Evidence of meeting #61 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 40th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was income.
Conservative
Liberal
Liberal
Michael Savage Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
I think what the witnesses in this group have shown us, and we should take this into account--maybe I'd direct this to the researchers--is that Mr. Kube is exactly right. There are some things that can be done right away, there are some things that may be mid-term, and some things that are longer term.
I hope that when we do the report, we would make recommendations for GIS right away, perhaps, or child tax benefit or child tax benefit with UCCB. Maybe it's mid-term with the child care, longer term with some other things, but I think those are good points. They're not combative to each other, they actually work well together. It's just some are more immediate.
Thank you.
President, Head Office, National Pensioners and Senior Citizens Federation
Mr. Chairman, if can just make one more point, I want to make it perfectly clear I'm speaking on behalf of seniors here.
We don't have too many years left. The need is now. It might be necessary to have a broader policy in regard to child care, and so on and so forth, for the overall population, but the need is now and the need is urgent.
I'm still saying that social inclusiveness, health, and many other things.... I'm not saying we should in any way abolish these things, but the health care system isn't perfect. Seniors do need some medication, and so on and so forth, which isn't covered. And they need the money to buy those things.
So what I'm suggesting lies solely in the federal field and it's not necessarily going to be opposed by the provinces or anything else and it helps seniors now.
Associate Professor of Law, University of British Columbia, As an Individual
I was going to say the obvious, about how complex this is, and that there's not a single solution, but I won't.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Okay. Thank you very much, Ms. Young.
Once again to the witnesses, thank you very much for taking time to be here.
With that, we're going to suspend the meeting until we can switch our witnesses.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
We will now continue with more witnesses.
I want to thank all of you for being here today and for taking time out of your schedules to talk to us as we continue work on our poverty study. We've been to the east coast, and now we're glad to come to the west. There's been a lot of great discussion already this morning, and we're looking forward to hearing more.
I will start on my right, with Ms. Stannard.
You may speak for seven minutes, then we'll go across the room. After that, we'll try to have one round of questions from the MPs.
Ms. Stannard.
Laura Stannard Organizer, Citywide Housing Coalition
Thank you very much for inviting us.
I want you to know that Citywide Housing Coalition is a volunteer organization, and unfortunately, with only five days' notice, we were unable to submit a written brief with sources and references. My presentation today is largely anecdotal and assumes that you understand, by now, the circular connection between poverty and homelessness.
We recognize that there are many causes of increased poverty in Canada. Changes to the employment insurance program and the cancellation of the Canada assistance plan, to name two, have critically reduced incomes among the poorest people in our country. But with only seven minutes, we decided to focus our presentation on one aspect of a federal plan to reduce poverty: the federal government's role in providing affordable housing.
While you're staying in Vancouver, we hope you will have time to see the real Vancouver, the Vancouver that the 2010 Olympics cannot avoid, where thousands of people sleep nightly on our streets, not only in the downtown east side but in every neighbourhood in every part of the city and in every surrounding municipality.
The top two causes of Vancouver's explosion of homelessness are the rise of the condominium industry and the end of a permanent national social housing construction program. The greater profit of building condominiums not only ended new rental housing construction, it caused the demolition or conversion of thousands of units of existing rental housing, particularly rooming houses and residential hotels, the last housing for the poorest people.
In 1992 and 1993, at the height of the condominium construction boom in Vancouver, two successive federal governments ended our national social housing construction programs. Today, it's clear that those decisions did not save us money but instead resulted in the eventual spending of billions of tax dollars on homelessness, which is, of course, the consequence of an inadequate supply of affordable housing.
It is estimated that 80% of Vancouver's homeless people suffer from mental illness. Many people blame the policy of deinstitutionalization and demand that Riverview, which was our regional psychiatric institution, be fully reopened. However, while 80% of homeless people may well be mentally ill, very few have ever spent time in Riverview. Because the stress of homelessness triggers mental illness in many people, we are actually creating mental illness with our social policies. Not only is homelessness a gateway to mental illness and addiction, but homelessness, or being at risk of being homeless, because your housing is unsafe, unhealthy, impermanent, overcrowded, or unaffordable, or all of those, is a direct cause of a range of costly, long-lasting, societal problems that exacerbate the effects of poverty.
The purpose of a city is to provide a place for people to live and work. The end of permanent federal housing programs profoundly affected our ability to plan our cities and create economically mixed neighbourhoods. Before 1993 we had a social housing construction industry in this city. There were local architects, developers, and contractors whose expertise provided local employment opportunities, and there was a backlog of social housing project proposals. These were real public-private partnerships that created internationally awarded buildings and communities. When the annual proposal calls ended, we lost the experts, the potential projects waiting to be approved, the actual homes and local jobs, and our ability to plan inclusive communities.
Recently Bill C-304, a bill to establish a national housing strategy, passed second reading in the House of Commons. This is an extremely important step in addressing homelessness. While Citywide Housing Coalition fully supports the bill as drafted, we know that a national housing strategy won't solve anything without the concurrent commitment to fund a permanent social housing construction program. Along with the many housing and social service groups across Canada, Citywide Housing Coalition adds our voice to the cries for the 1% solution, which is that 1% of every annual federal budget be allocated to new construction of permanent social housing.
We have a couple of caveats.
First of all, the 1% solution is only a solution if we are not already in crisis.
Our government may argue that they are already spending 1% of the budget on housing. This could be anything from home renovation grants to research. We have learned to choose our words very carefully, which is why we say 1% of the federal budget must be spent annually on the construction of new permanent housing affordable to people with the least income.
Added to the 1% of the budget, there must be additional federal funding to address the immediate crisis of homelessness, the need for supported housing and treatment programs, and in particular, the crisis of homelessness in the aboriginal community. In Vancouver, aboriginal people comprise 2% of the general population but they make up 32% of the homeless population.
Canadian architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert has called social housing the architecture of opportunity. By this she means affordable housing is the base from which a person may begin to prosper and escape poverty.
A national housing strategy and adequate funding of a permanent national social housing construction program will provide both the literal and the metaphorical support beams of any successful plan to reduce poverty in Canada.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much, Ms. Stannard.
We're now going to move to Ms. Hall.
Welcome. I believe you're from St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church and you're a representative of the homelessness and mental health action group.
Thank you for being here, Ms. Hall. The floor is yours for seven minutes.
Dr. Nancy Hall Representative, Homelessness and Mental Health Action Group, St. Andrew's-Wesley United Church
Thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity to speak and to be part of this Canada-wide process. It's important that we do these things.
The homelessness and mental health action group is a group at St. Andrew's, which is a very large church just down the street, at Burrard and Nelson. We decided to take on a role in educating the public, business, and community leaders and governments regarding the issues of homelessness and mental health. To do that, between May of 2007 and the present, we've convened about seven different public forums. We brought people from Portland who've had a very good and effective approach toward ending homelessness in that city. We brought the Calgary Homelessness Foundation, and we actually arranged for them to meet some of the emergent board of directors of the Streetohome Foundation, about which my colleague will speak next.
Most recently, we had a concert in collaboration with First United, and much of our fund-raising also goes toward the mission at Hastings and Main. We raised $22,000 in a community concert. At most of our meetings, we have anywhere between 700 and 1,400, the maximum that the church will hold. I'm saying that we've generated a lot of public interest. We've also presented in the provincial budget consultation process and the City of Vancouver consultations on their social housing plan. So that's the kind of role we take in the community.
Today I'm going to talk quickly about mental illness and give some stats on why people with severe and mental illness experience what people call institutionalized poverty--that is, they can't possibly get out of the current situation they're in because they don't earn enough. They can't earn money, and they don't get enough in social assistance benefits in order to be able to afford to live in a neighbourhood other than the downtown east side core, where most of the homeless and mentally ill people in our city live.
Finally, I want to close by talking about the need for a national housing strategy, which will support to some extent what the Citywide Housing Coalition has said. Broadly speaking, the mental illness overview is that one in five Canadians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime, but 2% experience what we call severe and persistent mental illness. Included in that--you would see this on the streets of Vancouver--would be people with acquired brain injury, with fetal alcohol syndrome, or autism.
We're talking about the needs of a very vulnerable population. As my colleague mentioned, we've closed the institutions and we haven't managed to build the community-based treatment system that's so necessary.
Simon Fraser University research suggests that approximately 6,700 individuals in the Vancouver coastal catchment area--that includes Vancouver, Richmond, North Shore, and up to the Sunshine Coast--have both severe addictions and mental illness and are at risk of homelessness. Sadly, another 3,000 are absolutely homeless and, again, suffering from severe mental illness and possibly concurrent addictions.
The relationship between mental illness and poverty is a bit of a complex relationship and some people say it's an indirect association or a direct association, but my experience is that most people with serious mental illness simply drift into poverty. Again, some will say having a serious mental illness is a form of institutionalized poverty, because.... Well, I'll get to the numbers.
The support for one person under provincial disability benefits is $531 a month plus $375 for housing. But you can see that the average rental for a one-bedroom unit in Vancouver is about $880. Many people spend all of their disability stipend on simply trying to get a roof over their head, if they're not lucky enough to have access to supported housing that is subsidized or a rental subsidy through the treatment system.
I also want to acknowledge, because I've just come from a mental health conference at the Hotel Vancouver, that the federal government has put in $110 million to the Mental Health Commission of Canada. There are five cities involved; Vancouver, Moncton, Winnipeg, Toronto, and Montreal.
I know they are working very hard to demonstrate the importance not only of a roof over one's head, and they are evaluating different treatment models. That is progress, but the point we would make is that in the meantime we have thousands of people in this region who are mentally ill and homeless, and they are getting worse.
Recently we opened a treatment centre in Burnaby called the Burnaby Centre for Mental Health and Addictions. Within a year, that had a wait-list of 600 people. So you have a program that takes in 100 and then you have a wait-list of 600. Many of those people, I would venture to say, would be dead by the time they actually got their file into the program, because they're so vulnerable also with concurrent illnesses, hepatitis, HIV/AIDS, and those sorts of things. The point is there's a serious treatment gap in this area.
My colleague Barbara will talk in more detail, but we estimate that as of March 2008 there were 3,700 people who were homeless in Vancouver. The province has had a really aggressive social housing initiative, but there will be only an additional 1,100 units by the end of this year. We need at least an additional 1,500 units.
Again, this is where if we had a national housing strategy that put a priority on supportive housing...and affordable housing also, because people with mental illness do recover. What we're seeing is that there's no place for them to move to. That means the buildings that are more intensively serviced are bottlenecked.
I don't think I have to talk to you about the factors I suspect have led to this epidemic of homelessness. It's not only the closure of institutions or the changes in unemployment insurance but also family breakdown and so on.
When we in our action group talk about it, our major point is that the presence of this level of poverty in our communities degrades us all. It diminishes us all. I see Canadians as being kind people. We meet the public at our public meetings, and if the public is willing in one evening just out of their pockets to give $22,000 to the shelter at Main and Hastings, we have to keep stepping up and we have to rid ourselves of this particular plague.
The one thing that has become clear to us is, as some research from Simon Fraser University has said, it costs us more to do nothing than to provide supportive housing. In terms of criminal justice costs, policing costs, city sanitation and engineering, all of those cost $55,000 on average per person versus the $28,000 it costs if someone is safely housed in supportive housing.
I also want to remind you about what was recommended in the report of the Senate committee, and I know it's more complicated at the social affairs committee. It was Mike Kirby and Wilbert Keon's report on mental illness, “Out of the Shadows at Last”. In that report, they recommended 57,000 units of additional supportive housing for this population.
While I am very enthusiastic about the homelessness project, as an example in Vancouver, with that federal money, we're now housing on a short-term basis for three years 300 people. I just want to make it clear that the scale of what is required to address this is significant.
Mind you, if you divide 57,000 up across Canada, our share is probably much less. There are some very creative approaches that are being followed in this region, which Barbara will no doubt speak about.
I think we do need a national housing strategy, because it isn't Canadian to be on the street. I just want to emphasize that. I don't know anyone who thinks it's a good idea, and it's costing us more.
I heard you in the earlier session talk about social inclusion. In relation to the national housing strategy, I'd like to say that for people with serious mental illness, just having a roof isn't enough. One of the things, unfortunately, in the existing social housing policy has been to build congregate housing, which is really a form of re-institutionalization on a smaller level. This is not helping with social inclusion.
On the scattered-site models, the CMHA in Ottawa has received support to buy condos through the social housing policy. People will be housed in not more than 10% of the units in any one building. They will contribute from their disability stipends, but they'll also be able to live in a dignified way in the community in an integrated sense. When stigma and discrimination are such huge issues, in new policy going forward we have to avoid creating more ghettos, because that leads to the NIMBY fights and all those sorts of things.
In closing, we would really be thrilled to see this committee support the development of a national housing policy, and particularly to address those needs already identified in the Senate committee report for people with serious mental illnesses.
I think the leverage that the federal government has...recognizing that the provincial government provides health services, is that it's just not enough for a roof. People do need support to be able to maintain their tenancy. This is a challenge for the provincial government. So it's housing plus supports, and that includes mental health care.
Thank you.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you, Ms. Hall.
To Ms. Stannard, if you have a brief that you want to submit to the clerk, he'll make sure it gets out to everybody at a later time. That will ensure that we have it on the record, even though you came here on short notice.
Ms. Grantham, thank you for being here. You're with the Streetohome Foundation.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
We're looking forward to hearing from you. You have seven minutes.
Acting President, Streetohome Foundation
Take it away.
First of all, I want to say thank you.
Second of all, I want to say that the last time I spoke in front of a standing committee, I was quite a few years younger, and I didn't have to wear reading glasses. It's a lot harder; the looking up and looking down thing is a lot harder. I just needed to acknowledge that.
Mostly, I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak with all of you today to talk about the federal role in reducing poverty in this country. I will take my seven minutes to highlight a little bit of the Vancouver context that we have here, the role of the Streetohome Foundation in poverty reduction, and some of the solutions that we seek in terms of the federal government's role in reduction of poverty.
My comments speak today, notwithstanding the name of my organization, to poverty and poverty reduction within the context or through a lens of homelessness, because that is really the role and the mandate of the organization that I represent. I'm going to start with a very simple metaphor. I'm going to start with a metaphor of the weather, because I think it serves as a simple but evocative metaphor for the socio-economic contrast that one sees here.
Whether you've come from the other side of the country to be here today or whether you have not, I don't think it's possible for one to hang out in Vancouver these days without being acutely aware of an impending large international event. Indeed, you will see evidence of that probably within about 30 seconds when you step off a plane at Vancouver Airport and you go to buy Olympic stuff.
About 12 blocks east of here, as all of you know, is probably the zero zone of one of the most socio-economically challenged neighbourhoods in this country. The weather this morning was dark and stormy, and it was raining. Now, for reasons that I cannot even begin to explain but will leave to the mysteries of the weather gods and goddesses, it is sunny.
I think that serves as a very useful metaphor for us in terms of, as I said, the very real socio-economic contrast that we see here, where there are signs of light and optimism but there are also very dark clouds on our horizon.
In terms of the Vancouver context, I'd like to touch on three things. The first is just some of the numbers. The second is to touch on the costs of homelessness, and the third is to briefly touch on the populations that are affected. Both Laura and Nancy have touched on these things so I'm going to make my comments very brief.
I think it's very important for us to understand--again, as both of them have reiterated--that in looking at the issue of our fight against poverty and the linkage between homelessness and poverty, our lack of a national strategy to contain the rapid growth of homelessness has been a failure, at least in part because we don't have a comprehensive strategy to address poverty in this country.
Poverty is the root cause of homelessness. It creates social exclusion by denying people safe, decent affordable housing. Because of the persistence of poverty, particularly through generations, citizens have inadequate income in order to pay for very basic needs, including housing.
Every three years in Vancouver we do the “metro Vancouver homelessness count”, which has come to represent the best-possible widely accepted community measure of homelessness in this region. The measure from 2005 to 2008 showed an increase of 20% in the number of homeless people in this region. Not only are there thousands of people who are homeless in this region, we also know, through both research and anecdotal information, that there are hundreds of people at risk of becoming homeless due to their socio-economic circumstances.
It is not with pride that I say that this province has the highest overall rate of poverty and, more compellingly, the highest childhood rate of poverty in this country. Homelessness continues to be a problem of very compelling proportions in the city of Vancouver and throughout the metro Vancouver region. And because homelessness is a compelling problem, poverty is also a compelling problem.
The costs of homelessness are almost too difficult and complicated for us to measure. What we know is that the cost of not investing in appropriate social housing is seen in the resulting costs, as Nancy said, in health care, social services, and the justice system. As all of you know, I'm sure, housing, like income, is a major determinant of health. People need adequate housing--in some cases with appropriate supports--in order to improve their health and well-being. Yet temporary housing for people who are homeless, whether it's in shelters or in jail or in the hospital, is much more costly than providing them with appropriate permanent housing with appropriate supports.
Nancy has already cited the Simon Fraser University study that was done in 2008, which is rapidly emerging as probably the best, most widely cited piece of comprehensive research that we have. As she said, it costs us approximately $20,000 a year more to provide services to a person living on the street—health care, social services, justice costs—than it would cost to put them in appropriate housing with appropriate supports.
The populations that are affected by homelessness are almost too large and diverse to imagine. Virtually all the population groups here in metropolitan Vancouver comprise our homeless population. These populations that are living in poverty are particularly vulnerable. One of the most vulnerable groups is youth—youth with mental illness or early signs of psychosis, youth that are aging out of foster care. Then, too, there are families, particularly women and children, who are fleeing abuse. Finally, there are adults who are being discharged from hospitals or from correctional facilities.
What are some of the solutions? I want to leave you with five quick points. The first is that in Vancouver, we've been fortunate to follow the lead of other Canadian cities in looking at a comprehensive community response to homelessness. Streetohome was created in 2008 as a partnership between the Vancouver Foundation, which is Canada's largest community foundation, the City of Vancouver, and the Province of British Columbia. We are a community organization working to ensure that all citizens of Vancouver have a safe, decent, affordable place to live. Our goal is to tackle the problem of homelessness here in Vancouver by bringing together community leaders from the private sector, the public sector, and the non-profit sector to find sustainable solutions. This is the first time in Vancouver's history that all sectors of the community are working together towards the common goal of finding lasting solutions to a complex problem. It is a community challenge and it is going to take all of the members of this community to solve it.
We have taken inspiration from other Canadian cities. Hamilton is one example. The Hamilton community's round table on poverty, sponsored by the Hamilton Community Foundation, has been an inspiration to many of us across the country. We, in turn, hope that we can inspire some other cities across the country to mount a similarly comprehensive, collective community response.
The second is money. The federal government needs to step back up to the plate and provide sustained federal funding to social housing in this country. The Mental Health Commission of Canada is a hopeful and progressive sign for many of us, but we need more than that. I'd like to think that at Streetohome we're showing evidence of our good faith in the work of the national mental health commission by financially supporting the work of the mental health commission here in Vancouver.
Our third point is that we need a comprehensive federal housing strategy. I think it bears reiterating that Canada is in urgent need of a comprehensive federal housing strategy to make sure that all of us have a safe, affordable, accessible place to live.
Fourth, we need a comprehensive federal strategy for poverty reduction, which I like to think is the role and mandate of this committee. We are encouraging the federal government to adopt a national poverty reduction strategy with measurable legislated targets and timelines to combat poverty and, more important, to improve and promote social inclusion and social security in this country.
There's also a unique role for the federal government to play in encouraging the provincial governments to adopt poverty reduction plans. We'd love it if you played that role. This way, our province, one of the few in this country that does not yet have a poverty reduction plan, could move to the other side of the house and have a plan in place.
My last point is a little more technical, but I'll leave you by going from the broad to the specific. We need some changes in the federal tax system that would encourage the development of affordable housing. We're long overdue in this country for some changes to the federal tax system that would increase private investment, including philanthropic investment in affordable housing.
There are five examples that I'll give you. The first would be to eliminate capital gains on real estate donations, made to registered charities, for affordable housing. The second would be to eliminate the GST on construction materials associated with the construction of affordable housing. The third would be to permit the deferral of capital gains taxes and recapture of the capital cost allowance on reinvestment in rental housing, which is in scarce supply in this part of the country. The fourth would be to increase the capital cost allowance on rental and affordable housing. And the last would be to permit small landlords to be taxed at the small business corporation rate as an incentive to increase the supply of rental housing.
There is a strong willingness in this part of the country on the part of the private sector and philanthropy to do this, but we need very strong tax measures and incentives to encourage it.
I know I've used up my time. I look forward to hearing of your findings.
Thank you for your time and attention today.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much, Ms. Grantham.
We now turn to our last witness, Rosemary Collins from Wilson Heights United Church.
Welcome, Ms. Collins. You have seven minutes.
Rosemary Collins Community Minister and Community Advocate, Wilson Heights United Church
Thank you very much.
I can't tell you how gratifying it is to be here today and to be invited. It's my absolute pleasure to address all of you. In the, goodness, almost seven years now that I've been working at Wilson Heights as a community advocate and community outreach minister, this is the first time anyone from any level of government has come to me and asked me what it looks like on the ground.
I know you've heard a lot of presentations today, and you've probably been snowed under by statistics. I thought I would instead tell you what it looks like in my office and tell you about the people who come to my office, many of whom are people with disabilities, which I understand is also the mandate of your committee.
Wilson Heights is a small church. We have about a hundred members. We're located on East 41st Avenue in Vancouver, which is in southeast Vancouver. We're about halfway between Victoria Drive and Knight Street.
The community around Wilson Heights is a working-class community, mostly single-family dwellings. A lot of the people who live in that area are either seniors, who are house-rich and cash-poor, or new immigrants, largely from Asia. We also have a growing Latino community.
Our church has basically decided that the role it wants to play in the community is to alleviate poverty, hunger, and loneliness among its neighbours, so I would say that food security and economic security are two very important aspects of our church's outreach programs.
That's basically how we got to our advocacy program. We initially started with a community meal. That was a sit-down meal, where we invited all our neighbours to come in. We got to meet our neighbours. We got to hear about the struggles they were having—this is going back to 1999--and out of those conversations we discovered that what was in their way was a lot more than access to a good hot meal, or being able to manage the food budget a little better by not having to prepare a meal that night. They were running into terrible barriers at the bureaucratic levels, particularly with income assistance and trying to qualify for benefits.
The group I see the most in my office is made up of people with disabilities trying to qualify for provincial disability benefits. Many people in British Columbia who are in need of disability benefits don't qualify for the CPP benefits, often by reason of the actual disability they have. If they have had a mental illness or a head injury, they have a very sketchy work history, if any at all, over the course of their lives. Therefore, they haven't accumulated the income and benefit contributions to qualify for CPP and are reliant on welfare.
Although I understand that welfare is not the purview of the federal government, it is one of the reasons that draws people into poverty, particularly people with disabilities. The maximum rate for a single person on disability welfare in this province is $906, and with $375 of it, they're expected to find housing. That's the maximum shelter allowance for an individual on income assistance.
Many people are coming to my church because they want to qualify for disability and raise their income from $610 a month, the benefit rate for a single person who is considered to be employable.
We also do a lot of food security work, as I mentioned earlier. I want to tell you that this year we've decided as a church to eliminate our Christmas hamper program in favour of using those funds to provide ongoing help to families throughout the year. We think we can better meet the needs of families struggling in poverty if we can provide them aid throughout the year, rather than playing Santa Claus every December.
Before the economic downturn in late 2008, we were responding to 12 requests for food assistance per month, actual bags of groceries that we were giving out. And in a busy month, which is what we call a “five-week-welfare” month--that's a month where your welfare cheque has to last you five weeks instead of four and you don't get any additional benefits to cover that extra week--we would get 20 requests for food. After the economic downturn, a normal month now for us is 20 food requests, and a busy month is over 30. That happened overnight. By January, it was absolutely normal in our church.
We have signed on as a church, as has the presbytery that funds our advocacy program, to the B.C. poverty reduction strategy.
I would also endorse the recommendations from First Call, which I'm sure were presented to you earlier in the day. I believe it's fact sheet nine in their presentation; there are a number of measures to reduce poverty among families. I know that First Call has done a lot of work and probably has presented you with a lot of information in that regard.
Our advocacy program services over 300 people a year. We are two advocates working a total of 32 hours between us. We work out of three different locations, our primary one being Wilson Heights. But I also do four hours a week in Kitsilano, which is a middle-class neighbourhood on the beach here in Vancouver. It's a very nice neighbourhood to live in unless you're homeless. At a lunch program there, I provide advocacy services, largely to men who are homeless. Also, once a month, I'm in Shaughnessy providing advocacy services, largely to people with disabilities and to seniors, at a lunch program there.
The purpose of our advocacy program is to try to expand our services so that we can start going to other centres such as Grace Memorial United Church, which runs a breakfast program every Tuesday morning but cannot afford to hire an advocate.
The reasons why people need advocates have a lot to do with how difficult it is to qualify for benefits. Even just in applying for regular welfare, there is an initial application waiting period of three weeks when you first present yourself to the welfare office in need. It's not unlike the two-week waiting period that is required under employment insurance. During that time, applicants are expected to be looking for work, which of course is what they were doing before they got to the welfare office.
There's also a two-year independence test, which disproportionately affects young people who have not had the opportunity to establish themselves independently, as well as anyone who has a checkered work history. You have to be able to prove to the ministry that prior to applying for income assistance you've actually held a job for two years in your life.
There are exceptions to these rules--I want to emphasize that--but they're not always clearly spelled out to the applicant, so that is often the role the advocates take. The person gets their application rejected and then comes to me, assuming they know I exist, and I explain to them that they qualify for benefits because of this exception or that exception. We then prepare the paperwork for an appeal because it has become a formal appeal. Hopefully we are successful and the client gets benefits.
The most common problem affecting people's disabilities, as I mentioned earlier, is qualifying for the disability welfare if they're not eligible for CPP disability. The application is 23 pages long. It has to be filled out by three different people, one of them being the applicant, as well as their physician and an assessor. I assist the applicants and their physicians with the correct completion of the documents. As well, I help the client find a qualified assessor.
It's standard operating procedure for the Ministry of Housing and Social Development here in British Columbia to deny applications upon them being initially received. We see cases all the time of applications that are absolutely correctly filled out, that are in accordance with and meet all the guidelines set out in the law, with letters from physicians describing in detail how a person is unable to function because of their illness or their physical disability, and they come back with a blanket “no”. That requires an automatic appeal process.
So again, if you don't have an advocate to help you fill out the application correctly in the first place.... Even if you do, it's turned down as a matter of course. If you don't have an advocate to help you with the appeal, then chances are that you're just not going to get the disability benefits at all. The automatic turndowns are a huge waste of money both for the government and in regard to the time and effort of the advocates who are doing unnecessary appeals on disability benefits.
I supplied a list of relevant websites as part of an appendix to the committee. One of the websites I would urge you to look at is that of the British Columbia Public Interest Advocacy Centre. They spearheaded an ombudsman complaint back in 2005, I believe, that is still an open complaint. There were a number of recommendations that the ministry had to follow in order to bring its application and other processes into line with basic guidelines for procedural fairness.
The complaint is still open. There's a possibility that additional complaints from advocates will be coming forward, because we're still seeing difficulties such as this one of the disability benefits being automatically turned down. I wish I had actual applications to show you, because it is really shocking.
We have the lowest minimum wage in the province. It's $8 an hour, not to mention the $6 an hour that is the training wage for new workers. Our welfare rates are well below the poverty line, regardless of which measure you use. For example, for a couple with two children, their welfare rate is less than 60% of the poverty line. And a single parent with one child is receiving approximately 65% of the poverty line on welfare rates. This is poverty that's actually legislated by policy and by law.
Welfare recipients used to be the majority of the occupants of single-room occupancy hotels and rooming houses. They are now being displaced in Vancouver by foreign language students coming in to learn English, and by labourers who are better able to afford the rental rates in these hotels, which are in the range of $400 to $500 a month.
People living in single-room occupancy hotels have little or no access to kitchens or fridges. They must share a washroom with their neighbours, and their buildings are often very poorly managed and maintained. They are often infested with cockroaches, rats, mice, and bedbugs.
Families are faring no better. I'm seeing more and more families who are living in one-bedroom apartments. The children are sleeping in the bedroom and the parents are sleeping in the living room. It's such a precarious housing position because under our residential tenancy law, you can be evicted for being over-housed in such a manner, for having too many occupants in an apartment. But for the people who are earning $8 an hour--even if you have two wage earners at $8 an hour--a one-bedroom apartment in this city is $1,000 a month. Where are you going to find an apartment big enough for you and all your children?
I'd just like to add, on a personal note, that I live in the very last social housing cooperative that was built in this province before all the federal housing money ran out. It's the Lore Krill Housing Co-op. It's situated in Vancouver's downtown east side. We have two buildings, and one of them won a Governor General's award for its architecture. We're providing housing to our members, 80% of whom are subsidized. It's the only way I can afford an apartment in this city without paying 50% or more of my income towards rent. Last week I had a woman in my office who is paying 82% of her $1,000-a-month income for rent for herself and her two children.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Thank you very much, Ms. Collins.
Members, I'm going to cut down the time for questions. We're low on time. We'll have a five-minute round.
We'll start with you, Mr. Savage.
Liberal
Michael Savage Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
Thank you very much.
It's hard to know where to start.
We appreciate very much your impassioned testimony today, and I assure you that it will receive significant attention when we write our report.
It occurs to me that one of the really interesting things about poverty in our country is that Canada is a wealthy country. It's this dichotomy, this juxtaposition, the contrast between the haves and the have-nots. In Canada the average income of the wealthiest 10% of the population has increased twice as much as the income of the poorest 10%. Canada's child poverty rate ranks 13th among 17 peer nations. We rank last among 25 OECD nations on benchmarks for early learning and child care. We don't have a very good reputation with the United Nations because of the way we deal with the most vulnerable in our society. So we're a rich country with a lot of people who aren't doing so well.
We have poverty everywhere in Canada, but then you look at places like Vancouver, where there is great wealth, or Calgary. Tony and Dean and I have been to the drop-in centre in Calgary, one of Canada's richest cities, where there are over 1,000 people every night. We drove last night through the downtown east side, and then you come across a neighbourhood that's extraordinarily better. And it's perhaps all perfectly encapsulated by this contrast between the money that'll be spent on the Olympics versus the needs of people who live here on a full-time basis.
I love Canada. I think it's a great country. We do a lot of things right. But we're a little too proud of ourselves and the way that we look at the people who actually need help, I think. I can't help but think in terms of housing--a number of you have mentioned housing and mental health--when we asked Mike Kirby, who appeared before our committee, what the number one things are that people need from the federal government, the first thing he said was a national housing strategy with specific measures for those who have mental health issues to deal with. The second thing he said was that our social infrastructure is not designed for people with mental health issues--for example, episodic illness and the EI system, things like that.
I wonder if any of you want to comment--not in a piling-on way, but....
Canada is not doing as well as many Canadians think we are, are we?
Organizer, Citywide Housing Coalition
I'd really like to comment.
I was trying to put myself in your shoes when Rosemary was speaking, knowing that she was talking a lot about provincial social policy. That policy started to get really bad in 1996 after the Canada assistance plan ended. That plan put requirements on provinces, particularly for welfare distribution, to meet the basic needs of everyone. I think this is where we took a nosedive. Aside from the cancellation of programs, that act allowed the provinces to do pretty much as they liked.
Liberal
Michael Savage Liberal Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS
You are speaking of the reduction in funding to the provinces through the CHST. There was a corresponding benefit from the provincial point of view—they got less money but they got more control. This was at a time when galloping health care costs were going on. My father was the premier at the time in Nova Scotia, and I'm sure he would attest that this was important.
A number of people have mentioned Libby Davies' bill on housing, Bill C-304. We are supportive of it, and we're hoping we're going to get it through committee. It was going to what is called clause-by-clause, which is the final stage in the committee process. But Libby pulled it back because there were some flaws in it, particularly concerning persons with disabilities. We intend to bring it back to the committee, and I hope it can do something.
Private members' bills can be passed by the House of Commons and become the law of the land, but it doesn't mean anything unless the government actually embraces it. Last year, Bill C-293, the overseas development assistance bill, was going to make alleviating poverty the purpose of international development assistance. That passed and it is the law of the land, but it hasn't made a lot of difference yet.
Anyway, we are hopeful that we'll be dealing with that next week. Maybe we can do something to make a difference. Libby is a strong advocate and probably knows all of you very well. We'll do what we can to make that bill a reality.
Thank you.
NDP
Tony Martin NDP Sault Ste. Marie, ON
Libby wanted to be here today, but she had to be back in Ottawa because there is some stuff happening. In her role as House leader, she needs to be there to manage things. She can't do it all.
I appreciate all of the input that we've heard today. It has been enlightening and encouraging and informative.
I don't think there is anybody around this table who doesn't believe there is poverty in the country and that we need to do something about it. I also think we probably all believe that the federal government has a leadership role to play. It's just a question of what that role should be and how complicated it can get. In my own head, I'm trying to simplify it. I don't want it to become so complicated that they will just tell us to forget it, they have too many other things to deal with, and that all this should be dealt with another day.
I want to ask for your response. As I look at it, there are at least three areas in which the federal government could show leadership. One is income security. We do that for seniors through the Canada Pension Plan, OAS, and GIS, and there are lots of other income security matters over which the federal government has control. The second would be housing. We have done that before, and we're able to do it. The third is a bit more complicated. It is the whole question of social inclusion. How do you involve people in the communities in which they live and give them the dignity they deserve as human beings? I would like to think that, as a federal government, we could get this done for everybody. I heard at least one of you mention poverty reduction. Poverty elimination should be the goal that we adopt. Our challenge is to get the federal government to act on a national anti-poverty strategy.
You mentioned housing. What else is there?
