Thank you very much, Chair.
First of all, I want to say thank you so much for inviting me here today. I'm very excited about the strategy we've tabled and embarked upon in Ontario. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to speak to the committee about what's in the strategy, how we got here, why we're doing it, and how we're going to move forward to achieve the success we are determined to achieve.
I want to start by saying that I was happy to see in the budget that there are some initiatives that will directly improve the quality of life and the standard of living for kids living in poverty. The increase to the WITB will directly help low-income families. Thank you for that. The housing initiatives are, of course, very helpful. The increase in the CCTB is also appreciated. I will talk a little bit more about that a little later in my remarks.
I want to start by talking about why we embarked upon a poverty reduction strategy. We are all elected people in this room, and we know that the issue of poverty is one that has been raised by a solid and committed, but small, group of people, particularly among faith-based organizations and social justice organizations, for a long time. They have been making the moral argument, what I call the moral argument, that to have the levels of poverty we have in this country, in a country as rich as the one in which we live, is simply not morally acceptable. That is as true now as ever before. But what has changed a little bit is the economic argument. There is now a growing understanding that we can't afford poverty. Poverty is too expensive.
I don't know if you've seen the Cost of Poverty report that was recently released by the Ontario Association of Food Banks and Don Drummond, chief economist at TD. It makes the argument that poverty costs every household in Ontario an average of $3,000 or close to $3,000. That's the cost of poverty. So it's not just about them; it's about all of us.
The other kind of economic consideration is a demographic consideration. As our population shifts, we need to make sure that every child who is born in this country or who comes to this country--everyone--is given the opportunity to achieve his or her full potential. We need all people at their best. So we have now both a moral and an economic imperative to really address poverty and to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to achieve his or her full potential.
That's really what has motivated us to embark upon what some people say is a topic on which you'll never win. They say that poverty has always been with us. If you think you can make a dint in it, well, good luck to you. But we look at our seniors and at the progress we've made in seniors' poverty. We know that the rate of poverty among seniors is now at around 3%. That has come down enormously over the past many years, because government decided that we needed to act on it, and we did act on it. The success we've had with seniors we can have with other segments of the population living in poverty.
I want to say that this was an issue that was really pushed hard by the women's caucus. It was the women in our caucus who made it our top priority. And when the women's caucus decides that their top priority is poverty, then we will act on poverty, because we don't stop until we're done. So it was the women's caucus. But then it was embraced, I have to tell you, by the entire caucus, and particularly by our leader, and thankfully by our finance minister, because that matters.
So what did we do? We had a line in our campaign platform before the 2007 election that committed us to developing a comprehensive poverty reduction strategy, with measures and a target. We committed to building on the Ontario child benefit, and we committed to working with our stakeholders to develop that strategy.
I was given the enormous opportunity to lead our poverty reduction strategy. We had a cabinet committee--it's now transformed--that was 15 members. We recognized that this was not something that one ministry could do on its own.
We all have a role to play in the reduction of poverty. The inter-ministerial nature of the work goes through every initiative in our strategy. It really is at the foundation of what we're trying to do. We have to work together in a more coordinated way.
One of the most difficult decisions we had to make was where to start. If your job is to reduce poverty, where do you start? We knew we had to start somewhere. We had to refine our scope.
So we started with kids. We started with reducing poverty and increasing opportunity for kids. We did this for the very good reason that the evidence is abundant and very clear that you get the best return on investment when you make it as early in a child's life as possible, as early in a person's life as possible, even prenatally. The return on investment is much greater the earlier you start.
We wanted to start with kids, and that's what we did. Our strategy addresses all people living in poverty, but the initial focus is on reducing child poverty in this province.
We embarked on a consultation strategy. I travelled around the province. I met with groups of people. We tried to get as broad a community representation as we could. Most importantly, we wanted to hear the voices of people living in poverty. We wanted to hear from those who weren't known to be part of the poverty community--business, police, others who had a stake in reducing poverty but weren't already part of the conversation.
I think the most important thing we did was to listen. And we did listen. We engaged MPPs from all sides of the House in poverty reduction consultations in their own communities. That in and of itself was very important. MPPs from across the province started to understand poverty, to understand the reality of poverty in their own communities. Even though we as elected people are as close to our communities as anyone, there are still stories that members needed to hear about how poverty impacts their communities.
We had wonderful participation in the consultation. We had a website that listed questions that we were interested in hearing feedback on. We had over 600 submissions from organizations and individuals to our website. We had people meeting around kitchen tables, around boardroom tables. They embraced the opportunity to participate in the development of a strategy.
I think one of our great successes over the course of our year was that the conversation changed. When we started talking about poverty reduction, it was a somewhat acrimonious conversation. There was deep distrust between those who were concerned about poverty and government. We worked hard to build a strong sense of trust. People who had been protesting on the front lawn of Queen's Park were now inside, sitting around the table, figuring out how to move forward on it.
There was a wonderful transformation of the tone, so much so that when we released our strategy in December, there was overwhelming support for it, even amongst those whose initial focus was not child poverty. I think that was a good year.
What's in the strategy? The title of our strategy is Breaking the Cycle. Our real focus is on breaking that intergenerational cycle of poverty, so that kids growing up in poverty are given the opportunity to be successful. It's about more money in the hands of low-income families. People made it very clear in our consultations that if you want to reduce poverty, that means more money in their pockets.
So the strategy is to be $1.4 billion annualized when fully implemented; $1.3 billion of that will be an income transfer, through the Ontario child benefit, directly into the pockets of people living in poverty.
I want to give you a quick example of what the strategy means. When we were elected in 2003, a single mom with two kids, working a full year, full time, would have had an income of just over $19,000, only a couple of thousand dollars more than she would have had on social assistance. When this strategy is fully implemented, her income will have gone up by more than 54% to over $30,000—the same woman with the same kids, still working a full-year, full time, minimum wage job. The difference between trying to make ends meet on under $20,000 compared with over $30,000 is enormous. It means more stable housing. It means better food. It means the kids aren't going to move from school to school as frequently. It's going to mean that the kids will have an opportunity to participate in some activities outside of school. It will make an enormous difference in those kids' lives, opportunities, and success.
That will actually be achieved even without more federal investment than is already planned. The big movers behind this are the increase in the minimum wage and the Ontario child benefit.
So for that group we will see success. Those kids will be moved from well below the poverty line to nicely above the poverty line; it's not in the lap of luxury, but it's above the level of poverty.
It's about money in your pocket, but it's also about a full range of programs to promote academic success and moving into work, into employment. So it's about before school, after school, and pre-school programs. It's about summer jobs for kids.
The strategy very much takes a community-based approach, so we have initiatives in it to help communities develop capacities to determine their own strategies. We don't expect communities to develop strategies that actually increase income, but we do expect communities to develop strategies that increase opportunities for social engagement, and we've seen some wonderful examples of that already.
We have some targeted programs aimed, in particular, at a group of kids for whom I know we can do far more: the kids who are wards of the crown. They are remarkable, wonderful kids who just need the opportunity to achieve their potential. They are kids who, by definition, have experienced severe trauma, and we need to do a better job for them—and we're doing that.
We have a section in our strategy called “Smarter Government”. We heard everywhere we went that there was a lot of money wasted in the delivery of service for people, that services were difficult to access, that we had a lot of work to do to get our act together to make sure we spent our money on initiatives that actually improved the well-being of people in the community. We know we have some difficult work ahead of us on that, but we are committed to doing it.
Part of our strategy is legislative. We've introduced legislation—in second reading now—which will make this the first of a series of poverty reduction strategies. It will mandate that future governments renew a poverty reduction strategy every five years. It will commit those governments to transparency, that is, to measuring and reporting annually on their progress.
We are committed to measuring our progress. We've identified eight indicators, three of which are income-based and three of which are education-based, because we know that the best protective factor against poverty as an adult is education. So we want our kids to be doing better. And we are committed to reporting on those indicators every year. We have set one target; the target is to reduce the number of kids living in poverty by 25% over the next five years.
That will improve the standard of living of all kids living in poverty and lift 90,000 kids, including those I talked about earlier, up and out of poverty altogether. In order to achieve that we all need to work together, and that is another foundational principle of our strategy. This is not something the Province of Ontario can do on its own. We need everyone working together with the same objective.
We are very explicit about our request to the federal government, and very pleased, as I said, with the increase in WITB. On the target indicators, there are two things we're asking the federal government to do. One is to increase WITB to $2,000 a year. It's now up to over $1,600--thank you for that very much. We're also asking you to increase the NCBS by $1,200 a year. If you do those two things, and if we do what we're undertaking to do, and the economy.... We're very clear that we need a certain economic growth to make this happen, but they are reasonable assumptions in our model. If we all work together, we can achieve this; we can do it. And we lay out how it can be done.
There are also some other initiatives that don't relate to the target but certainly affect poverty and well-being that we are asking the federal government to come to the table with, to be part of.
You are probably all familiar with the inequities in employment insurance. That is a very serious problem for us, an increasingly serious problem. An unemployed worker in Ontario receives on average $4,600 less than an unemployed worker in Alberta or anywhere else. That's not okay. It's not fair. It's time to fix that.
We need a renewed commitment to early learning and child care. This is extremely important. If we want kids to do well, they need to have that early learning. If we want parents to work, we need to have child care. We need a renewed commitment to early learning and child care.
We need to work together on housing, and we have seen some very promising steps there.
We need a targeted commitment to improve the quality of life and well-being and the opportunities of aboriginal peoples. We really need to get back to doing what we need to do so that aboriginal kids growing up are given the opportunities to be successful.
I'm going to close there and throw it open to questions. I'll leave it with you there.