to be doing something, because people are living in it today. Let's get started lifting people up out of poverty and reducing and alleviating the poverty that people find themselves in. The measurement tools, the measuring we need to do, and the baselines we need to establish will come as part of that process. We're two years into our strategy and we're now going back out to our community with some baselines and some measurement tools. But we've already had two years of progress that we initiated.

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

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Martin.

We'll now move to the Conservatives and the parliamentary secretary for HR, Ms. Yelich. You have seven minutes.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Overall, I want to get an idea of your measurement, your Newfoundland market basket measure. You talk about going ahead with the strategy, and you have nine ministers or nine departments working together. I think that would be far different federally, because we have to deal with each of the provinces and there are jurisdictional issues. So I think our strategy would look somewhat different.

I wonder if you could help us in determining what the strategy would look like. I'm also thinking, from the time you began this strategy, it must be different today from what it was when you decided to take this on and start to attack poverty with a strategy. Today, with the economy booming in both Newfoundland and Saskatchewan—I'm from Saskatchewan—our economy is playing a big role in poverty and in people's lives. Are there changes now for you, in your strategy, that are happening because of your economy, which I think definitely plays a significant part? It can't be the same.

You said that you wanted to measure poverty, yet you don't. But you have to measure in order to report, because you report every two years. Have you reported this year, for example?

You have? What is your measurement of success?

[Shawn Skinner]

No. We haven't.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

Oh, you haven't. Okay.

So if you're reporting and you're showing a measurement of success, what are you saying has been successful? What is your measurement in any one of these areas? You mentioned affordable housing, financing from the federal government. Let's take federal affordable housing. Is that somewhere that you've seen a significant decline in poverty, or an increase?

I'm trying to get a grasp on what you're measuring here, if you say you don't really measure but yet you have to report. You've been on this strategy for three or four years. Was it 2003, you said?

Okay, 2006.

[Shawn Skinner]

I'll turn it over to Aisling in a second, but I will just say to you that we have been measuring, because there are existing measurement tools out there. So it's not that we've not measured. We've taken some, such as the LICO, for instance, and we've used that. There is a federal market basket measure that we've used. But they don't necessarily fit well into the Newfoundland and Labrador situation, so we needed to come up with our own custom measurement. That's what we've been working on for the last two years.

I'll pass it to Aisling, because she's done a lot of work in this area, and ask her to give you a little overview of our measurement tool, how we arrived at it and the kinds of things we've been able to do with it in terms of measuring.

And on the reporting—just to finish that thought—we are going to report back this year. We are now getting ready to release our reporting to the people of our province.

[Aisling Gogan]

The Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure is not the only measure of progress we'll be using. As the minister mentioned, we'll also continue to look at LICO and HRSDC's MBM and track what's going on with them. As I mentioned briefly earlier, the problem is that we can't really look at what's going on in different areas of the province. That's becoming more and more important as we've had a lot of economic development, but a lot of it has been focused on the Avalon Peninsula, as well as a few other areas of the province. We need to make sure we're tracking what's going on in different areas of the province and that we're able to respond.

In addition to looking at our market basket measure, we're doing things like looking at who's on income support and looking at changes in our income support program. One of the focuses we've had is removing financial disincentives for income support clients to go to work. We're seeing real success in that area. For example, we introduced a range of different measures, taking some of our programs outside income support--the low-income prescription drug program is the biggest one--because we knew the biggest disincentive or barrier for people to be able to leave income support was losing access to prescription drug coverage, so we removed that by having the low-income prescription drug program outside income support, based on income level rather than source of income.

We've increased our earnings exemptions, and as a result of that, when we looked at a one-year period on a monthly basis, we had 40% more people starting a new job every month. Obviously that's also partly due to changes in our economy, but we know from talking to our clients and also just from the way our program worked that if we hadn't made these changes they would not have been able to avail themselves of those opportunities.

So we increased the earnings exemptions. We have a new job start benefit. As I mentioned, the low-income prescription drug program has been taken outside that program. We can measure that. We have administrative data for our income support program and we will be reporting on that, but we're mindful of the fact that this is only one group living in poverty--our income support clients.

What the Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure does is allow us to track who's falling below those cut-offs at the community level. So we can look at almost 400 different communities in our province and we can look at who's falling below the particular cut-offs of the market basket measure. The basket itself has been costed for all these different communities, so it's a very regionally sensitive measure, unlike the HRSDC one. Also, as I mentioned, because we're using income tax data, we don't have issues of sampling error, so we can look at any geographic area of the province, and in that community overall we can look not only at who's falling below the cut-offs but at family composition--the age, and those sorts of things--so we can target our initiatives where they're needed. We're looking at everything from high school completion rates...and again, they're generally very good in Newfoundland and Labrador compared to the rest of the country, but we know we do not have good high school completion rates in certain areas. We're trying to look at what's going on so we can address existing needs.

Our measure allows us to look at different neighbourhoods and cities. We can look at any neighbourhood of about 1,000 people and see what's going on in terms of who's falling into poverty and what supports they might need.

I don't know if this fully answers your question. Is there anything else you want me to add?

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

There is. I would just like to say, though, that the national basket would have to look different from yours, and I wondered if you had any suggestions on what our market basket might look like.

I have two other questions. In the last couple of years, there have been some targeted initiatives from the federal government specific to...well, there will be some coming up, so I would like you to watch those closely. One will be the education grant. If you would like to comment, those are targeted toward people on welfare. So those are things the federal government is doing that I'd like to have a response to.

Have you engaged other stakeholders? For example, we've been approached by the real estate board, which really feels it can be part of the affordable housing solution. Other than other levels of government and community leaders, who have you engaged with who could help us work toward some solutions to poverty?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

I'm going to ask for a quick response because we're out of time.

[Lynne Yelich, Conservative, Blackstrap, SK]

They can leave it for another round.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Why don't we come back to it in the next round, unless you have a quick response.

[Aisling Gogan]

I have a quick response in terms of what a national measure might look like, particularly around the market basket measure. There are a number of things you could do to make that measure work better for different provinces and territories, particularly smaller ones like ours, like increasing the sample size of the LICO, the MBM, and the LIM, for that matter--not that's it's all that useful for provinces. They are all based on the same survey data, and there are real issues for smaller provinces in terms of the size of the sample.

But also look at doing something similar to what we're doing--using income tax data rather than sample data to do a market basket measure that's really very similar. We've based it on HRSDC's methodology; we haven't changed it that much. We've made a correction for housing costs because we were an outlier and have such a high home ownership rate in our province, and the housing costs in the national one are based on rental costs, so that was a flaw.

I'll leave the other questions about the WITB, and the minister might like to speak to other stakeholders after.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That would be great. Thank you very much.

We're now going to move to our second round, which will be five minutes. It will start off with Mr. Savage from the Liberal Party.

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

Thank you, Chair.

First of all, I'm going to talk about how you have nine ministers involved in this. People who have worked in poverty and people who have worked in health have talked about the importance of bringing together all the social determinants to try to work across departments. Poverty is not just the responsibility of the Minister of Human Resources--that's obviously where it's led in Newfoundland--but there's housing, education, health, and all these other things. I think that sort of multi-faceted approach to bring everybody to the table is very positive.

There are a lot of people who work in anti-poverty issues on the ground. When you deal with people with disabilities, mental health issues, literacy, drug addictions, there are so many people on the ground across Canada working with these people who understand the concerns and the issues. They are working with virtually no resources, on bubble gum and toothpicks, to try to do good work, and then every now and then government has a habit of coming in and saying they're going to change the way this or that is done, and it's counterproductive.

It seems to me you referenced the Canadian Federation of Students in terms of people who are living the condition and have some suggestions. They obviously came to you and you met with them. I recall watching Danny speak to the CFS a year or two ago, and he got a standing ovation. That doesn't happen very often. There's obviously a dialogue with people who are living this experience.

Can you talk a little about how you have reached out to those people who understand poverty, who aren't sort of overarching bureaucrats--and we need bureaucrats, I have no problem with that--and who often get pushed aside when it comes to looking at solutions?

I'm not sure if I'm being clear enough, but I'd like to get your thoughts on that.

[Shawn Skinner]

I think I understand what you're asking, Mr. Savage, and I'll give you an example of a meeting that occurred as recently as this morning. But first I'll take you back to just before our budget.

I received a letter from the executive director of the local chapter of the Canadian Mental Health Association indicating that he had distinct concerns about housing for persons who had mental health issues and the difficulty with those individuals being able to maintain housing, even if it was available, because of the mental health issues they had. They were having difficulty maintaining the housing and would often end up in the...[Inaudible--Editor]...system while, if they had just had some support, they would have been able to stay in their own units. So he first approached me by letter indicating he would like some special funding from me, as I happen to be Minister of Housing as well, to be able to address that issue. I had some meetings with him and we came up with some money.

We have a program that we call rent supplementation. If we don't have units available to give to people, we will take money and give it to private landlords. This goes back to Ms. Yelich's question. We went to private landlords who own apartment buildings here in the city. For instance, in a lot of apartment buildings there will be ten units designated that we can use as a government to place people in if we don't have adequate social housing stock ourselves. We will provide the rental supplement to them and they will be able to move into these private buildings.

The Canadian Mental Health executive director wanted to get access to that, and just this morning we had our final meeting. We had 500 new rent supplements that we were able to provide in our budget this year on top of the 1,000 that we already provided, so it's 1,500 in total. We basically carved out a percentage of those for the Canadian Mental Health Association. We will give them the funding; they will work with their clients to find adequate and suitable housing to help people with mental health needs in a supportive environment. They know those things better than we do, and so we'll give them that.

There are accountability measures, reporting measures, and all that kind of stuff, but we sat down, had a dialogue, and had a couple of meetings--literally, it was a couple of meetings, it wasn't a long process--and they now have a source of funds that they can use to help house their clients.

I hope that answers what you were asking.

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

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about, working with people who know what the answers are. Government doesn't need to invent the answers very often; it only needs to listen to those people who have the answers. That's exactly what I was talking about.

On literacy, one of the big concerns of literacy organizations across the country was the cut of $17.7 million of a couple of years ago from the federal government. In fairness, the minister has indicated that there's other funding, but we're having trouble seeing where that's going. Literacy Nova Scotia, for example, is having an awful lot of trouble staying afloat.

Can you talk about some of the impacts of cuts and what you're doing in Newfoundland and Labrador specifically for literacy?

[Shawn Skinner]

I think the impacts of the cuts are well known. I won't spend a lot of time talking about the impact; it only makes the job that much more difficult. What I will say to you is in terms of literacy.

I referenced earlier is that we, as a government, now provide textbooks free of charge to all school children in our province from K to 12. We are increasing our grants to community-based organizations that provide literacy training. We are increasing our grants to community-based agencies. We have what are called community youth networks here, and we're increasing our grants to them. They provide homework programs, after-school programs. We are providing more money to our community centres in our social housing neighbourhoods. Most of them have community centres. We've provided extra funding to them over the past couple of budgets—it's a part of our poverty reduction strategy—to be used to run homework havens, to work with the smaller children. We're doing things like that.

Basically, what we're trying to do is talk to the people out there who, as you said, are dealing with the issues, to find out how we can best serve them.

It's not always money, by the way. The other thing I want to make a point on here is that certainly money is a key factor, but sometimes it's simply being flexible or allowing people to be flexible and not having the guidelines too tight so they can't get done what they need to get done. Money certainly is a contributing factor, but there are other ways to assist without necessarily providing money.

Those are only some examples of the kinds of things we've done.