Human Resources Committee on Dec. 3rd, 2009

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our study of the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada will commence.

I just want to take a second to thank the witnesses for being here today. Thank you for taking the time out of your schedules to not only offer up some things that you guys are doing on the ground, but also some recommendations for us as a committee to take back to the government. I think you probably know we've been across the country doing this, and some of the other MPs may talk about that. We've been north and west and east and south, so we're just wrapping up what we've been doing over the last year to two years.

Just as a housekeeping note in terms of the devices here, Mr. Lessard will be asking his questions in French, so I'll give you a chance to put on your headsets before that happens.

I'm going to start, John, with you, if you'd like. We'll give you the floor for seven minutes, and then we'll see Bill, and then we'll go around the room and ask some questions.

John, welcome, and the floor is yours, sir.

[John Kolkman, Research and Policy Analysis Coordinator, Edmonton Social Planning Council]

Thank you.

On behalf of the Edmonton Social Planning Council, I am pleased to participate in these hearings. The Edmonton Social Planning Council is an independent, non-profit social research organization that focuses on issues of poverty and low income. Our goal is to build a more healthy, just, and inclusive community. In the past decade, poverty rates have fallen in Alberta because of the strong economy and, in recent years, modest re-investment in social programs. Yet in 2006, at the height of Alberta's recent economic boom, there were still 77,595 Alberta children living in poverty. That's over 1 in 10.

If history is any guide, in the absence of additional investments by federal and provincial governments, it's almost certain that poverty rates will go up in this recession. This increase could be significant—Alberta has seen the number of those unemployed more than double in the past year. Rising unemployment is falling disproportionately on vulnerable groups, including youth, aboriginal people, recent immigrants, and those earning low wages. Seven of Canada's 10 provinces, representing more than two out of three Canadians, are planning or implementing poverty reduction strategies. A multi-sector coalition has been formed in Alberta, which is one of the three provinces that has not yet adopted a strategy. We're urging the Government of Alberta to do so. The federal government should support the development of a national poverty reduction strategy that complements the initiatives under way in the provinces.

How can the federal government most effectively keep the momentum of poverty reduction going while counteracting the effects of the recession? Today I'm going to make a pitch for further investment in the child tax benefit system as an important component of a national poverty reduction strategy. The Canada child tax benefit and the national child benefit supplement already reduce child and family poverty significantly. The Caledon Institute of Social Policy has calculated that existing child tax benefits reduce the number of children living in low income by 38%, more than a third. Child tax benefits are available to all families regardless of the source of income, working poor as well as those on income support. Low-income families receive the maximum benefit, with benefit levels gradually diminishing as family income rises.

This year's federal budget made a modest additional investment in child tax benefits by raising the upper limit on the net family income required to receive the maximum benefit. However, much more could be done as government revenues recover in the coming years.

The Edmonton Social Planning Council proposes that child tax benefits be increased by $400 per child in the next benefit years, starting July 1, 2010. There should be further real increases of $200 per year in the following four benefit years. To help pay for this proposal, the non-refundable child tax credit should be eliminated. It is a poorly targeted program, disproportionately benefiting higher-income families. The $1.5 billion in savings from eliminating the non-refundable credit should instead be invested in the refundable benefit, allowing it to be increased by about $200 annually at no extra cost to government. The ESPC's position is that further increases to child tax benefits should be made to the basic benefits, with indexing of only the NCBS portion in future years. This avoids creating a poverty wall caused by the already steep phase-out of the supplement as family income rises.

We propose that benefit reduction phase-out rates remain the same as those currently existing. Applying the real increases in child tax benefits to the basic benefits will also assist more Canadian families with the cost of raising children, thereby helping to offset the loss of the non-refundable child tax credit.

The universal child care benefit should be retained, in our view, for all Canadian families with children, as it provides extra support to younger families with preschool-aged children. While it is not a child care program as such, it does help younger families pay a portion of their child care costs. Obviously child care costs are an issue with preschool children, so I think there is an argument for retaining the UCCB. It's also worth remembering that the UCCB replaced the supplement for children under seven that existed prior to July 2006. However, the UCCB should be non-taxable, indexed, and better integrated with the overall child tax benefit system.

Unfortunately, I don't believe you have a copy of the table I presented. I'd be happy to answer questions, but I did present a table with an assumed indexing rate of 2.5% and estimated the additional cost of the recommended changes we are proposing to the child tax benefit system. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have in that regard, because it is a little bit hard to kind of explain the numbers in the absence of your having the table in front of you.

One of the things we're proposing is that these benefit increases be phased in over a period of five years, which recognizes the constraints the current economic recession is placing on federal government revenue and expenditure. As the economy recovers, the federal government will have an increasing capacity to make these investments in Canada's children.

Previous research has documented the vital role child tax benefits play in reducing both the incidence and depth of poverty among Canadian families with children. Based on this research, the Edmonton Social Planning Council estimates its proposal could lift an additional one in five Canadian children out of poverty once it's fully implemented.

In conclusion, the Edmonton Social Planning Council congratulates the HUMA committee for its leadership role in studying the most effective ways to reduce and eventually eliminate poverty in Canada. In terms of reducing child and family poverty, there is no better investment or more effective delivery vehicle than strengthening child tax benefits. Our children are worth it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Mr. Kolkman.

We're going to turn it over to Bill Moore-Kilgannon.

The floor is yours, sir, for seven minutes.

[Bill Moore-Kilgannon, Executive Director, Public Interest Alberta]

I'm grateful. Thank you very much, and welcome to all of you. Je vous souhaite la bienvenue ici en Alberta.

I'm the executive director of Public Interest Alberta. We're a provincial network of many organizations of individuals advocating on a number of key public interest issues. Our mandate is to advocate for better-quality public services, so we've been working with students and faculty associations of all of the universities, colleges, and technical institutes across Alberta. We're working with many seniors' organizations, community groups, and others on issues related to poverty with respect to seniors, post-secondary education, and a number of issues that obviously any comprehensive poverty elimination plan would deal with.

We have just completed seven forums around the province looking at what Alberta can do to establish a comprehensive poverty elimination strategy. In these, we have been working with many groups throughout the province: these forums were hosted by United Ways; we partnered with a number of municipalities; the City of Edmonton was a sponsor of our forum here in Edmonton; and we've connected with front-line community organizations throughout Alberta who have been working for decades on the issues of poverty.

The report we have completed and released on November 24 is called “We Must Do Better: It's Time to Make Alberta Poverty-Free”. We will make it available to you. Obviously again, without the time to have it translated, it's not before you today, but it is available on our website, and we will make it available to you. What we are looking for is that all levels of government work together, and what we heard, particularly from municipalities, is that cities throughout Alberta are deeply concerned about poverty.

The mayor of Medicine Hat came and spoke at our forum to kick it off. He is the former chief of police in Medicine Hat, and he talked passionately about what he saw as a front-line police officer, the interconnection between crime and poverty, and the need to not only reduce poverty but to look at what we can do to prevent poverty in the long term. Everywhere we travelled we heard that community agencies are being stretched to the maximum. They feel as if they are pulling people out of a river but are unable to know why more and more people are coming down the stream, to use the metaphor that I'm sure you've heard.

At a time when the provincial government is looking at cutting $2 billion out of its budget for next year, everyone is deeply concerned about the impact that's going to have on people in poverty. Working closely with the Social Planning Council here, we find the statistics show that at the height of the boom we still had a poverty issue—even in good economic times—because of the high cost of living. People are struggling to be able to pay the rent, feed the kids, and not everyone is rising in their boats.

Today in Alberta, one out of four people who are employed—that's excluding unemployed people—are making less than $15 an hour. Even in the wealthiest province in Canada you see that number—25% of people earning less than $15 an hour. That's not just people like my son, who is 17 years of age and living at home and earning a little extra money. More than 50% of those people are over the age of 24, and two-thirds of the people earning less than $15 an hour are women. We need to take a look at this in terms of a perspective of how that impacts young families or all people as we move forward.

What we also saw was that the economic downturn, of course, impacted much greater on low-wage workers—83,000 people have been laid off in Alberta since last October. The vast majority of those were people earning less than $10 an hour. On the higher end of the scale, we've actually had job increases. For people earning more than $30 or $40 an hour, there have been increases.

This is a time when services are being cut. That means higher transfers of costs of services onto individuals, whether that is increasing tuition rates or access to various services. Certainly, the cost of seniors' services in Alberta is increasing rapidly.

But we are here to talk about solutions today, and as you've undoubtedly heard across the country, there is no one cause of poverty and therefore no one solution to poverty. There's no reason to say we're just going to do one or two things. Ultimately, a comprehensive plan needs to work together so that one thing is not being increased over here and you're losing the benefits on the other side of it.

We see that with education and lifelong learning, where barriers to accessing post-secondary education or lifelong learning opportunities are keeping so many low-wage workers in situations where they can't move forward. So ultimately I hope you'll look at what barriers are preventing people from accessing services and education to change their situations.

I want to talk about early childhood education and care, because all of these things are interrelated. If a young single mom is unable to find quality child care or afford it, she's unable to go back to school to get training. She's trapped in a low-wage job that she may be losing.

Alberta has a very market-based system of child care. Even though, compared to other provinces, we have what appear to be generous subsidies for our child care system, because our market-based system doesn't regulate the prices, the amounts families pay over and above the subsidies available to them actually are far too prohibitive for low-wage workers. The province announced that last year they didn't spend $19.2 million--roughly 10% of their total provincial budget--on child care last year because of under-subscription of subsidies.

I have been talking to the province about the fact that low-wage workers are unable to afford $300 or $400 on top of what they would receive in subsidies, so they're not putting their children into licensed care and are not eligible for subsidies. Any funding that is coming forward to support the development of a quality early childhood education and care system needs to look at making sure that subsidies going in are actually reducing and limiting the amount that families are paying--ideally down to zero for many low-wage families that need that care.

As I'm sure you've heard, access to early childhood education and care is one of the best investments we could be making. But we need to look at the barriers and recognize that the market system we have here, as in many other provinces, is ultimately barring many low-wage people from accessing the care they need in order to get training and education.

The concern is that the current universal child care benefit, as John has pointed out, isn't really building a child care system, just as giving money to drivers wouldn't build roads. Giving money to families is important. I'm not saying you should get rid of that, but ultimately we need to build a quality child care system so that parents actually do have choices at the end of the day.

There are waiting lists of two to three years in this city to access quality child care. Many families do not have the resources to get it, even if they were able to get through the long waiting lists.

In closing, I have one other concern about federal-provincial relations. The federal government has put forward money to all the provinces to create more child care spaces. Initially when that money came forward to the Province of Alberta it was dumped into general revenues and was not given to the Ministry of Children and Youth Services to create more child care spaces. We made a big noise about that in the media here in Alberta, and the following year the $25.9 million that was transferred from the federal government was put into a space creation grant.

My understanding is that money is transferred year over year, based on a per capita percentage. But in the fiscal report on the Ministry of Children and Youth Services for the year that just ended there is no recognition of the federal contribution to the space creation grant in last year's budget for the provincial government.

In a province that is screaming for more quality child care and education and that has long waiting lists, the fact that there is apparently no accountability in terms of the federal dollars that have been transferred to create child care spaces in this province is a shame and needs to be looked at. For any programs that you are putting in place, you need to make sure, if it is a cost sharing or money transferred to the provinces, that money is actually going to go into the programs for which it was designated by the federal government.

With that, thank you very much for hosting this. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much, Bill, for your presentation.

We are now going to move over to Bev Matthiessen, from the Alberta Committee of Citizens with Disabilities.

Bev, welcome. The floor is yours. You have seven minutes for your presentation. After that we will go around to have MPs ask some follow-up questions.

[Bev Matthiessen, Executive Director, Alberta Committee of Citizens with Disabilities]

Thank you very much.

I apologize for the kerfuffle coming in late. I was asked to step in for someone at the last minute.

My name is Bev Matthiessen, and I'm the executive director of a small non-profit organization called the Alberta Committee of Citizens with Disabilities. We are provincial, we're cross-disability, and we're an advocacy group. All of our board members have disabilities and some of our staff members have disabilities. We are the provincial affiliate of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. I am sure you have heard of that group.

Based on Statistics Canada's PALS 2006, people with disabilities make up 16.5% of the adult population, or nearly 4.2 million people. For people with disabilities, the poverty rate is 14.4%, comprising nearly 600,000 people.

The definition of poverty for me, as someone who is working on the front line, is like the phone call I received yesterday from someone who is living on an income support program and can't pay the rent. They don't have enough money from the $1,188 to afford the rent in Calgary, Fort McMurray, and other places, which is $800 and up, leaving them around $300 to buy food, to have any kind of quality of life such as being able to go to a movie or have coffee with a friend, to have transportation to be able to get to work, to a volunteer job, or even to get an education.

Canadians with disabilities are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as other Canadians. The incidence of poverty among aboriginal people with disabilities is even higher. People with disabilities face exclusion from quality education, employment, and from participation in their communities. Compared to men with disabilities, women with disabilities face additional economic disadvantage. Historically women with disabilities have experienced lower rates of participation in the labour force, less access to income support programs, and higher rates of poverty.

Having a disability means, for many people, living in poverty for their whole lifetime, living on an income support program or social assistance that pays at best $14,000 and at worst less than $7,000 a year. Many persons with disabilities look forward to turning 65 so that they can get a better income.

The Government of Canada has committed to bringing forward a federal disability act. Canadians with disabilities will support the proposed act, which hopefully will address disability issues and allocate resources for improving access and inclusion and ensuring a strong enforcement of the act.

My recommendations here today are to make the disability tax credit refundable. At present only those with taxable income receive any benefit from the disability tax credit. Make those eligible for a Canada pension automatically eligible for the disability tax credit. Make the Canada Pension Plan disability benefits non-taxable.

Update the National Building Code of Canada to ensure universal design principles are respected. Develop accessibility regulations for federally regulated modes of transportation, and restructure the Ministerial Advisory Committee on Accessible Transportation. Create a universal design centre that would become a centre of excellence in universal design and become a resource to governments, community, and the private sector.

Re-establish the parliamentary committee on the status of Canadians with disabilities to address the ongoing concerns of Canadians with disabilities and submit to Parliament an annual report on the status of Canadians with disabilities.

Work with band councils to ensure equal access to disability-related supports for first nations people with disabilities living on reserve.

The Government of Canada must create the national socio-economic and political conditions for people with disabilities to empower themselves and to achieve their full potential. Work with the provinces and territories to explore ways of increasing access to and improving the range of available disability supports, and work with the provinces and territories to provide support for the building of safe, affordable, accessible, and supportive housing.

On the call that I received yesterday, there are over 12,000 people in Calgary waiting for subsidized housing. The person I talked to will never get on the list because other people have higher priority.

Enhance disability supports to enable independent living, active citizenship, and full participation.

There is a shared vision for an inclusive and accessible Canada and consensus among the disability community.

An inclusive and accessible Canada is a Canada where Canadians with disabilities have the necessary support to fully access and benefit from all that Canada has to offer, where independent living, principles of choice, consumer control, and autonomy are made real. Canadians would have safe, adequate, accessible housing and would not be relegated to living in institutions and confining places. Canadians with disabilities and their families would have appropriate income, aids and devices, personal supports, medications, and environmental accommodations that make social, economic, cultural, and political citizenship accessible and inclusive to all.

Women with disabilities, aboriginal people with disabilities, persons with disabilities from visible minorities, and those from other marginalized communities would be equally able to access all aspects of and benefit from Canadian society. Canadians with invisible disabilities, chronic illness, episodic disabilities, or environmental sensitivities, or living in rural or remote areas would be equally able to access and benefit from Canadian society. The result would be that the people of Canada would be able to contribute to and benefit from Canadian society in the same way as other Canadians.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you, Ms. Matthiessen.

We're going to start with the Liberals.

Mr. Savage, you have the floor for seven minutes, sir.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you. Those were very good presentations, very helpful to us, and with specific recommendations, which is really what we're looking for.

We've been travelling through this part of the country. We were in Vancouver on Monday, Whitehorse on Tuesday, Yellowknife yesterday, and we're here today. The committee is going to Winnipeg tomorrow. Everybody on the committee is very committed to coming up with something in terms of an anti-poverty strategy.

We get along very well, crammed into tiny planes and meeting rooms, but today I woke up and I was pissed when I read the Globe and Mail. I was so mad when I read this. I hate it when I'm right--and it may not be that often. I've always said that the perfect storm, in a negative sense, for people who are working on the front lines against poverty is that you go into a recession where there are already people who are poor, the government decides to spend massive amounts of money, but it doesn't reach the poor. Then you have to pay for the money that was spent, and what happens?

Here's the headline in the Globe and Mail today: “The price of stimulus: Here come the cuts.” It says “Staffing budgets for public servants will be tightened and grant money for non-profits nationwide is expected to become scarce.”

What is it now? How much stimulus money did the social agencies in Edmonton get?

[Bill Moore-Kilgannon]

Is that a question, sir?

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Yes. I don't mean to sound angry at you.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Bill Moore-Kilgannon]

I don't know if you read the Edmonton Journal this morning, but it says, “Woman fears for safety in budget cut”, and “Group home's weekend closure will put violence-prone men on the street.”

There's a picture there of me back when I used to have a beard.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

No, I didn't see it.

[Bill Moore-Kilgannon]

The provincial government, even though we have significant resources and savings, is choosing to cut many of the agencies that, as you indicate, are very stretched already. Adults with developmental disabilities are taking a $10 million cut this year. Unfortunately, that wasn't announced many months ago. This $10 million cut has to be implemented in the last quarter of this fiscal year, so agencies have been just told in this city yesterday that they're cutting $3 million to all the agencies that serve adults with developmental disabilities. They have to make those cuts now, and they've been told to brace for 10% to 15% cuts for next year.

The staff in this province had been promised a 5% wage increase. These are staff who are already earning incredibly low wages. Usually front-line staff working in group homes can make $12 or $13 an hour, $15 an hour at most. And they were told that they weren't going to get that 5% wage increase this year. They're going to get a 0% increase. There are 18,000 people who work with adults with developmental disabilities in this province. In the last couple of years they've had a 40% staff turnover rate, so the agencies are constantly recruiting staff. The staff are not necessarily able to be well trained, so the quality of service is declining.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Are you suggesting that there wasn't a lot of stimulus money that made its way to those people you refer to?

[Bill Moore-Kilgannon]

None, none whatsoever.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

The people who are working on the front lines, the non-profits, have not been the beneficiaries of the stimulus. Somebody mentioned that in fact it was the low-wage-income people who were losing jobs. In my own area in Nova Scotia, stimulus money would go to move, actually, in some cases, skilled workers from one job to another, but the poor got nothing out of that. So we have this awful situation now where we have to pay for the stimulus.

Also, in the budget, the tax cuts that came into play are permanent. Those measures that allegedly would have helped those who are less well off were temporary—EI extensions and social housing.

I guess you didn't have to be Kreskin to know that the poor were going to come out of this worse off than when they went into it, but I thought there would be some level at some point where people would want to at least look at those who didn't benefit from stimulus, who were on the low level going in, in terms of government support. I can't think of a group any more important than persons with disabilities.

CACL, CCD--these organizations aren't getting lots of public money, and if anybody deserves support in our community.... We know that aboriginal Canadians are hurting, as are single parents, but persons with disabilities in a country like Canada, which doesn't have a Canadians with disabilities act.... We often look at the American social services system as much inferior to our own, but the Americans have an Americans with Disabilities Act.

How are you going to do the work you do?

[Bev Matthiessen]

It's getting harder every day, and I'll tell you a story. Last year in my organization—I've been there 18 years now—we had a profit of $7,900, and I received a phone call asking if that came out of our provincial dollars. Was that $7,900 left over from our provincial dollars? And if so, we would have to give it back.

Just trying to keep a non-profit going.... The fellow I spoke to yesterday on the phone, who had the high rent and was living on $300 for food and so on...after I hung up, I said, “What is going to happen to that person?” And there are just thousands of people like that. I do not know where they're going to end up. They don't have places to live. They don't have adequate food, and they really need help, and we need to help them.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

The government is not doing the job that one would think governments should do in a country like Canada. So you're asked to pick up that slack, and now the meagre budget that social agencies like your own have is going to be slashed. It concerns me. I don't want to go any further than that.

I want to ask a question of John—

[John Kolkman]

I just want to make a comment as well, because I agree with you generally that in terms of both the federal and provincial governments, there's a tendency to cut initiatives that are important to low-income Canadians, low-income Albertans, when governments start to run into deficit problems, and I think this has occurred regardless of the political stripe of the government. Some of the most severe cuts that we saw actually were from the Martin government, when they were trying to balance the books in the early 1990s. So I think it is important to try not to make the same mistakes this time. And you asked—

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

But it's not all tax benefits in 1997 that you refer to. A Caledon report you refer to, which I carry with me as my bible, has indicated that that's making.... What is a measure that this current government has done for people? You mentioned that they invested in the child tax benefit. The lowest income got nothing.

[John Kolkman]

That's true.

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

Absolutely nothing. They were shut out completely. You invest in a benefit for people in low income and you say the lowest of the low get nothing.

[John Kolkman]

Well, that's because of the way it was passed through, because of the increase in the way the benefit is structured. The people who received most of the benefit were people who had incomes at the edge of the first income tax bracket, so you're right. In fact it was something that I was very critical of at the time, that there was no increase to people below $20,000, and most of the increase, which was still needed, went to people more in the $20,000 to $40,000 income category. So you're quite right, and that's the reason why I think the base benefit needs to be adjusted for everyone. But it's because of the way the particular adjustment was done.

I will say, in terms of the federal stimulus dollars, one area where there were some additional dollars provided this year in the federal budget was to affordable housing. I believe the number was $59 million to the Province of Alberta, and the unfortunate thing there was that the provincial government withdrew dollars. They withdrew more than a dollar for every additional federal dollar that was put into additional funding for affordable housing, and in my view that was extremely unfortunate and counterproductive.

The other area where there was some benefit in this year's budget—I didn't address it—was the working income tax benefit, which basically is a wage supplementation initiative for low-wage workers. That benefit was, I think, almost doubled in the recent budget. So the federal government has done some good things, and I just hope—

[Michael Savage, Liberal, Dartmouth—Cole Harbour, NS]

I agree with that, and I mentioned the working income tax benefit. But John, look at the affordable housing. When it was announced, the minister couldn't say quickly enough that this is a one-time thing. Meanwhile, the tax cuts that I get and that all the members of this committee get, in making over $150,000 a year, are permanent. And that's why coming out of this stimulus now.... It's going to be the poor who get hit.

And listen, this is as partisan as I've been all week, but I'm pissed off when I look at the Globe and Mail and I see that the poor in this country are going to have to pay for the stimulus money. This is an absolute sham, and it's a disgrace. It's a disgrace to this nation.