Thank you very much, Chair, and thanks to all of you, members of the committee, for coming here this afternoon and for hearing us.
My name is Julian Daly. I'm the executive director of Boyle Street Community Services. We're an inner-city agency working in Edmonton. We see roughly 8,000 people a year, mostly homeless, all living in poverty, and mainly aboriginal.
Thank you for the opportunity to come here to speak about poverty in our city. I'm left wondering a little bit about how much I can say in seven minutes, but we'll try.
To support your work and to prepare for today, I talked to colleagues at Boyle Street and to our clients. What I'm going to share with you today is the result of those discussions.
A good deal of what I have to say concerns the aboriginal community we serve. About 70% of our clients are aboriginal and we have about 4,000 to 5,000 aboriginal clients every year. I have sought permission from our aboriginal elders, staff members, and clients to speak on their behalf. There is much that we could share, obviously, but in the time we have, we've chosen to share some of the key things that we believe are causing poverty and keeping people in poverty in our community.
The first one is racism. Racism is still very much alive in our culture, particularly towards aboriginal people. How do you become part of the economic mainstream when you're constantly and consistently turned down for employment and housing on the basis of your race?
Aboriginal people are still regularly refused entry to commercial spaces in the city, and when they are allowed in, they are regularly followed by security. I would suggest that we have de facto apartheid operating in our country, under which you are treated significantly differently depending whether you are white or are aboriginal. You would feel ashamed, as MPs of this great country—and it is a great country—if you heard as many stories as I do about the humiliations and exclusions our aboriginal clients face on an almost daily basis.
In our country, apartheid is invisible. Unlike some places such as South Africa, where it was legalized and therefore more easily challenged, it remains very invisible and is much more difficult to address. But address it we must, I believe.
The second area is the profound experience of social exclusion that so many people experience. In our province, there is a common perception that people who are homeless or living in poverty are the authors of their own situation and are simply lazy and feckless. They are constantly viewed with some degree of contempt. This prejudice and the failure to understand the complexity of homelessness and its causes pushes people into poverty, further to the margins, and makes the journey back to the mainstream all the harder.
We need greater public education, discussion, and advocacy concerning the causes of homelessness and of poverty. In this city, we have seen security guards and bylaws used to systematically keep the clients we serve out of many public spaces and most malls. Again, this has happened quietly and without the notice of most citizens.
How can anyone feel part of a society and become economically active in it when they are excluded and feel excluded from the very centres of economic activity because they aren't in the right race or economic bracket? Canada is our land, the land of all of us, and none of us should be excluded from any part of it on the basis of race or economic means.
There's also a major issue with identification. Many people we serve don't have and can't get any form of identification, which means that they are excluded from many services and also from employment. There is a real need for an ID bank, or a system whereby the homeless can obtain identification easily and without too much bureaucracy.
Failure to address the needs of the urban aboriginal population, we believe, is another cause of poverty and is keeping people in poverty. Aboriginal community members who have moved into the city from reserves in search of a better life are immediately marginalized. None of the money or resources available on-reserve is accessible to them.
The systems for their economic support disappear when they reach Edmonton. We now have one of the largest urban aboriginal populations in Canada. There is no initiative currently under way by the federal government to release any of that on-reserve funding to assist them. The money, in some parts at least, needs to flow and follow the individual so as to increase their chances of success in the city.
As well, the housing, education, and health and safety challenges that drive many of our aboriginal clients from reserves into the city need to be addressed, rather than simply displacing those challenges and that poverty.
Another challenge is inadequate mental health and addiction services. Mental health and addictions issues are widespread in poor and homeless communities. Indeed, they're often the cause of homelessness and poverty. There's a tremendous need to provide better services to reduce these challenges.
Addictions, especially, keep people in poverty. A war on drugs isn't the solution. That usually results in more people going to jail, but it doesn't do anything to address the root causes of addictions. Harm reduction works well in the community we serve, but we have seen, sadly, a move away politically from support for this approach.
Mental health challenges keep people in poverty. How do you exercise the skills and the mindset you need to move out of poverty when living with profound mental health problems? Tackling mental health is expensive and it is still culturally taboo, but until we do so, we won't be able to tackle poverty comprehensively.
Another cause of poverty for the people we serve is insufficient benefits. Welfare payments and other benefits are minimal and are barely enough to do more than stop someone from freezing and starving to death. They are not at a level to help people make changes in their lives. They often don't even cover the cost of the most basic form of housing.
Finally, I would see a barrier in that we do not listen to people and understand what poverty means to them. Individually and collectively, we as human beings usually have a solution to our own problems. We need to go to those who are poor and homeless, listen to them, and relinquish our power and authority so that they are empowered and enabled to take control of their lives and tackle the poverty that crushes them.
We also need to have a more complex understanding of the meaning of poverty. It is not simply a material matter. Spiritual and emotional poverty can be just as terrible. Meeting only material and economic needs does not address the whole. Racism, social exclusion, and economic marginalization can often cause excruciating alienation, loneliness, and spiritual poverty, and this needs to be recognized and addressed.
I wish I were able to introduce you to some of the members of the communities we serve. Their stories would be far more eloquent than I am. On Tuesday I was talking to one of our community members, one of our clients. I explained to him—he was an aboriginal man—that I was coming here today. I asked him what poverty meant to him and what he would like to say to you, if he had been invited here today.
This is a little bit of what he said. He said a lot, but I chose some words that I felt were most pertinent to the hearing today.
He said that the high-ups don't care. He said that they say they do, but they don't. They give us a little food and a little benefits, but not enough, he said; they just want to appease us, just to make themselves say, “Yes, we are doing something”. He said that the high-ups should come and talk with them, come and experience and see what poverty is, smell the place, and smell what poverty is like.
How can we understand what poverty means unless we talk to the poor, listen to their stories, and hear their solutions? How can we understand until we have smelt poverty? We cannot address what we do not understand.
The doors of our centre are always open to you. Any of you or all of you would be welcome to visit and have the privilege of meeting our clients and hearing their witness.
Thank you for your time.