Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.
I'm here representing the Centre for Equality Rights in Accommodation, CERA, which is a world-renowned organization quite unique in addressing the human rights dimensions of housing in Canada. It has increasingly started to work internationally.
I was the executive director for about 15 years and then moved from CERA to working more internationally, and nationally, on issues of poverty and housing within a human rights framework. But I'm very honoured to be representing CERA today. The executive director, Leilani Farha, is unable to appear.
I'm also very grateful to be here at a time when I think you are dealing with the most critical human rights crisis in this country that we have seen for many years. And I think we're at a point where we have a unique opportunity to address it.
I wanted to then focus on how it is that a human rights framework can provide assistance to this committee in the challenges that it's dealing with, particularly in the interaction between homelessness and the crisis of housing and the broader question of poverty amelioration and elimination.
We have to realize the economic crisis is working its way down. Imagine yourself as someone who lost their job a month ago or two months ago. Perhaps you have a bit of savings. If you're a woman with children, you probably don't qualify for employment insurance, and you go on welfare and you find that the amount you get on welfare is grossly inadequate to cover the cost of your rent. You're going to survive for a while, but not long.
So there is a delay factor between the data we're seeing about the economic crisis and the way it's going to really play out for the most vulnerable groups in Canada. I'm absolutely convinced that this committee is going to be facing a very serious crisis when we realize that the stimulus package has not moved in at the bottom to protect the most vulnerable from the inevitable effects of this economic downturn. So it's very important that we deal with the issue that is of such urgency now, within a coherent framework as suggested by the previous speakers.
Secondly, we have a unique opportunity right now. Some of you may not be aware that Canada recently participated in its universal periodic review. This is a new procedure at the UN Human Rights Council. It applies to all governments, and it provided an opportunity for Canada to be reviewed in relation to its compliance with the whole range of human rights commitments that we have.
On June 9, Canada will appear before the UN Human Rights Council and state, of the recommendations it hears in the process from very many states, which it will accept and commit itself to implementing over the next four years or longer, and which it won't.
One of the critical concerns that emerged there, as always when Canada is at the UN, is the extent of poverty and homelessness in so affluent a country. As you know, a critical aspect of international human rights is the commitment to the right to an adequate standard of living, which includes the right to adequate food and adequate housing. So it's useful in the context of what we're talking about today that the international human rights framework links an adequate standard of living to adequate housing. You can't address one without the other, and I think that's true within a policy framework in Canada.
So I would urge this committee to engage in the question of whether Canada will say yes to that recommendation and what it will commit itself to. I know that it's at a high level now within HRSDC, with officials looking at whether they will commit to this recommendation and how they might implement it. But why do you want to commit to a recommendation that places the policy issues that you're dealing with today within a human rights framework? It really is a matter of recognizing that when we talk about homelessness and the housing crisis, or even poverty, we can't really pin it down to any one program or any one failure. The woman I talked about who was dealing with job loss and the inadequacy of welfare, when she goes on welfare her national child benefit supplement gets clawed back, and when she tries to get assistance for her child with a disability, she finds that she may not be entitled to that. People who are struggling to survive in Canada are dealing with a very complex system of entitlements.
I have turned to Amartya Sen's notion of entitlement system failure to try to understand what it is that we're grappling with when we look at homelessness in a country like Canada. I find it useful because Amartya Sen came across this concept. He developed it when he was looking at the fact that people starve and suffer from famine when there's lots of food around. It's not a scarcity of food that leads to starvation and famine; it's an entitlement system failure. The whole system of entitlements breaks down so somebody doesn't have what they need, whether it's because they sell their produce in a market or whether they're looking for governments for help. Whatever they need isn't there, and eventually their children are dying of starvation because of such an entitlement system failure.
If you look at the problem of homelessness in Canada and at the federal involvement in that, of course it's a complex system. There are provincial programs. There are federal programs. There's the way in which employment insurance interacts with welfare interacts with the NCBS program on child poverty and the tax system. What is it that causes entitlement system failures to lead to so dire a human rights violation as 300,000 people homeless in the midst of affluence? That's the question we've been asked a number of times by the UN.
We had the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, on the invitation of the Canadian government, come to Canada and review the situation. His key recommendation was that we need to have some sort of framework, a housing strategy, that builds in the notion that these are human rights issues. That's not to say that governments now have to provide housing for everyone; it's just that we have to have an institutional framework whereby we can notice and address the entitlement system failures.
Who is in a position to look at how employment insurance interacts with inadequate welfare rates and interacts with the national child benefit supplement? Who is in a position to look at what's going to happen to the most vulnerable people in this economic crisis? Under international law, and I think in the expectations of Canadians, it's the federal government that is in that position. That's not to say that you will solve the problems, but somebody has to take responsibility for noticing them. Somebody has to take responsibility for giving a person a place to come to say, this is not working, I'm in a gap here. I can't get assistance for my child with a disability. I'm not eligible for welfare because of my age. I'm a newcomer. I'm trying to get into social housing, which the government funds, but there's a waiting list of 12 years, and I'm not allowed to apply until I'm 16. I'm only 22 and I have two children, but I can't get in because the system is based on a waiting list allocation.
These are complex issues. We're not going to solve them today, but what we could solve is the problem that there's no place to go. There's nobody looking at the big picture. The big picture is also the small picture. The big picture you only understand by hearing from the woman explaining what isn't working in her life, because what's not working in her life is what's not working in the country.
My recommendation is essentially to go to the UN in June and for this committee to interact with the officials who are making those decisions and say yes, let's commit ourselves. We don't have to work out the details now, but let's make a commitment that will also restore our leadership role internationally in relation to international human rights. I can't tell you how difficult it is now to be a Canadian at the UN in relation to issues like housing, homelessness, and poverty. We may not be aware of it, but people are totally shocked by the extent to which people can be hungry and homeless in one of the most affluent countries that has recognized the right to housing.
It is a crisis. It's a crisis of human rights, and it's a crisis of our own Canadian values. People are not prepared to respect Canada if we keep telling other countries that they're not respecting human rights when we're not addressing some of the key issues that have been identified here. These issues have been identified repeatedly by UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies as a crisis and as requiring urgent measures. We have the UN special rapporteur's report. But who is dealing with it? There's no follow-up. There's no action in response to any of these concerns, yet again, and this problem that we have no framework within which we deal with human rights violations as issues that have to be dealt with.
If we were to adopt an anti-poverty and housing strategy that built in a notion that the federal government will take on the role and ensure that human rights institutions, policy-makers, and intergovernmental agreements start with the premise that if somebody is homeless there's something wrong and we're going to try to figure out what's wrong, that's all we need. All we need is a new will, a new framework, that recognizes these as human rights that have to be subject to proper hearings and appropriate remedies.
Thanks very much.