Human Resources Committee on April 23rd, 2009

[Bruce Porter]

Thanks for that question.

It is very important to realize that many times people become homeless because of discriminatory barriers rather than because somebody is not providing them with something they need. The Canadian government has repeatedly been asked to act. Most recently the Canadian Human Rights Act review panel travelled across the country looking at what needs to change in the Canadian Human Rights Act. They reported that they heard more about poverty and homelessness than about any other human rights issue. One of their strongest recommendations was to include the right to freedom from discrimination because of social condition, defined, as it is in the Quebec legislation, as encompassing homelessness and poverty. Unfortunately nothing has been done about that.

It plays out in a lot of very practical ways. We had cases at CERA of people being refused access, for example, to telephone services because they were on welfare and couldn't afford to pay a deposit or access bank credit. There are many forms of discrimination against poor people for which there is no remedy because of the failure of the Canadian government to act on that critical recommendation. In fact, in cases of people on welfare being discriminated against in social housing, the CMHC has intervened to argue that the Government of Canada doesn't have to be accountable to protections from discrimination on the basis of welfare contained in provincial legislation.

That in itself is a very major issue that could go a long way to deal with some of the problems, in particular in relation to access to credit and in cases in which home ownership may actually be a more affordable alternative. CMHC could be doing so much more. For example, if somebody has been paying $600 a month in rent and wants to have a shared ownership situation in which she would be paying $400 a month towards the mortgage, she won't qualify for CMHC mortgage insurance, which is based on fairly rigid criteria relating housing costs to income.

There's so much that could be done to ensure that poor people aren't excluded from the most affordable housing options, and the Canadian government hasn't take the leadership on that issue.

[Megan Leslie, NDP, Halifax, NS]

Mr. Gazzard, you were talking about the accountability framework, and I actually want to toss that to Mr. Gillard. I believe we need dedicated funding with strings attached, especially when it comes to housing and poverty elimination. What are your thoughts in that regard?

[Geoff Gillard]

I certainly agree that we need an accountability framework that sets out measurables, targets, and milestones. However, we believe that the provinces and territories need to take lead responsibility for negotiating those, setting them out, and having them set in agreements. So I agree, but it should be done in a collaborative manner.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much. Thanks for being here today, Megan. We appreciate it.

We will now move to the last individual in the first round. Mr. Cannan, you have seven minutes.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you also to all our witnesses. I appreciate your coming here and sharing your experience, wisdom, and ideas on how we can deal with and address this issue of housing and poverty in our country.

Also, happy birthday to the Canadian Co-operative Association--your 100th. We look forward to hopefully participating in your celebration, and all the best in the next 100 years. Ideally, it would be good if you could be out of business and eradicate poverty and move on to some other issues so we can constructively have a better country.

The reality is that it has been an issue, as we alluded to. In some cases it's getting worse instead of better, depending on which part of the country you live in. I have the good fortune of living in British Columbia and representing a constituency in the Okanagan. I spent nine years on the City of Kelowna council dealing with the social housing planning committee, so it's something I'm very passionate about. Our city is undertaking a 10-year capital plan right now, modelled after the City of Calgary model, and they're going through that study right now.

I also have a co-op across the street from my house, and it was a very controversial rezoning. People were all afraid, and they said not in my backyard. It was one of the aspects of B.C. Housing, where our government was the first to sign a Canada-B.C. social housing agreement in 2006 for the modelling of other provinces. It has been very successful in many ways.

It's, as you mentioned, a very complex issue. There's no simple solution, no silver bullet. Mental health issues in many cases have to be dealt with. Housing, as indicated, is one of the key priorities, and our government has indicated, as Mr. Gazzard alluded to, over $1.9 billion over five years in the homelessness partnership strategy.

I was very excited with our budget in January, working with Minister Flaherty, and with the additional billion dollars for social housing, and $600 million for on reserve and northern housing, $400 million for seniors housing, and $75 million for housing for people with disabilities, which is another important aspect which this committee is dealing with, and $400 million for on reserve, which will be dealt with through CMHC.

My question is for Mr. Gillard or Mr. Porter, or whoever.

Do you want to speak to the issue of a national housing strategy? One of the issues we talk about is the Constitution, the framework we live with in Canada, and the struggle we have. There's only one taxpayer, and all levels of government have to work together. By wanting to have conditions attached to the funding to the province, how do you see us getting around the constitutional issue?

[Geoff Gillard]

I'll speak briefly first.

On the positive side, Nicholas and I, and some others, had the privilege of speaking to the provincial and territorial ministers in the fall. Most of the provinces and territories are anxious to see a national housing policy framework put in place. I think with more work on how unique circumstances in various provinces and territories can be addressed and accommodated within such a framework, we could see a really collaborative effort put in place and implemented between the federal government and the provinces and territories.

Without that sort of framework, we're investing and we're doing good work. We are housing people, but we're not necessarily bringing down those core-need housing numbers that Nicholas referred to.

Again, you mention the silver bullet. On the jurisdictional issue, there's no silver bullet there either, I think. It's something that will require some dedication, but more than I think was the case even five years ago. Today there is a real recognition that at all levels a great deal of money is being invested here and that we need to invest it in a more planned way. Certainly the provinces and territories look to the federal government for funding more than policy guidance, but there has to be some accountability there and there have to be some guidelines.

[Nicholas Gazzard]

Can I add something to that, Mr. Chairman?

Yes, absolutely, there's a jurisdictional issue here, but there's something called the federal spending power as well, and you're using that. You're using the federal spending power in many areas. Health is big, as is education and, of course, housing. These are the three blocks I talked about that we build a civilized society on. You've shown that you can ask for outcomes on health spending and that you can ask for outcomes on education spending.

We're not suggesting that the federal government start telling the provinces and territories exactly how to spend the money. What we're saying is that that's their jurisdiction, and that's their right to decide. But you say there's one taxpayer, and that taxpayer deserves accountability for money put in. Many taxpayers think that a lot of social programs are simply black holes, because there's no real reporting out at the end on results and, as I said, not necessarily any real accountability for it either.

I'm with Geoff on this. I'm not saying you hold the other levels of government up at gunpoint and say, “You have to do it our way.” What I'm saying is, you sit down and say, “We all have a problem. It affects you politically. It affects us politically. And it affects all of us ethically and morally. And we need to get a grip on how we're going to deal with it.” What I think you do need an end to is unbalanced spending.

So for example, in the province you're in, B.C., most of the money that has been passed to the affordable housing initiative has been spent on supportive housing. I'm not saying it's not needed, but it's unbalanced in the sense that there is a shortage--particularly in the Lower Mainland and perhaps also in Kelowna--of affordable family housing, and that's not being addressed. In fact, it's going the other way. Affordable family housing, rental housing, is starting to disappear in B.C. rather than being added to.

Our own organization is so concerned about that, we're looking to see whether we can actually acquire apartment buildings and turn them into non-profit housing cooperatives in perpetuity, because there is a desperate need for family housing that's not being met. So I think across the range of groups that I talked about that need affordable housing solutions, they have to be looked at fairly equally. They can't just be focused at one end of the spectrum. That's the kind of discussion I think you need to have with the other levels of government.

[Ron Cannan, Conservative, Kelowna—Lake Country, BC]

I agree. I also believe the closer you get to the grassroots, the better the decision-making is. As you said, it's better than having someone in Ottawa telling the provinces and municipalities what to do. That's one of the things I said when I was in local government. I said that when I went to Ottawa I wanted to make sure that the spending powers and the decision-making were at the local level.

That's why our transfer payments are secure—3% per annum for social transfer, a 6% increase compounded annually to 2014 for health care—to ensure that the sustainable, reliable, predictable funding source is there, along with our gas tax now with local government. So all those decisions are made on a local and provincial government basis, and whether the provinces decide that they need to put more money in social housing for affordable families or for seniors or supportive housing, that will be decided at the local and provincial levels.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Porter, do you have a quick response?

[Bruce Porter]

Very briefly, I think the other model we can look at is a joint commitment to the kind of accountability that has been suggested by my colleagues. I would add that it can't be just to broad indicators like the core housing need. There has to be recognition of the unique needs of particular groups, like persons with disabilities.

Quebec is committed just as much as the Canadian government is committed to our international human rights obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to adequate housing. If we frame the relationship between different levels of government as a joint commitment to these shared obligations, I think we get around some of the jurisdictional squabbling, and we can move towards what I would think of as a kind of Jordan's principle, which we have applied to aboriginal children so that their rights should never just be allowed to fall into the gaps of jurisdictional squabbling. I think we could adopt a broader approach to the right to adequate housing and the right to an adequate standard of living, which says that none of our rights should fall between the cracks.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Porter.

Thank you, Mr. Cannan.

We're now going to move to our second round, which will be five minutes of questions and answers. We're going to start off with Ms. Minna.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you to the witnesses for coming today and for your presentations.

I've always felt that co-op housing--I am biased--is probably one of the best ways of providing affordable housing in this country. I was very involved with defending federal co-op housing and maintaining it in federal hands, as some of you may recall, because I felt it was important that it stay under federal control and that the Government of Canada stay engaged in this issue of co-op housing, especially over time.

One of the reasons I feel that co-op housing--and the homelessness program that we now have, which the Liberal government of the time brought in, the program called SCPI--works is because it is done at the grassroots level. There's a buy-in from the people who are participating in it. So it's very successful for that reason.

I wanted to ask something. In my riding, there is an area called Main Square. It was built in 1976, and it was a mixed arrangement between Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the private sector, which happened to own the land and build. The arrangement was that some, not all, of the units would be subsidized, and the rest is mixed. It was administered by CMHC, but it wouldn't have to be, obviously. It could be administered in other ways. That's one way of looking at tripartite arrangements. More recently, the subsidies have been coming down because, as people leave their subsidized units, those units become commercial. Unfortunately, the decision sometime in the mid-nineties was that CMHC got out of actually subsidizing and was doing more mortgages and what have you.

My question to you is twofold.

That kind of arrangement, I think, is critical if we want to increase the numbers and make sure we have mixed housing as opposed to building ghettos, which we have done in the past, in my view, and which we are trying to get rid of, such as Regent Park. Have any of you had any meetings with CMHC? I think its mandate needs to change. CMHC should be very aggressively involved in the development of housing, not just be a mortgage company. That's one question.

The other concerns the short term. Through my former leader during the last election, we said we would subsidize the individual as opposed to the unit in order to ensure that we increase the number of units as quickly as possible while we're building more housing, because there just isn't enough, and nobody has time to wait for 10 years, which is what the wait list is now in Toronto.

Could you comment on that--subsidizing the individual as opposed to the unit?

[Nicholas Gazzard]

I'm very glad to hear you say such nice things about cooperative housing, and of course I agree with you. I think it's worth noting that cooperative housing programs began in Canada in the early seventies as a solution to the construction of ghettos that you described. Public housing programs in Canada came relatively late compared with, say, the United States and the United Kingdom, but apparently they didn't learn any lessons, because they built 100% low-income housing, no streetscape, nothing, and of course you're seeing the results in your area of the country right now. You mentioned the Regent Park redevelopment.

Co-ops were a community alternative to that, with mixed income, a combination of low and moderate incomes, a real heterogeneous community. The problem is that we're not getting any more of that. You mentioned CMHC's role, but it has been pretty clear for some time now, despite what I've been saying about broad outcomes, that the federal government will not permit its crown corporation to deliver direct housing programs. And that's a great shame, because I think there's an enormous value both socially and economically in having those mixed-income communities.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

I agree with you. That's why I asked the question.

[Nicholas Gazzard]

They're cost-effective, they spread the load, and they develop solid corporate citizens.

On your other points--I'll just answer very briefly, because Geoff probably has something to say--I completely agree that while I think we do need more permanent affordable housing here, in the short term, yes, subsidizing families, subsidizing individuals, is necessary while they wait for social housing to come on board. What people don't realize is that even though I'm talking about outcomes, those outcomes take a long time--between a policy decision here and then at the provincial and municipal levels in Ontario and actual assets on the ground. In the meantime, that misery of poverty that I talked about earlier on continues, and we need to be able to address it.

I'm sorry, Geoff, I used the time up.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

We'll move now to the Conservative Party, to Mr. Vellacott.

You have five minutes, sir.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

You bet. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Because I'm super jealous of my time--our chairman is very strict with the time here--perhaps to the questions I pose you could give me as cryptic answers as possible, and to the point.

Just off the top, Nicholas, in the brochure you have, I looked through the part that mentions housing co-ops. It says in here that they're jointly owned by the members who live in them, but the members don't own equity. I'm trying to figure that out, because I'm a co-op member, and I get things like equity cheques occasionally.

So what do you mean here? Perhaps you could clarify that for me. It would seem to be a contradiction that you jointly own something but you don't own equity. That second statement shouldn't be there, it would seem.

[Nicholas Gazzard]

There are two kinds of co-ops. There are co-ops where there are dividends and profits earned and returned to the members, and co-ops where there are not. Housing co-ops in Canada are not-for-profit co-ops. So although the members collectively own and are responsible for the asset, they take nothing with them when they leave. They get no dividend. If there are any surpluses generated, they go back to the general good.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Right. Well, I guess I would probably differ, then, on whether you should say they own it. Is that technically a legal term...? If people take nothing with them when they go, I wouldn't view them as owning it.

[Nicholas Gazzard]

The cooperative corporation owns it, and they make up the cooperative corporation. I agree that there seems to be a bit of a....

You talked about a cryptic answer: I'm giving you one.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Exactly, yes.

It also says in here that co-ops charge their members only enough to cover their costs. I'm just wondering if they build in a little bit of a reserve. Sometimes there are higher maintenance costs and those types of things. Is there a kind of fund built in for some of those larger costs that can happen as the housing stock matures, so to speak?

[Nicholas Gazzard]

Yes.

[Maurice Vellacott, Conservative, Saskatoon—Wanuskewin, SK]

Okay, good. Super; you're most helpful.

The other thing you say in here is that as they mature, they use less financial help from the government. As stock kind of wears over time, I would have thought otherwise. In a couple of sentences, can you explain that to me?

[Nicholas Gazzard]

That has to do with the funding formulas that are provided. In the largest co-op program, the section 95 program, which delivered 40,000 units, its subsidy declines over time as interest rates have declined.