Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. I am pleased to see that your committee attaches great importance to anti-poverty policies. I know that you have been working on this issue for several months and that you are considering a tour to continue your work. I'm very pleased to hear this.
I will speak in French, but afterwards, during the exchanges, I will answer the questions in the language in which they are posed.
I do not have a lot of time, and you have already studied this issue somewhat, so I will just present five aspects, ideas or questions relating to anti-poverty policy. I think that this is what you would like to discuss today, basing the discussion on Quebec's experience. Then, during questions and answers, we could explore each one of these aspects more or look at any other issues that you might want to raise. I will provide you with the five main ideas immediately, and then I will go back to them. They are as follows:
First of all, over the past decade, Quebec has introduced an integrated approach to alleviating poverty, an approach that is still changing, but it is consistent and it is becoming institutionalized. I will come back to this topic. So, my first main idea is the integrated approach.
The second main idea is that in some ways, this approach is unique to Quebec, although it is also in keeping with international trends. You have met with people from Ireland and the United Kingdom. In Europe, many countries are certainly moving in this direction. In Canada, several provinces are also taking this direction. So that is the second idea that I will be discussing briefly.
Third, this integrated approach is paying off. A great deal of work remains to be done, but now that a few years have gone by, we are already seeing practical results thanks to these public policies.
Four, the federal government certainly has a role to play within its areas of jurisdiction and in light of its resources. I will be discussing that point very briefly.
Five, because of the current economic situation, clear directions and actions are even more important, insofar as the years to come may be difficult from an economic point of view and tough for the poorest in society.
I'd now like to discuss the first main idea of my presentation, namely Quebec's integrated approach. The background of this approach is well-known. For the most part, this approach is based on legislation that was passed in December 2002 by all the parties in the National Assembly—unanimously—to offset poverty and social exclusion. This legislation was first designed by a coalition called the Collectif pour une loi sur l'élimination de la pauvreté, which has now become the Collectif pour un Québec sans pauvreté. So you see, a social movement was created for this purpose, bringing together various people and community groups from all regions of Quebec. It included unions, various social movements and organizations, as well as several municipalities. The coalition suggested legislation. Of course, the bill that was finally passed was not the same as the one prepared by the coalition, but all the same, it was a social process that led to this legislation.
In 2004, the first five-year action plan was introduced, on the heels of the 2002 legislation. This action plan has nearly come to an end, and another action plan will follow. This action plan includes a number of measures. Quebec's strategy to alleviate poverty is based on the 2002 legislation and the 2004 action plan, but important measures were taken back in 1997. It was in 1997 that Quebec's public policies began to change.
I won't go into the details, but I will say that the most important interventions within Quebec's framework focus on families, including in particular a restructuring of family allowances, the establishment of the early childhood centres for day care services and finally, parental leave. These measures were brought in to help all families—and we can look at them in greater detail if you wish—particularly lower-income families. The second focus is on work. This policy provides incentives for low-income people to work, somewhat like policies established in several other countries. Under this policy, low-income people receive an incentive if they are working, and the policy provides for drug coverage if people are not covered by an employer.
Early childhood centres are, of course, a support to families, but they also help women to participate in the workforce, and are therefore also part of that component. There was the increase to minimum wage, and more recently, a new deal for employment announced by the Quebec government a little over a year ago. This program is intended to promote the integration of unemployed people into the workforce, as well as people who are facing various obstacles in that domain.
Finally, the third component after family and work is a policy that reaffirms certain social rights, particularly those protecting family allowances from reductions—this was part of the 2004 action plan—and that also indexes social benefits to the cost of living. More recently—this goes back only a few months—benefits for people who are able to work were fully indexed.
We are therefore talking about a set of policies rather than a single one, structured around a certain number of objectives. This is also a way of doing things that includes a number of institutions, which we can discuss in more detail if you wish, but it includes in particular an advisory committee made up of people from various backgrounds in Quebec, including people living in poverty who make recommendations to the government on the targets to be reached, the objectives, etc.
Working alongside the advisory committee is the Centre d'étude sur la pauvreté et l'exclusion, which is more or less the equivalent of what exists in France and is called the Observatoire national de la pauvreté et de l'exclusion sociale. This is a body that provides recommendations to the government on the subject of the indicators to be used to follow people living in poverty. It is therefore a knowledge organization that consults experts.
At the same time, there is also an initiative that promotes social science research on poverty and the issues it involves, which has existed in Quebec for several years. Concerted action is being taken, as we say in the language of Quebec research funds, to finance research in this area. This funding is about to expire and will be renewed over the coming months.
This way of doing things is rather typical of Quebec's way of proceeding, that is to say with several partners, with concerted action, with people working in the domain as well, and it is quite typical of the way things have been done recently in Quebec. It also reflects the fact that the fight against poverty was launched by the people, and therefore cannot simply be carried out by the government.
Finally—and this is the second major component that I will raise today—this integrated approach goes along with and is relatively compatible with what has been done elsewhere in the world over the last few years, more or less since the shift in about the year 2000.
I will not say too much about that, but since the turning point in 2000, the United Nations has set out new millennium objectives for itself on poverty reduction. The European Union, in Lisbon in 2000, also set out objectives and a process for itself. This process aims to provide objectives, somewhat like we did in Quebec, to provide one or more specific action plans, institutional structures to allow for the achievement of these action plans, accountability mechanisms, consideration of the relevant indicators and the participation of people living in poverty.
In short, the Quebec initiative is quite similar to that which was developed by the European Union, without being a carbon copy. There was not really a direct influence, but it was born of the same kind of process and, of course, you have certainly heard about it here. Elsewhere in Canada, in several provinces, people are beginning to move in the same direction. Therefore, this is an integrated initiative, a process that works.
It is obviously rather early to see the results, but we nevertheless can see that, regardless of the yardstick we use, according to the indicators, poverty has been reduced in Quebec over the last decade. If you wish, we could discuss the relevance of various indicators or measures that can be used to assess poverty, which include the Canadian poverty line, the poverty line as it is used by Europeans or the market basket measure as proposed by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.
There has been a greater decrease in poverty in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada. This is particularly true for families, given that the government devoted most of their efforts to them. Social assistance income in Quebec, as measured by the National Council of Welfare, increased, particularly in the case of families. In the last few years, family incomes for those participating in the workforce and having income from work also improved, particularly income after taxes and transfers. In Quebec, there were fewer inequalities than elsewhere in Canada. The policies therefore seem to be producing results. I will come back to those results a little later on.
I simply want to emphasize that this redistribution did not create any problems in terms of work incentive, quite the contrary. We can in fact see that the number of social assistance claimants went down more in Quebec than in Ontario over the last seven or eight years. Furthermore, we have noted an astonishing fact: households with children, although they had the highest level of social assistance income, stopped claiming that assistance in greater numbers than those without children. Contrary to what we might have thought, by improving the situation of these households, they were not encouraged to remain on social assistance. On the contrary, they integrated the workplace in greater numbers than before. The fact of having greatly improved the situation of families implies that single people were less able to benefit from this trend.
Fourthly, what is the role of the federal government? It plays a very important role, but this role is not set up following a coherent logic targeting poverty reduction. One of the foundations of this role is primarily a remarkable success story. This is not recent, but it allows us to understand what poverty is in Canada. The federal government, along with the provinces, has almost succeeded in eliminating poverty among seniors, over the last 20 to 30 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, Canada was one of the OECD countries with the highest percentage of poor among the elderly. Now, we are among those who have the fewest. This is of course due to the income security programs that come under federal jurisdiction, the Guaranteed Income Supplement, the Canada Pension Plan and the Régime des rentes in the case of Quebec, as well as all of the other measures that contribute to the financial security of retired persons.
When we think of the role of the federal government, we also see that alongside this success is a failure. As remarkable as the effort has been as far as the elderly are concerned, the situation of aboriginal peoples is a disaster. This is of course a very important issue for the federal government. Without getting into the finer points of federal areas of jurisdiction, I would say that it is very important not to be too quick to promote a pan-Canadian approach intended to standardize what is being done in Canada. Why? First of all because much of what needs to be done does not come under federal jurisdiction, while at the same time much of what could be done comes under federal jurisdiction.
The issue is therefore to identify what the federal government can do. It is also important to say that the policies we are discussing here are new policies that we are experimenting with. Quebec is carrying out its own experiments. We are learning. Several European countries are doing the same thing and several Canadian provinces have begun to think along the same lines. We do not yet know what will bring the most success. Therefore, there are great advantages to working within the federal framework and leaving the provinces to their own experiments according to their priorities.
As far as the federal government's role is concerned, putting aside of course the issue of aboriginal peoples, there seem to be two priority issues. First, employment insurance, which is the main income security program for Canadians of working age, must be improved, which is quite clearly a federal responsibility. Second, there are the transfers to the provinces, which play an important role in funding social programs. I would add that the federal government has a role to play—that it is already playing—and it will be called upon by the provinces regarding the measurement of poverty.
Statistics Canada and, above all, Human Resources Development Canada have worked on the development of the market basket measure. This measure appears to be very interesting from Quebec's perspective because it takes into account the real costs incurred by people living in poverty. It is not without its difficulties as a measurement tool, but it rounds out the low-income measure used by the Europeans and it is certainly of more interest than the poverty threshold used by Statistics Canada, which is more and more out of date.
There are other aspects of poverty that we are not well aware of, particularly as far as social exclusion and the deprivation of material goods is concerned, to which Statistics Canada could very usefully contribute.
In conclusion, we are entering a period of recession. This does not call into question the efforts that have been made. On the contrary, it brings us back to the issue of available resources and brings back to the table the importance of employment insurance and transfers.
Thank you very much and I am ready to take your questions.
