Thank you very much again for this opportunity to present to your committee.
I have worked as a street nurse for over 20 years. I'm currently on my sixth year of an economic justice fellowship from the Atkinson Foundation. I've worked primarily on homelessness and the affordable housing crisis from Victoria to St. John's. In addition, I'm executive producer of a series of films about homeless families and children. The first in the series that is completed is called Home Safe Calgary. I would actually like to file it with the committee as part of evidence, in particular because children are speaking in it about their experience.
Miloon Kothari, the United Nations special rapporteur on adequate housing, has pointed out very clearly that while he was in Canada and we had a federal surplus, our record on alleviating homelessness and poverty was pretty inadequate.
Last week, Prime Minister Harper, commenting on North Korea, stated: “It is deeply troubling that a regime routinely unable to provide for its own people should invest so much of its effort and wealth into its weapons programs.”
In 2009, just last month, the Angus Reid poll pointed out that 51% of Canadians believe that the bulk of Canadian troops should be pulled out of Afghanistan before 2011.
There are troublesome signs that the federal government is renewing its campaign to divert more federal spending to an extended mission. I'm here, again, as a street nurse, to say that I find it very troubling. Over the last few years, I have witnessed some sharp and excruciating signs of worsening poverty, and I want to highlight just a few of them for you.
One is the deteriorating housing stock, which, as I am sure you've heard, has left people in water-damaged, poorly heated, mouldy, and bed-bug-infested units. As has been pointed out already in your hearing this afternoon, aboriginal people are disproportionately affected by substandard housing and by homelessness. Poverty now routinely means evictions, hunger, deprivation, and also, as has been pointed out, ill health. Parents depending on food banks, we now hear, have to ration diapers for their infants to three a day. We are also now seeing what I call the forced nightly movement of homeless people from church basement to church basement. The Calgary film actually shows that happening to families with children. Why is that happening? Because the city, up until about two months ago, did not have a family shelter.
So many of our seniors are living and dying in shelters. You may be surprised to learn that we now have palliative care units set up in at least two cities in Canada for people who are homeless. Families from so many walks of life are now housing-unstable, many ending up in a room or shelter. Many cities are now using motel shelters, motel beds on contract. None of these shelters is really able to meet the UN standards for refugee camps.
I want to contrast that with the $100 million a month that we're spending on Afghanistan, the majority of that being on war efforts, and to contrast how that money is being used. I'll just give a couple of my favourite examples. One howitzer cannon could finance child care for 180 children for one year in Quebec. That would be $450,000. The 2008 spending in Afghanistan could fund 3,500 new units of affordable housing here. That would be $1 billion. The spending in Afghanistan by 2011, which will be $18 billion, could actually fund nine years of a national housing program, looking at this core spending prior to 1993. There many other examples in my brief.
The special point I wanted to make today--because I know you will have heard many solutions, and you'll be hearing from Michael Shapcott tomorrow, and also from John Andras, from the Recession Relief Fund Coalition--is that Canadians need and want what I call a peace dividend. A peace dividend is an investment in people and in our social programs. In the meantime, however, this particular recession necessitates program spending that needs to focus on emergency recession relief. That needs to include moneys to expand employment insurance benefits. It needs to include what I call disaster relief, which means emergency relief for food and social assistance programs. It needs to prevent evictions and to expand emergency lifesaving services for food and shelter. With my written presentation, which you'll receive, is a longer document of a speech I gave in Kingston that outlines that contrast.
Thank you.