Human Resources Committee on June 2nd, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our study on the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada, we'll continue today with meeting number 38.

I want to take a second to thank our witnesses for being out today. We appreciate your taking time out of your busy schedules for a meeting at eight o'clock in the morning and coming downtown here. I don't know where you guys are coming from. I was only coming from a few floors up, and I can assure you it was a little bit of work so it must have been a little more work for you guys.

You are probably already aware that we started in Halifax, Moncton, and Montreal. We're in Toronto for yesterday and today, and then we're heading out west in the fall. As I said, we're looking for ideas and suggestions of things that are working in the community or possible things that we can recommend to the government in order to deal with this issue. I can assure you we have heard from lots of people so far. These two days have been very busy, but very productive in terms of being able to get some feedback.

I want to thank Mr. Hughes again for last night. I wasn't able to make it because of previous commitments, but I know your organization is doing fantastic work. You and I have been working together on a number of things. Once again, thank you for opening up your place of work for the committee to see some of the great things that you guys are doing.

What we're going to do, Mr. Langille, is start with you, sir. We will work our way across. If our other witnesses show up momentarily, we will certainly add them at the end, but we're going to try to be flexible. We're going to give you guys five or so minutes to get started. My timer will stop at five minutes. I'm not going to cut you off at five minutes, but do what you can do to try to operate within that timeframe. Then we'll go around and do some questions and answers back and forth across the table.

David, welcome, sir. You're with the Ontario Coalition for Social Justice and you're the co-chair. The floor is yours, sir. We'll give you five minutes.

[David Langille, Co-chair, Ontario Coalition for Social Justice (OCSJ)]

Thank you.

Good morning. I thank all of you for this opportunity. I have not brought another shopping list of policy preferences, you may be pleased to hear.

The Ontario Coalition for Social Justice brings together provincial organizations, unions, and community groups to promote social and economic justice in Ontario.

As you're probably aware, the Ontario economy is being rocked by a global recession on top of years of global restructuring. Many people in the province are coping with layoffs, part-time work, and temp agencies and are finding themselves working longer for less. The middle class is shrinking as jobs are being exported, downsized, and contracted out. The wealthy get wealthier. More and more people fear that they're just a couple of paycheques away from eviction and hunger, as poverty moves from the margins into the mainstream.

It's a sad but true fact that the people of Ontario need the federal government to help us cope with the current economic crisis. That's not just because our manufacturing and forestry sectors are being hard hit. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the federal government had to assume new responsibilities for social relief when municipal and provincial governments were unable to cope.

As a case in point, the poverty reduction strategy announced by the Ontario government was largely dependent on spending by the federal government. The centrepiece of the strategy is a promise to increase the Ontario child benefit over the next two years, contingent on federal government support.

According to Professor Dennis Raphael, the author of Poverty and Policy in Canada: Implications for Health and Quality of Life, there are four key factors that determine the incidence of poverty: the level of minimum wages, the level of social assistance benefits, regulations that facilitate workers being able to organize and obtain collective agreements, and the availability of affordable child care.

Professor Raphael points out that the McGuinty government has not made it easier for low-wage workers to organize and has not raised the minimum wages from social assistance levels or provided the affordable child care we need. So not only is the Ontario government's poverty reduction strategy dependent on money from the federal government, but it states that it cannot meet its goals without a growing economy, when help is actually needed now more than ever.

Poverty is measured in relative terms. It's really about how income is shared among people. It doesn't require an economic miracle or a rich economy to share more equitably. People who are adrift in a lifeboat can share what little they have, but that would require the well-to-do getting relatively less so that others might get enough. As our economy continues to crash, I think this lifeboat analogy seems more and more appropriate.

That's why your work is so important. We're counting on you to lend your support to the calls for the reform of the employment insurance system and the overhaul of the Canada Pension Plan. We need the federal government to help all those people who are losing their jobs during this recession, people who have paid their insurance fees on the expectation they'd be insured if they were laid off. Imagine if a private insurance firm took their fees and failed to deliver. There'd be a scandal and heads would roll. The same expectations apply. During an economic downturn, we expect more of our government, not less.

Previous governments have met the challenge in times such as these, here and elsewhere. This is a rich country. We have spent billions to sustain the financial sector and the auto industry. People in poverty deserve as much or more attention. It's not enough to set targets and timelines or to offer more spin than substance. We need the federal government to help people move from poverty to economic security.

I just want to take a second to warn you about what I think is a policy pitfall. Everyone is calling for a comprehensive approach and reminding us that there's no one solution, but I fear that the desire to be inclusive of all possibilities is blinding us to the reality that some approaches achieve better results than others.

I think Hugh Segal made a wonderful point out at the Calgary social forum when he said that there's a belief out there that poverty has a thousand different causes, and we have a tendency to invest a little bit in reducing each cause, with very little net impact. This dissipation of effort occurs for a variety of reasons, which I've identified here but won't read. The bottom line is that even though I've worked for years and years in community development, I would not recommend a community-based approach to poverty reduction.

There are a few stories of successfully reducing poverty using such a place-based approach, perhaps, but such successes are few and far between. They're dependent on the leadership of a few outstanding individuals, a few socially conscious corporations, and supportive municipal governments. Such successes cannot be expected in all communities or even most communities. They do not offer a stable or sustainable model that can be counted on to continue when a few charismatic leaders lose their energy or resolve. A community-based approach didn't manage to reduce poverty during the Great Depression of the thirties. In fact, the federal government had to step in when the municipalities, local churches, and charities across the country found themselves overwhelmed and incapable of handling the relief effort.

But enough of being negative. Let's take a look at what does work. The Nordic countries offer the least poverty, the lowest inequality, the best health and social indicators, and the most productive and prosperous economies in the world. Sweden has strong communities, and they rely on their municipalities to deliver the most comprehensive social services imaginable, but they do not rely on them to finance these services. Local communities cannot guarantee that everyone enjoys high wages and high employment rates. Only strong central governments have the power to stand up to the large corporations and ensure social justice for the citizens.

The Ontario Coalition for Social Justice is a proud sponsor of a forthcoming documentary, Poor No More, in which Mary Walsh takes some ordinary Canadians to Europe to see how they reduce poverty. The film poses this question: if they reduce poverty, why don't we? Allow me, as executive producer of the film, to share a few of the insights I've gained from a recent trip to Ireland and Sweden.

We were prescient to focus on the working poor, given that the best single indicator of the number of people living in poverty in a nation is the number of people earning low wages. Or put the other way, nations that tolerate a high percentage of low-paid workers are more likely to have high poverty rates. Here in Canada the group with the highest risk of poverty is the single people of working age, with over 30% being in poverty. In fact, 25% of Canada's workforce are employed in low-paying jobs, one of the highest percentages of low-paying jobs of all the advanced economies. That works out to nearly five million people. One of the most startling quotes in the film was to hear the former Minister of Social Services in Sweden testify that they have no working poor in Sweden.

I probably don't have the time to recount the essence of the Swedish model, the essence of the Irish model, and what I saw there.

Do I have another minute, or less?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Less.

[David Langille]

In briefest summary, here are some of the lessons we learned.

Taxes are critical to reducing poverty. The Swedes we met were all supportive of paying high taxes, because they receive so many benefits for their investments. On the other hand, the head of the Irish federation of students was the first in his family to enjoy a free university education, but now he is struggling to prevent the government from reimposing tuition fees as the country copes with the lack of revenues due to low taxation rates.

The final points I want to make are that unions help reduce poverty, partnerships depend on the power of relationships involved, and politics matters, as I probably don't have to remind you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, David.

We're now going to move over to Mr. Hughes of Pathways to Education Canada.

David, once again welcome, and thanks again for last night.

[David Hughes, President and Chief Executive Officer, Pathways to Education Canada]

Thanks very much, members of Parliament and committee members, for this opportunity to speak with you today. And thank you for addressing this very real and pressing issue of poverty in this country.

I am speaking with you about a very exciting program, Pathways to Education, that is tackling both the root causes of, and one of the worst symptoms connected with, not equipping our youth for meaningful employment and post-secondary school education.

The crisis we have in this country, as it relates to dropouts, is clearly indicated by what we know. Studies show that dropouts tend to experience higher rates of poverty and thus draw most on social assistance. Dropouts tend to be unemployed or earn lower wages and thus pay little or no tax. Dropouts tend to commit more crime and threaten the safety of our neighbourhoods, thus putting greater strains on our justice system. And dropouts tend to have a higher incidence of illness, drug use, and teenage pregnancy, thus putting greater strains on our health care system.

Pathways to Education is closing the achievement gap between the haves and the have-nots by lowering the high-school dropout rate of at-risk youth and by preparing them for post-secondary education and meaningful employment. By investing in our most vulnerable youth and the communities they come from, we are reducing the harmful effects of poverty. And we are preparing better students, employees, and citizens for the future. This will be the best return on investment any community or government can make, and the result will be a healthier, more prosperous, and more competitive nation.

The Pathways solution is based on four pillars that, collectively, wrap students in support. They are deemed critical to helping students complete their education, make the transition into successful careers, and become contributing members of society.

The first pillar is a tutoring program. Volunteers provide after-school tutoring in core academic subjects. Second is mentoring. Volunteers run group mentoring activities to increase social skills, and they assist with career planning for our youth. Third is counselling. Staff provide one-on-one support to help students succeed in school, at home, and in the community. And fourth is the various financing options. Financial supports help reduce the barriers to school completion and provide short-term and long-term incentives.

Pathways partners with local agencies in high-need communities and helps them build the knowledge and capacity required to run the program. Pathways enters into a contract with the students, the parents, and the schools to establish clear goals and expectations and to promote shared responsibility for student and community success.

The results of the Pathways program are really quite extraordinary. The Pathways program has been instrumental in decreasing dropout rates in Toronto's Regent Park community from its pre-program rate of 56% to less than 10% today. The program has enrolled 92% of all eligible students in the community, and it has seen 80% of its graduates go on to post-secondary education, quadrupling the pre-Pathways rate of 20%.

Pathways graduates going on to post-secondary school are staying in school at a rate four times greater than the national average. Think of that. These students, who at one time weren't expected to make it through high school--and all the costs to society of that--are now, in fact, going on at a rate four times what it was before. And they are staying in school. Another interesting statistic is that their retention rate in the post-secondary school system is far greater than the national average.

So the payoff from this program is measured in its social return on investment.

In 2006 the Boston Consulting Group reviewed the Pathways to Education program and found that for every dollar invested in Pathways, society gains a $25 return on investment. This return on investment is based on conservative calculations, taking into consideration increased tax revenues and decreased social costs expended on health care, unemployment insurance, and the criminal justice system.

There's a problem in this country. If we look at Ontario, we have a dropout rate of 23% on average, and in Quebec it's 30%. We're working in communities across this country, and we're in discussions with new communities that want to take on the Pathways program, where we're seeing dropout rates as high as 60% and 70%. In one community that we're in discussions with right now, they have a dropout rate of 78%.

What is the cost to those individuals? What is the harm done to those individuals who are either pushed out or drop out of the school system? More importantly, what is the cost to their communities?

The Pathways to Education model was based on the notion of community succession, on the notion that our most vulnerable communities, those suffering the highest levels of poverty, are communities in which we do not have leadership right now. We do not have the education within those communities to develop the future leaders, the future professionals, the future educators in those communities.

Thanks to programs such as Pathways to Education, we are now starting to see a new generation of students, a new generation of youth, who are not only going to see higher incomes and a reversal of fortunes in their communities; they also are going to help their entire families, their siblings and their parents, integrate into Canada.

What we know about our students is that at our initial site, in Regent Park, 7.9% of them identify themselves as Canadian, with the balance identifying themselves with other cultures around the world. Similarly, if we take the results from our other sites throughout Ontario and Quebec, we see that the number is only marginally different, with only 11% of our students identifying themselves as Canadian. Their families, facing barriers as they relate to language, cultural integration, or otherwise, are not engaging in Canadian society the way they could, the way they should, and the way they will have to if they are going to reverse their fortunes and the fortunes of our country.

We strongly believe that only by investing in programs like Pathways to Education, programs that are community-based and that recognize the community risk factors associated with poverty, will we truly see a kind of reversal in fortunes and create a healthier, safer, and more prosperous nation.

I'm looking forward to your questions and our discussion afterwards.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thanks, David.

We're now going to move on to Adam Spence from the Ontario Association of Food Banks.

Adam, welcome. The floor is yours for five minutes, please.

[Adam Spence, Executive Director, Ontario Association of Food Banks (OAFB)]

Thank you.

Good morning. On behalf of the Ontario Association of Food Banks and our 120 members, thank you for the opportunity to speak today. The necessity of your work and the need for your leadership is as important now as it has been in at least a generation.

We are faced with the devastating effects of the economic downturn on the front line. The demand for our services is rising sharply. Since last spring, the number of Ontarians turning to food banks has spiked by over 20%. We already serve over 320,000 Ontarians every month. Unfortunately, poverty in Ontario is almost certain to grow both deeper and more widespread until robust and sustained recovery takes hold. If unemployment and poverty rates follow the same trends as in previous recessions, as many as an additional half million Ontarians will be living in poverty in the next two years.

In the past, we had better mechanisms to support our neighbours in times of economic crisis. Unfortunately, vital programs such as employment insurance will not protect the vast number of Ontarians who are forced out of work. In the last recession, two-thirds of all Ontarians qualified for EI; this time around, only 32% qualify for supports. As a result, tens of thousands have been forced to turn to more tenuous means of support, from charity to social assistance.

It is fundamentally unjust that so many Ontarians go without food and that many more will join their ranks in the near future. There is not only a moral imperative for reducing poverty; there is also a powerful economic case for action.

Poverty has a staggering price tag. As a function of increased remedial costs of health care and criminal justice, intergenerational costs, and lost productivity, the combined public and private cost of poverty in Canada ranges between $72.5 billion and $86.1 billion every year. The combined loss of provincial and federal tax revenues is $25 billion. Accordingly, investments in poverty reduction measures generate a significant rate of return.

Direct income transfers to low-income Ontarians and Canadians is a wise investment, because they're more likely to spend their money and spend it on local Canadian goods and services. For example, the relative impact on GDP of direct transfer payments to low-income Canadians is 35% greater than a transfer to the wealthiest Ontarians. Similarly, investments in the construction and repair of public housing, child care, and early intervention programs such as Pathways generate significant economic returns.

There is a very powerful case for poverty reduction; therefore, we believe it is time for the federal government to develop and implement a national poverty reduction strategy with a bold target for reducing poverty. We believe it should be our universal goal to cut poverty in half by 2020, with a focus on reducing the deepest poverty. This universal goal would be measured according to the low-income measure, also known as the LIM.

In addition, the federal government should establish supportive goals aligning sectors, including housing, education, financial inclusion, employment and enterprise, energy, and health, as well as supportive goals aligned to place and population, including neighbourhoods and communities, new Canadians, single parents, first nations, Ontarians with disabilities, and children. These supportive goals could be modelled on the UN millennium development goals and measured according to income, social inclusion, and deprivation.

Furthermore, this national strategy should focus on robust and improved universal programs affecting all persons living in poverty, through income supports, public housing, and child care. This represents a horizontal approach, targeting the breadth of poverty. Income support reforms should include adequacy increases to federal child benefits and the working income tax benefit, the development of a national system of disability income supports, and a more equitable and accessible system of employment insurance.

Beyond these basic building blocks, you should also consider a number of innovative solutions as a vertical strategy to target poverty where it is deepest, including public housing bonds, opportunity zones, and community food centres.

Modelled on programs in the U.S., the federal government should give public housing providers financial supports to issue bonds to obtain the necessary upfront capital for new building projects. The government should also agree to finance interest that would accrue on these bonds to finance them over the long term. The housing provider would then issue the bond for the public housing market and pay back the principal through the sale of units or rental income obtained over the bond period. This would significantly reduce the public cost of housing and speed up construction.

In addition, this strategy should also include investments in opportunity zones for struggling communities with high rates of poverty and unemployment, modelled after the renewal community and empowerment zone model in the United States. The federal government could offer enterprises the needs-selected opportunity zones, with wage credits for hiring new employees as well as capital deductions for the purchase of equipment or construction of buildings.

Finally, this strategy should include investments in the development of community food centres for remote reserve communities to help preserve local culture, provide hunger relief, increase the affordability of healthy non-traditional foods, and promote food enterprise export development. We're currently supporting the development of a similar model in Sandy Lake First Nation.

This community has the third highest rate of diabetes in the world, alarmingly high food prices, terrible rates of poverty and unemployment, and among the harshest housing conditions in the country. However, this community's resilience, its knowledge, its leadership, and bountiful supply of local food provide both potential and hope for a better future.

We believe we have a very strong case and a number of bright ideas to help reduce poverty in Canada. It is now a matter of marshalling the necessary political will to act.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Adam.

We're now going to move over to Debbie Douglas and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. I want to welcome Debbie and Edna. I know we missed you at the start.

The timer is set for five minutes. I'm not going to cut you right off at five minutes, but it just gives you an indication of your time in terms of your speaking notes.

Debbie, welcome. The floor is yours.

[Debbie Douglas, Executive Director, Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants (OCASI)]

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.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Ms. Douglas.

We're now going to move over to the Peel Poverty Action Group, with Edna Toth.

Welcome, Edna.

[Edna Toth, Chair, Peel Poverty Action Group (PPAG)]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

The floor is yours for five minutes, please.

[Edna Toth]

The Peel Poverty Action Group is composed chiefly of people who are cash poor. We're already at the bottom of the barrel, so we have no fear from the economic recession. We can't get into any worse shape, except for a large number of people cramming into the same barrel.

What the Peel region needs and asks you for is a fair share of employment insurance, a fair share of a national housing program, a fair share of a national child care program, and a fair share of health funding. Many of these things already exist: we want a bigger piece of that pie, because we are a growing area and the efforts that have been made have not been matched to population.

In regard to employment insurance, Peel lost 77,000 jobs between March 2008 and March of this year. About one-quarter of these jobs were in manufacturing, with construction and trades next in line. The local employment insurance office gets up to 800 applicants a day, and it plans to open on evenings and Saturdays to cope with these applications. About 700 auto assembly workers in Peel will soon exhaust their benefits and are expected to go on social assistance. Yet unemployed people in Peel and the GTA/905 area get $4,630 less in EI benefits than the average jobless person elsewhere in Canada; and nearly 80% of Peel people don't have the hours to qualify for EI anyway, which particularly affects women and those starting out in part-time work.

The Peel Poverty Action Group asks the government to increase EI payments to the level received by the unemployed elsewhere in Canada and to revise the qualification periods.

A national housing program could reduce Peel region's affordable housing problem. We have 13,500 families on the waiting list, and they may wait 20 years for homes they can afford. This is the longest list and the longest wait of any municipality, I think, in Canada—and certainly in Ontario. Meantime, homeless shelters take in families with children, who face changes of schools along with the disruption of frequent moves, while their parents have to move away from employment, friends, family, and support groups.

Peel has shovel-ready plans—whatever that means—for 441 units, if the federal government will release the cash.

The Peel Poverty Action Group asks the government to formulate a national housing program to provide affordable homes now. You might also consider reinvesting the money CMHC receives in mortgage repayments.

A national day care program would go far to reduce child poverty and safeguard our children against the ill effects of the current economic downturn. Quebec offers $7 a day child care—and I'm sure you've heard a lot about this—and claims it has cut child poverty in half since it began doing so in 1997, which was also a period of recession. In Peel region, a families-first program for sole-support mothers has shown that with guaranteed child care, women can increase their income and self-esteem and self-reliance.

The Peel Poverty Action Group asks the government to implement a national day care program that ensures high-quality child care at an affordable fee.

Peel does not receive the health care funding it needs. People living in poverty—167,000 of Peel's 1.2 million residents—are statistically more likely to get sick. Health care funding does not yet take population into account, and does not take poverty into account at all. Per capita funding will be phased in over the next six years, but we need that money now.

Mental health is a huge problem, affecting many homeless people and thousands of others who are either chronically or occasionally affected. Not providing the funding that Peel needs means more trouble down the line, as supports are not in place when needed. The result is ever higher costs for health care in an aging population, and ever more law enforcement problems among youth who need mental health supports.

The Peel Poverty Action Group urges the government to speed up the changes to per capita funding, so that local public health and non-profit groups can do their job. Peel does not need more incarceration of at-risk youth.

That's the presentation from the Peel Poverty Action Group.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Very good, and you fell within the five minutes. Thank you very much. You're the only one to do that on this particular panel.

All right, we're going to start with Ms. Minna. You have seven minutes.

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

That's such a short time, but anyway, I'll do my best.

First of all, thank you to all of you for coming here today.

I want to say there's nothing that's been said here that I and many of us around this table don't support. As many of you have said, it's a matter of getting it done.

I think what we've heard, and what most of you would agree with, is EI reform; child care; a minimum wage increase; housing; education and literacy; an increase in the child benefit increases, and social infrastructure, because we need supportive systems in communities; basic income for disabled people; and social economies, as I call them. That's my wish list.

[Debbie Douglas]

Seniors.

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

Seniors are included in the social income support. Yes, I should have said seniors specifically, but yes, for sure. That's what I see.

Mr. Langille, you were saying we can't wait until we get it all perfect and then maybe start. I would simply start with that list in a program, then start measuring as you go, so at least you start providing housing, child care, minimum wages, living wage for people, that kind of thing. That's where I would go.

Now I'm going to go into more specifics. Ms. Douglas, I should tell you I'm a former president of COSTI, so you know I do have an understanding of where you're coming from, and I'll get to that in a moment.

Mr. Hughes, I wanted to ask you this. Your program is high-school based, is that right? Since I have such a short time, a yes or no, if you can. You deal with high school students, not elementary.

[David Hughes]

High school, and also the transition into post-secondary.

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

Okay. Given the problem with elementary schools, and now we're looking at Afrocentric school, and given the fact that this is not going to be the solution because it's a short-term thing by the time it gets going, and in the meantime there are a lot of other kids elsewhere where that's not happening, would your program be something that's translatable to elementary? There's a major problem there. Kids are coming through high school having had problems at that level.

[David Hughes]

We get this question asked to us a lot, about whether or not it could be applied. I think there's no question there are principles from our program that could easily be applied and should be applied at the elementary school level. The reason we have focused on the level that we have is because our data shows that grade 9 and grade 10 are the grades where the greatest proportion of dropouts happen. We also recognize that this is where the greatest temptations or distractions happen in youth that pull them off course.

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

Yes, they all go to grade 9 because it's part of the process.

[David Hughes]

Right. And I think it's partly to do with their stage in life and their age at that point.

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

Going by personal experience with one of my nieces, I'm wondering if even grade 7 or grade 8, as they're making that transition to grade 9.... I don't know how many kids actually drop out of grade 9, so I'm wondering. Anyway--

[David Hughes]

So you know, we are registering students from grade 8. We are making that initial contact already in grade 8 to help them make that transition into grade 9, then prepare them on for the post-secondary part.