Thank you.
Thanks again for the opportunity to share our thoughts with you and have a bit of a dialogue after we present.
I want to start with our thank you for the motion you took to the House of Commons on November 24, that the federal government develop an immediate plan to eliminate poverty in Canada. Having that motion passed in the House of Commons confirms that having a plan is an absolutely essential first step. Hopefully future action will lead to setting some targets and timelines so we can see what kind of progress we're making to achieve that resolution. Thanks for that effort.
Nationally, First Call is part of Campaign 2000. We produce the annual B.C. child poverty report card. Additionally, we're part of the B.C. Poverty Reduction Coalition, which Daryl is representing today.
As a child and youth advocacy coalition we are particularly interested in the immediate and long-term effects that growing up in poverty has on children's development and health. I'm sure you're all familiar—and Daryl has referenced some of it—with the mountains of research evidence attesting to the negative impacts of poverty on children and youth, and that the longer and deeper the poverty the greater the threat to their well-being. This obviously makes poverty reduction an urgent issue for all of us.
We do have some specific recommendations for actions that the federal government can take, many of which you've likely heard before. I'll run through them quickly. They are contributing to a substantial increase in the supply of affordable and subsidized housing, which is not new to you; investing significantly in the creation of a system of accessible, high-quality, affordable child care; ensuring that post-secondary education is accessible to those with lower incomes without having to incur a burdensome load of student debt; creating a unified child benefit that combines the Canada child tax benefit, national child benefit supplement, and universal child care benefit, and increasing it to $5,400 per child, per year; restoring and expanding eligibility for employment insurance and increasing benefit levels so that most workers are protected during a temporary loss of wages and receive a benefit they can live on while they look for new employment; and, last, ensuring direct and indirect, meaning contracted, employees of government are paid a living wage. A simple place to start might be reviewing the wage levels of people who clean federal buildings and offices, even if, and especially if, they are employed by a contractor or through a property management firm. We need to be part of the solution in all aspects of government, and we can show leadership there.
Whatever actions the committee eventually recommends, they should be grounded by having agreement about where we want to go and establishing the parameters that tell us we're getting there.
We agree with Campaign 2000's interim target of a 50% reduction in poverty for all Canadians by 2020. But if we are to be faithful to the resolution just passed by the House of Commons, there must be a target date for achieving the full elimination of poverty in Canada as well.
The Poverty Reduction Coalition in B.C. has proposed a more ambitious decrease for our provincial government, to reach 75% reduction in poverty within ten years. They have two additional measures that a federal plan might do well to adopt. One is eliminating deep poverty in two years' time, so ensuring that no one falls below 25%. That level could be negotiated, but let's look at eliminating deep poverty, making sure that people don't fall a certain percentage below the poverty line in a shorter timeframe. The second is making sure that reductions in poverty rates include and have the same benefits for those who are now over-represented in poverty statistics, such as aboriginal people, people with disabilities, single mothers raising children, and recent immigrants. Let's make sure those groups benefit equally as progress is made.
In addition to targets and timelines for reduction in poverty, the plan should also clearly spell out the income thresholds that would guide specific actions—for example, we use the LICO before-tax threshold and ask what minimum hourly wage would be required for a single person working 40 hours a week for a full year to meet that threshold. In Vancouver, that would be $10.80 an hour to bring a single person up to that threshold. Similarly, welfare rates could be set in the LICO after-tax or market-basket measure threshold, taking into account federal tax, child tax benefits, as both thresholds are measures of disposable income.
Speaking of child benefits, the $5,400 recommended by Campaign 2000 is based on the additional income that a lone parent with one child, working full-time, full-year, at $11 an hour would need to reach the poverty line.
So some thought has gone into some of these, and there are some thresholds we can recommend to at least bring people up to a poverty line, if we can agree on one, and we should do so.
We need to move from the almost whimsical way that we seem to set benefit levels and instead use a set of agreed-upon thresholds that will guide government in setting rates. Two of our First Call colleagues have also written about the problems that occur when there are differing thresholds, usually quite low, at which benefits begin to be reduced. They refer to this as the stacking effect. Perhaps you've heard of this. The report “Now You See It, Now You Don't” is available on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives website. It shows how a low-income two-parent family with two kids faced an effective marginal tax rate of over 100% because of the way in which various benefits were clawed back. Those ranged from the child tax benefit to provincial rental supplements or child care subsidies or even the medical services plan's premium assistance that we have here. Those all start to be clawed back, and that interacts with their earned income at a very low rate, and families, as they start to earn, are sometimes actually worse off than they would be if they had stayed on income assistance.
It may well be that the guaranteed income proposed by Senator Hugh Segal could help address some of these stacking effects, but again it will be critical to establish a threshold that would make such a guarantee adequate. I think Elsie Dean spoke to this earlier.
Those are our suggestions for the committee. I want to thank you again for your work on bringing a resolution to the House of Commons, and thank you for inviting us to appear. We look forward to a discussion with you.