Thank you. I was surprised when I saw that I was one of the last speakers, so it's a good thing I was late.
We support many of the issues that have been raised by my colleagues around the table. I'm actually speaking to a joint submission from the Colour of Poverty Campaign.
OCASI, the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, along with the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic are the founding members of the Colour of Poverty Campaign. So you've heard many of the issues that we are facing as Canadians in terms of poverty, but I will focus on the issues of racialized poverty.
I'm not sure you have my document in front of you, but just to give you a sense of the organizations that have been working on this, I must say that we have had support from the Ontario government as well as foundations like the Atkinson Charitable Foundation to help advance our thinking and research around this.
The Colour of Poverty Campaign is a province-wide initiative. It is made up of individuals and organizations working to build a community-based capacity to address the growing racialization of poverty and the resulting increased levels of social exclusion and marginalization of racialized communities across Ontario.
Often people are surprised that as the executive director of Canada's largest council concerned with immigrants and refugees I tend to spend quite a bit of my time talking about racialized communities. So let me put this up front, that when I talk about racialized communities, I am not only speaking about newcomers. I am also speaking about Canada's black communities, who have been here for seven generations. I am speaking about first nations communities. I am speaking about people of colour who are Canadians and who are part of our nation, as well as new immigrants and refugees.
As a network, we try to work to build concrete strategies, tools, and initiatives to empower those who are poor and those who find themselves living in at-risk communities to become part of the policy debate, to become part of the policy discourse. We believe that we can better develop coherent and effective shared action plans as well as creative coordinated strategies for collaborating with mainstream policy analysts and institutions, such as this committee and anti-poverty and social justice advocacy groups such as the groups of my colleagues around the table, or academic partners. We aim to work together to address and redress the growing structural and systemic ethno-racial inequality across the province.
At OCASI we have over 200 member agencies who work with immigrants and refugees. They include many mainstream organizations as well as ethno-specific organizations. They are service agencies, but they are also social justice and advocacy agencies. OCASI is one of the founding community-related organizations that founded CERIS, which is part of our Metropolis Project, and Canada is certainly a huge player, if not a leader, in our international Metropolis Project, which is concerned with issues of immigration and urbanism.
Listening to my colleague speak made me think of one of the reasons we created the Colour of Poverty. Poverty is not colour-blind. Race and poverty are absolutely linked in Canada. It is well documented that the gap between rich and poor in Ontario is widening. What is much less well understood is that the impact of this growing gulf is being much more profoundly felt by racialized group members: aboriginal or first nations people, communities of colour. There's a particular anti-black racism that exists in Canada. Our national government recognized this in 2001 when we were in Durban. We haven't done anything to address it. It is certainly something we need to pay attention to, particularly as it's happening here in Ontario, but we're also concerned about places like Nova Scotia.
The increasing racialization or colour-coding of all the major social and economic indicators can be gleaned not only from the statistics on income and wealth, but also from any one of a number of different measures, such as inequalities with respect to health status and learning outcomes; higher dropout rates; employment opportunities, such as overrepresentation in low-paying, unstable, and low-status jobs; under-housing and homelessness; the re-emergence of imposed racialized residential enclaves; and the increasing rate of incidents and ethno-racial differentials with respect to targeted policing, as aboriginal men and women of colour are ever more overrepresented in our prisons.
All these are products of the long-standing and growing social and economic exclusion of racialized groups from so-called mainstream society. You probably have heard, and we can quote a number of studies that bear this out: the United Way of Greater Toronto's Poverty by Postal Code; Greater Trouble in Greater Toronto: Child Poverty in the GTA, a study by the Children's Aid Society of Toronto; Ontario's Urban and Suburban Schools - A Prescription for Change, reports from the parent advocacy group People for Education; the 2008 review of the Roots of Youth Violence that was commissioned by the Ontario government and written by the Honourable Alvin Curling and the Honourable Roy McMurtry, which says that racism is becoming more serious and entrenched than it was in the past because Ontario is not dealing with it.
I think that poverty reduction needs to begin by acknowledging that race and poverty are intrinsically linked. I think that given the realities and all the findings of the report, it is imperative that political leaders at all levels of government need to discuss the reduction, if not the elimination, of poverty by referring directly to actions to address and redress the increasingly racialized and otherwise differential character and experience of poverty.
We have a number of recommendations, so let me move to the recommendations because I'm paying attention to my time.
Our first recommendation is that we believe the federal government must acknowledge and address the systemic barriers to inclusion as well as the persistent experience of racial discrimination by adopting a racial equity outcome measure in all its legislation, programs, and public policies. Departments like Citizenship and Immigration Canada have adopted a gender lens and a gender analysis of all immigration policies, and we are asking that all federal departments do that in terms of issues of race.
Our second recommendation is that the federal government must take a leadership role by developing a national poverty reduction strategy targeted to those most racially vulnerable and systemically excluded, that is, time-specific and measurable mechanisms.
During the voluntary sector initiative period of 1999 to whenever it ended, 2002, one of the things we asked was that, at least at the deputy minister level, part of the reporting out and part of their role in every federal department was how they were dealing with issues of race, gender, ability, and age—issues of intersectionality. As the bureaucratic leads, they needed to be measured on these issues, and these issues needed to become part and parcel of what we do as a national government.
Our third recommendation is that, rather than introducing further tax cuts, the federal government should reverse some of the tax cuts that have been implemented to date, so that more federal funding will become available to provide needed services and programs for people living in poverty. We are absolutely concerned about the lack of a national housing strategy. We are absolutely concerned about the lack of a national child care strategy. We're not talking about shared-cost programs, we're talking about the senior levels of government coming up with our taxpayers' money to build housing, to ensure that we have a child care program, given that mostly single women-headed households, but particularly single women of colour, are the ones that tend to be poor, so that they can better participate in our labour market.
We have a number of recommendations. I believe my staff forwarded you our presentation, so you absolutely have it in writing.
I thank you for your time and I look forward to our conversation.