Human Resources Committee on May 11th, 2009

[Louise Smith MacDonald]

Well, if you don't qualify for EI--

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

Excuse me. If I might just interrupt, I actually want to get a lead into talking for a few minutes about this notion of a guaranteed income as well.

[Louise Smith MacDonald]

Many women don't qualify for EI. And even for those who do, if they work in a minimum wage job, minimum wage in Nova Scotia is $8.60, and I believe that EI pays 55%. So if you have a minimum wage job, and you lose it, and you are eligible for EI, you're still only going to collect about $146 a week, which is about $7,000 to $8,000 a year in total income. If you can't collect EI, then of course you would go onto social assistance through the province.

I'm trying to stay on topic. But one of the problems with all the stimulus money that was put into the economy is that very little of that would be directed to women, because it is all infrastructure money. We know that fewer than 7% of women are in non-traditional jobs. So that is not going to be a help for women who want to try to improve their lot.

There are certainly models to follow for a guaranteed income in a country like Canada. Canada, which has such abundance, really needs to look after its people. We're a caring and compassionate society. If you knew that there was a boat sinking out in the harbour and it was full of children, there isn't one of us who wouldn't be on the shore trying to do something. But you have generations of children who are literally drowning because of their poverty, and no one is doing what they need to do. So a guaranteed income would look, to me, as though those who need it.... There would be a minimum level of what a family could expect to get. So they would not be subject to political pressure or to the difference between Ontario and Nova Scotia.

I'm not suggesting that one size fits all, because it doesn't. But it would get us away from the charity model of welfare whereby if you're good and do as you're told we'll give you $208 a month for yourself plus your shelter allowance. It would just remove that. And I really believe....

We are always going to have people who need help. But we do have people who respond very quickly to a change in their lifestyle, and they move ahead, and they start to work, and they pay taxes, which I understand is the lifeline of government. Women and families, you know, are not investing in offshore oil. They're buying groceries and they're buying food and they're buying clothes in their own local economies. It is a wise choice to invest in people and to allow them to pay their fair share, as we all do.

The specifics of how to do it I'm sure someone much smarter than me could figure out, but it certainly makes sense.

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

I was in Finland in 2002 visiting different groups--big business groups, union groups, and political groups. The notion of social welfare has a completely different connotation there. For them, it's the welfare of society. Poverty is often referred to as the failure of communities. This notion of stigma came up a couple of times. So did engaging young people in the world around them.

I said earlier this morning that when I was younger, I lived in a poor family. I think that now, as I look back, but I didn't know it at the time, because I was able to engage. The hockey game happened out in front of my house, and everybody played. Nowadays, because of the way things have evolved, it's very expensive to participate.

How do we get back to a notion in Canada of a healthy society, meaning that everybody in that society is healthy and has access to the things they need to actually be healthy and participate?

[Timothy Crooks]

I'd like to speak to that for a moment, if I could.

The old antiquated notion that takes us back to the fifties is if you can play containment on this, so it's us and them, and if you just put those folks who are troubling us on the other side of the line over there, then those of us who are on this side of the line will be just fine. Hopefully, as we've grown as a nation we've started to understand that the more who are over there, the less who are over here. The simple reality is, if it's quality of life that you seek, if you're not all on the same side of the line, then everybody pays the price.

This is borne out again and again in the research, in the literature, in personal experience, in the voice that people give to their lived lives about what poverty has meant for them. So I think that's the starting point. Regardless of your political stripe, if it's thriving commerce that you're after, I would think that you'd want all individuals, all families, to be doing well. If it's quality of life exclusively that drives you, the same rule applies.

I think when we start to look from a policy perspective, and it goes back to the question that was asked a short while ago about measure, you can't just have a measure that's exclusively tied to income. It's got to be tied to somebody's ability to participate, to be engaged, and to subsequently thrive. What's interesting is here in Nova Scotia one of the holdouts used to be, many years ago, the corporate sector, which was very lean and mean in their perspective on this, and now they're way ahead in understanding that if we want folks to fill our trades, if we want folks to lend in a productive way to commerce, we can't afford to leave anybody behind--we can't afford to leave anybody behind.

Everybody knows what's happening with the population, not only in Nova Scotia but in Canada as a nation, so if for no other reason we have reason now to give pause and to take a serious look with an inclusive lens at how we do the work that needs to be done so everybody has access to opportunities to do something really meaningful with their lives.

There's a shift that's happening all around us, and I think one of the last areas to catch up is federally and provincially when we talk about policies on these issues.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, Tim.

We're going to now move over to Mr. Komarnicki for seven minutes.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thanks, Chair.

I'll probably direct my comments to Tim specifically. I know that we have heard from quite a few that the way the funding presently works in the grant programs requires organizations that have been around for a long time to continue to spend a lot of effort and energy in trying to sustain themselves by jumping through various hoops. My sense is that perhaps we've matured over the years, and for some of the organizations that provide quality service and service that's really meaningful, maybe we need to rethink how we run our funding, granting proposals, how we do our call for proposals.

Do you have any specific suggestions for ways to improve that process that would give you some sustainability, I suppose, some hope towards the future? And anyone can deal with this if they like, but I know you raised it, Mr. Crooks, so I'll direct it to you.

[Timothy Crooks]

Thank you. I'd be happy to hear the thoughts from others as well.

There is some great work starting to happen through the Treasury and Policy Board of the Government of Nova Scotia and through HRSDC and Service Canada. It's quite exciting and interesting to see. I'll give you a small example.

Depending on the funding stream for some of the contracts now, you can go to a flat rate that's tied into administrative costs. It used to be the case that each of your items had to be itemized and there needed to be a rationale, and so on. It's easy enough to do, but it's utterly laboursome to do. After a while--I think it was on the heels of some of the problems in the past--things got so restrictive that in the run of a day you'd spend the majority of your time managing that, as opposed to doing the service delivery for which you were receiving funding. I hope we're swinging back to a more commonsensical perspective where, yes, there's accountability, but there's also the flexibility built in so that people can do what they're being funded to do, which is to exercise their understanding and basic knowledge and to get out the door the services they're receiving the funding to get out the door.

We should look at it from a “what's sensible to do” perspective. I know that becomes challenging when we're talking big dollars on a national scale, but we should also do it with the informed understanding that to do the proactive things means a huge cost savings. Locally there is a research piece called “The Cost of Homelessness” that was done by an individual named Frank Palermo, who's a professor at Dalhousie University. He did an extensive literature review. One of the things he came back with was specifically on the issue of supportive housing. His estimate was something in the 40% range as a quick and bulky summary, but nonetheless there it is. There was something in the area of a 40% cost savings in the long term to provide the supports up front that are required. It's with that understanding from a policy perspective that things that operate on a 12-month funding cycle are hugely problematic. Our work is not always necessarily a short-term intervention. It's done with a long-term view and a long-term impact. It's like any other investment.

I would encourage this committee to understand that this work we are doing, which the Government of Canada is supporting, is an investment. When you understand it from an investment perspective, then you start to look differently at what a reasonable rate of return on the dividends is, and you can start to understand it in the same way that we look at other investments. It's no different from some of the money that's gone into the stimulus. We understand that we're building for a year or two years out, and so on. Part of what's required is not only specific changes, but a cultural shift in how we think about funding NGOs and what it is we're looking for in terms of return on that investment.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Thank you.

The other sense I'm getting is on how you measure poverty and how you draw the line, so to speak. You mentioned the market basket approach as one measure. One good thing about that is that each region is a little different. It tells me that when you're dealing with poverty, there are a lot of circumstances that go into that. We have to be somewhat flexible yet objective.

As you mentioned, when you are dealing with a person there are a number of things you have to do. You need to deal with trust issues and a whole variety of things, but it boils down to the individual you're working with. Somehow you need to be able to allow the organizations to do what they need to do with the person to succeed.

How can we as a government set some objective standards that will allow you to take some risk and do some things, since otherwise you might not come up with a program such as the MOSH, which gets you to where you need to be? How do you quantify that? What do we need to do as a government to allow you to do the work you need to do?

Anyone can answer that.

[Patti Melanson]

The experience at the mobile outreach street health program was unique. As I have worked in the community, my experience has been that the government makes some decisions around priorities and then throws out calls for proposals around hepatitis C prevention or specific areas like that. If I'm working at a needle exchange, and there's a call for proposals in the prevention of hepatitis C, I figure out a proposal that will address that. I tailor a proposal that has us doing prevention around hepatitis C when we are doing that anyway.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Shouldn't it be the other way around?

[Patti Melanson]

That's what I'm talking about. The community is a group of experts, and we're a group of experts on the needs in the community. But rarely is that community consulted about what the needs are and how to equate the funding dollars with the needs.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

Tailor the programs to what you know the need is.

[Patti Melanson]

As an example, if you're on needle exchange and you write a proposal to offer some services around hepatitis C prevention, you're also making sure that people have food. You're also probably making sure that someone is linked up with housing.

I think there are experts within the community who could offer a great deal of assistance to government around how to direct calls for proposals, and even how those proposals are framed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

[Louise Smith MacDonald]

As Patti has said, we're always looking at the call for proposals and trying to fit ourselves into it, as opposed to saying what we need to do.

We run a women's homeless shelter in Cape Breton, and through the homeless initiative we were given money to develop it, but there's no money to hire an employee, for example. It's very difficult. We have the capability of housing nine homeless women, and they have to live cooperatively because we can't access money to put someone in there on a full-time basis. So some of the programs give you enough of what you need, but not enough.

We access Status of Women funding and there isn't an administration fee there. You take it because you know the work needs to be done, but it's at a cost to you, and you're overworked at the best of times. But it's the only way you can get the money to do what you need to do.

It's really a matter of what we need, as opposed to us trying to fit into something.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Komarnicki.

We'll move to the second round for five minutes.

Mr. Savage.

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

Thank you very much.

I think the conversation is interesting, and we've moved a little into the issue of the cost of poverty. We knew some time ago that governments fighting poverty is not an issue of charity; it's an issue of justice. More and more we can see that it's also an issue of investments, as Tim talked about.

Canadians are quite proud of the social infrastructure of Canada, but it's not as robust as it could be. On early learning and child care, we were in last place in the OECD nations. On employment insurance, this is not a recession-tested system. In fact, the United States has now raced ahead of us in the way they deal with unemployment benefits.

Our medical system has holes, particularly in Nova Scotia, where home care and care for those who need ongoing assistance--whether it's episodic, consistent, or chronic--is a problem.

On the cost of poverty, I don't think it's a question of whether we can afford to address poverty; it's a question of whether we can afford not to address poverty. So it's both a social issue and an economic issue.

I think Tim mentioned stimulus. The most effective stimulus, if the purpose is to put money into the economy so it has a rebound effect, is to put it into people who need help. If Halifax is going to build a new convention centre with the stimulus money they get, we'll just be moving skilled trades people from one job to another. We won't be putting money into the hands of people who could learn and do better through the process. It's the same with employment insurance.

I wonder if anybody has a specific thought on a really effective way to use stimulus money to invest in people.

[Patti Melanson]

There are a couple of examples across the country where money has been put toward social enterprise or creating workplace opportunities for people who haven't had much experience in the last little while. So if you take someone who's had a lot of chaos in their lives and previous trauma that has led them to being homeless, their initiation back into the workplace needs to be guided and gentle, in some ways. There needs to be a realization that their present life circumstances aren't the same as mine, because if I apply for a job at a construction company, I have a place to live, a phone, and food to eat.

If we are looking at using stimulus money to provide opportunities for those who are in a chaotic place, we need to create the work environment that supports the chaotic place so they can transition from chaos to organization and structure in their own lives. Once they're there, that support isn't needed. But there is a way to tag-team stimulus money and supports to people who need a gradual introduction back into the workplace.

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

Good point.

[Timothy Crooks]

One of the things I think we'd be being very remiss if we did not touch on before our time is up is just the absence of appropriate housing stock in Canada. I think in some ways it could or should be stimulus-tied. When we were at our peak in the eighties, we were developing 25,000 units, or thereabouts, of supportive housing stock through a national housing strategy and in connection with CMHC on an annual basis. In the early nineties that program was truncated, as I'm sure you're all aware, and by 2002 we were down to fewer than 5,000 new units a year, and we've yet to recover from that in any substantive way.

Part of this issue is that in the absence of affordable, appropriate, well-placed housing stock in a mixed market—not in some of the ways in which we've done housing in the past—and in the absence of a national housing strategy, we're going to continue to have these discussions around tables like this and we're going to continue to struggle about what our steps forward are. And we see it play out, especially when we talk about women who are single parents and have children they're doing everything in their power to care for. A housing-first perspective is essential, I think, in this discussion.

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

Thank you for that. I agree with that.

Am I okay? I didn't hear the buzzer.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

You can finish off.

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

I was just going to say that another area I want to mention is that Canada, in my view, has fallen behind in how we treat people with disabilities. The Americans have the Americans With Disabilities Act, and Canadians don't one. I know it's jurisdictional and everything else, but it's really very sad the way people have to combat all kinds of challenges without more government assistance.

Thank you, gentlemen.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mike.

We're now going to move to Mr. Lobb for five minutes, please.