Human Resources Committee on June 1st, 2009

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

You can get it online. It's called gender budgeting, and it was an attempt by the standing committee of the House to address two things. We did one report on women's economic security and then realized we couldn't be successful with that unless we did a proper analysis of gender budgeting in this country in terms of gender analysis and programming. We followed specifically the budget process and whether budgets had proper gender analysis and where they went. For instance, we followed a number of programs that were in the previous few budgets to see where they went in terms of women and how they affected women. Of course the income disparity was very large in Canada, as you have said in your recommendations, and how to break that down and how to change that....

You have recommendations here. Without having seen the reports, in addition to the wage disparity, have you done any gender analysis yourself or evaluation in partnership with other organizations on government programs besides the EI, such as any others like CPP? I'm just wondering if you've done any, if there's already work out there we don't need to be doing.

[Judit Alcalde]

We haven't done any gender analysis of programs. We're still, as I mentioned earlier, beginning our fourth round of interviews, and then we're beginning a phase of beginning to analyse and see where some of the gaps are. We're just seeing clearly in our data and in the stories of women over the last three years how programs are not taking into account the fact that they are single mothers responsible for their children.

The example that always comes to mind is of training programs that are offered through the Ontario Works program. In Ontario, the majority of programs that are open to these women do not take them out of poverty. It's very different in a two-wage family or if you're not responsible for children. When you have children and it's your income and that's it, a program that leads you to a job that pays $10 to $12 an hour, and is quite often precarious work as well, is not going to take you out of poverty. We feel those programs have not taken into account the fact that the majority of people accessing them are women responsible for the care of their children. That's one obvious example that we're seeing over and over again in our data.

As well, we didn't purposefully go looking for women who have left abusive relationships, but over and over again what we're seeing is that a majority of women in poverty are there because they've experienced abuse, and then the supports are not built in over the long run for their working through the issues and getting into training programs. There's no accounting for the fact that they've lived in an abusive relationship for ten years and they don't just get up and go to work the next day. So those are a few of the examples we're seeing. We'll have more. We'll be able to take a look more analytically at the end.

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

It's obvious, from everything we've heard and from everything I know, that a national child care program, housing, education, skills training, and the child benefit increase, at the minimum, are fundamental to giving stability and to helping women--all families, but certainly women--out of poverty.

Have you taken a look at the effectiveness or not of the working income tax benefit and to what extent that's helping at all in this? Not just you, but has anyone else taken a look at that piece, the working income tax benefit, which has just come in recently?

[Yves Savoie]

We've looked at it, obviously, in the context of people with disabilities. Structurally, it's a very good piece of policy innovation. The amounts are very small and they remain very small at this time. We certainly welcomed its introduction, but the real proof in the pudding will be seen in terms of the rate of increase, of the value of the benefit.

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

I have two questions. I have one more for all of you, and then one specifically for the MS Society.

Following that train of thought, we have a child benefit, which is an income support to families with children, and then there's a working income tax benefit. Which would you increase if you were increasing just one, in terms of its best impact? It's not fair, but we need to make choices, right? Let's just say we are increasing one only or enriching one.

[Sarah Blackstock]

It is a really tough call. I think there are a lot of anti-poverty activists who agree with Yves Savoie that the working income tax benefit is a good program. The value of it is quite minimal, I think, for someone working full-time in Ontario.

I would have to say that a national child care program is critical. And certainly when we're talking about child benefits, we have to be talking about child care. We in Ontario have an amazing new Ontario child benefit. It's a good program, and it's a benefit that people on social assistance get to take with them when they leave social assistance. You cannot get and keep a job unless you have access to affordable child care. The Ontario child benefit was set up with the main policy objective to support families in making that transition and getting and staying in decent work. But they cannot do that without child care. So I can't underscore enough the importance of affordable child care.

I think that also starts to get at the gendered and racialized aspects of poverty as well.

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

I will come back with more questions later.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Maurice Vellacott]

Can we have a very short response to this? We're over time. Go ahead.

[John Myles]

The working income tax credit was something I skipped over in my talk.

We know, of course, a lot about these kinds of credits because our neighbour to the south has a much bigger program that has been operating since the 1970s. In the United States, that's been the single most important source of poverty reduction, and it's now their biggest welfare program. That's partially because their other programs are so small.

I consider that to be a good short-term solution to the problem of low wages that I raised. It's a bad long-term solution, because we now know one of the side effects of the EITC in the United States is that it encourages the expansion of low-wage jobs. It's a subsidy to low-wage employers in the same way that it's a subsidy to low-wage workers. So by itself, if that's the only thing we do, it really is a band-aid that doesn't stop the bleeding.

[Josephine Grey]

I would just make a quick point that we seem to continually overlook the fact that women particularly are continually going between employment and unemployment. Very often they are not eligible for EI. So whether it's their child benefit or their working tax benefit or whatever, because some of these things are monthly and some are annual, it's a mess. And for the most part many women on social assistance don't get what they should be getting. Very often they're working in between, but they can't maintain their eligibility properly. So there has to be some coordination between the levels of government on that issue.

Every time I've raised the fact that women work and don't work three or four times within a year, it's never addressed. So that has to be looked at.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Maurice Vellacott]

Christian Ouellet.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Thank you for being with us today. You have raised very interesting issues.

Mr. Savoie, I recently received a letter from one of my constituents who was telling me he had multiple sclerosis and that he only received employment insurance during 15 weeks. I asked him for how long should these benefits be paid to someone who has this illness. It in not easy.

[Yves Savoie]

I should first tell you that multiple sclerosis varies a lot. However, people who have it are generally more tired for a very short period or for a few weeks or even for a few months. These people could be receiving a treatment, for example, or going through an acute phase. They must reduce the number of hours.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

That's not what I was asking. I know the situation: my sister has multiple sclerosis. I want to know how many weeks should these people get.

[Yves Savoie]

They get 15 weeks right now but we are asking double that period, so that these people can receive their employment insurance benefits for half the time and work the other half. The same formula would be used for people who have cancer, for example. They could work in the morning and go for their treatment in the afternoon.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

I agree, thank you.

Mr. Myles, you talked about a national policy administered by each province, as it is done in Europe, if I understood correctly.I find this idea very interesting but I would like to know if in your proposal, all programs should be offered in each province and the provinces would establish their own objectives rather than follow specific policies. Someone has said earlier that there was one nation and that we should get going. Personally, I know of at least two. There is also the Assembly of First Nations. In short, there is more than one nation and Vancouver's problems are not Newfoundland's.

Given the situation, how should the federal government proceed, in your opinion?

[John Myles]

First, let me make an observation. Among the countries of the world, in western Europe and so forth, that have been most successful in this field are countries where the coordination problems are low, are weak, and where there's a high-trust environment. These are built into longstanding institutions that we don't have in this country. In political science, we would be considered a high-conflict, low-trust country in terms of our political institutions. So we have to recognize that our institutions are a problem. They can't be changed overnight.

The weakest form of coordination is, to my mind, the kind I suggested to you in my comments about the open method of coordination. It requires buy-ins, in terms of what we're shooting for. For example, the EU set targets for employment, particularly employment levels for women? They didn't tell the individual countries how they had to get there, but everybody said yes, they were going to make the effort to get there through whatever national institutions they had available.

That requires auditing. In Canada, even the notion of auditing and producing comparable data and evidence across provinces is highly controversial. So it's very hard for us to get those, but sometimes we do. That's why I used that example. We seem to be able to cooperate around certain issues but not others.

The stronger method was the one I mentioned for the CPP, where they not only agreed on a target, but they introduced the forcing mechanism that required them to act if certain conditions weren't met. That's tougher. But in the key areas for poverty reduction, particularly labour market issues, we have no choice.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

I will now go to Ms. Alcade. You talked earlier about some of your recommendations, which I have read. This goes back to what we just said. I think that six of your twelve recommendations deal with provincial jurisdictions.

However, there is one that concerns the federal government, the one about employment insurance. You say employment insurance should be changed. I am in complete agreement on that, especially about the waiting period. In fact, I am the one that presented the bill.

Don't you think that the present employment insurance system is creating poverty and does not help people get out of the poverty circle? A waiting period of 15 days and only 43% are eligible. Employment insurance created poverty because people have no choice but to go on welfare.

[Judit Alcalde]

If unemployment insurance is creating.... I don't feel qualified to respond to that question. Most of the women we interview and most of the women who we know are living in poverty do not have access to employment insurance because they are in a precarious environment. I think part of our recommendation has to do with separating maternity benefits from employment insurance so all women are eligible for that. But I don't feel qualified to answer in terms of our research study.

[Christian Ouellet, Bloc, Brome—Missisquoi, QC]

Ms. Grey, do you think that employment insurance, the way it is now, creates poverty and doesn't help people to do better, as it should?

[Josephine Grey]

Insofar as it's accessible to so very few and has such very difficult administrative rules, I think it does in fact create a great deal of poverty. You can see the huge shift in Ontario. I was very involved with government around social assistance, and the shifts to EI made enormous differences to our caseloads here in Ontario. There is no question that it creates poverty.

The low level of the benefits is another problem. If somebody has been living for 20 years on a certain income and then all of a sudden is expected to survive on 50% of it, that creates a problem in and of itself.

The fact that the government was also able to take the revenue from there, which workers paid in, and then throw it off into the general pot and run off with it, to me represents a theft, and I have to say that Canadians are becoming more and more aware of these things. They're not only seeing that it creates poverty, which indeed it does, but also seeing the fact that we were robbed of those moneys.

Frankly, I think you'll find that on the street people are saying that not only is there this $50 billion and more that they ran off with from the EI fund, which was ours, but there's also some $200 billion that was given to bail out the banks and these kinds of things. This is becoming a big problem. People are noticing now. They're not as asleep as they were. There is a lot of anger, because this is our money and we know this. Frankly, I think a lot of people feel it's not just about poverty reduction; it's about reparations to pay back what has been taken from us over the last 15 years when everybody was, for a while, hoodwinked by this whole idea of deficits or whatever.

To me, this raises the fact that if we have been able to get to a point where our government felt it had the right to do that, we also then have to look more broadly at our economic framework and ask ourselves some questions about what it is we're valuing and what it is we're trying to achieve. I have to say that the only commitment that Canada kept to the World Summit for Social Development was a commitment to examine our national accounting system and how we value things. That was the only commitment. There was some work done, but then it was just scrapped, lost, and forgotten about.

I would say that at this time, when we're all becoming economies in transition because of all the difficulties we are facing now, this is a perfect time to look at those things and ask how we can shift the actual framework, so that we can say when something is going well for the most vulnerable that it's actually a success instead of a loss. Until we have a better accounting system, we're hopeless. We're not going to get anywhere, as far as I'm concerned. EI is a part of that whole picture that says it's a success when we make a profit over here, never mind how many people suffer.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Maurice Vellacott]

Olivia, we'll go to you now for seven minutes.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

Mr. Myles, Josephine Grey talked about the Canada assistance plan, since 1995, being eliminated, and going into block funding, with cuts. You know the sorry history of that. For us to go back to setting national standards, whether it is through the open method you talked about or through CPP negotiations, the social union method, or the Canada health plan--there is any number of methods--are you suggesting that we should do it through poverty reduction targets, audits, or evaluation, or are you saying that we should do it through a Canada housing plan, a Canada child care plan, etc., with a different segment moving ahead or all wrapped into one?

Now, there's a danger with wrapping it all into one. The middle class, even though they are living in poverty, don't think of themselves as being in poverty, and it's much harder to advance it politically even though we Canadians are supposed to care. In the last 20 years, though, my faith in that has been slightly eroded, as you can understand.

What do you think would be a way to move ahead in terms of focusing? Is it to set the targets on poverty, such as 25% in five years and that kind of percentage? We must bear in mind that the majority of the people living in poverty are lone mothers, and that in Canada we are confused about whether lone mothers are really mothers or workers, so as a result they are neither mothers nor workers. They get the worst of both worlds and they have very little political clout as a result.

Where do you think we should move forward on that? That was a long preamble to my question.

[John Myles]

I'd take whatever I can get, but one reason I emphasized employment and wages is that, as far as I'm concerned, employment and wages are the best poverty reduction strategy we have available. Employment issues are clearly an area of overlapping jurisdiction between the federal government and the provinces.

[Olivia Chow, NDP, Trinity—Spadina, ON]

You're talking about minimum wages, for example.