Thank you very much.
Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee.
I represent the Manitoba Research Alliance, which is a group of academics and community-based researchers. We received a five-year grant of $1 million from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. This is our second grant to do research in this area. This particular grant is classified as a CURA, which means a community-university research alliance. As a CURA, we are tasked with bringing together the academic expertise of economists, political scientists, social workers, and sociologists with community-based residents and researchers. The idea is to bring together the academy with the community to do research based on that kind of team. Our project is called “Transforming Inner-City and Aboriginal Communities”.
Because most if not all of you are not from Manitoba, I'm going to give you a bit of background as to why transformation is required in these communities. Then I will explain what we have learnt so far from our research. You'll see that a lot of our research backs up things that Brendan just mentioned.
Conditions in Manitoba's multi-ethnic inner city and aboriginal communities are deteriorating, despite years of intensive and creative work. Household poverty in Winnipeg's inner city is more than double the city-wide rate, and Manitoba's aboriginal population is growing at more than three times the non-aboriginal population. These projections are worrisome, given high rates of poverty, unemployment, violence, and illness in aboriginal communities. These are the product of dynamics that are not just economic, but also cultural, social, and political.
Stressed urban centres are also the destination of growing numbers of poor refugees and immigrants, resulting in rising levels of what we call spatially concentrated poverty. If you spend any time in Winnipeg's inner city, that will be very obvious. There are high levels of poverty that are confined in the inner city. As you move out, these pockets of poverty are not seen nearly so much, and particularly once you get out into the suburbs.
The many refugees and immigrants arriving in Manitoba come from different parts of the world, and they are increasingly finding themselves locating in the inner city as well. Some are escaping civil war and environmental destruction; others have seen their lives drastically changed by the forces of globalization. Too often when these people arrive in Canada, the services and jobs they need are not available. I would refer to what Neil Cohen said about the Community Unemployed Help Centre: often the employment insurance benefits they need are not available when they arrive.
Conditions in non-urban aboriginal communities are equally complex. Traditional one-dimensional strategies have little effect in these communities, but effective community development strategies have helped, and they have left a legacy of community-based organizations in many communities and in the inner city.
The situation for aboriginal peoples is particularly significant in Manitoba. Mendelson, who has done a lot of research in this area, has argued that “the increasing importance of the aboriginal workforce to Manitoba...cannot be exaggerated. There is likely no single more critical economic factor for [the prairie] provinces.”
Aboriginal peoples constitute a disproportionately large percentage of the population in impoverished inner-city communities and move frequently between urban and rural communities. In our project we talk a lot about migration and about migrants. This is an obvious reference to the refugees and immigrants who come to Canada, but we also consider aboriginal people to be migrants, because they are constantly moving back and forth between the inner city and their own communities, particularly reserves. The conditions on the reserves are very bad, but when they come to the inner city, a lot of those conditions are not any better.
Non-urban aboriginal communities, including those in the north, experience difficulties of a kind similar to those in inner cities. They have high rates of unemployment and poverty, low levels of income, inadequate housing, and rising rates of crime and violence. The persistent poverty and social exclusion experienced in aboriginal communities is partially the product of the long process of colonization.
Simplistic policies such as forced migration or business development have not worked and will not work in marginalized communities. We support a holistic community economic development approach, or CED, that considers the social, cultural, and political aspects of social exclusion, not just the economic aspect. A CED approach does not impose development from the outside; it promotes development from the inside. CED seeks to meet local needs by hiring, purchasing, producing, and investing locally. In economic terms, it creates local linkages and minimizes the amount of money and resources that leak out of the community.
Winnipeg's inner city has many community-based organizations that are well positioned to help implement a CED strategy, but these organizations are poorly and inconsistently funded. We believe that the solutions to the communities' problems come from these community-based organizations, but they will not be implemented without substantial help from the three levels of government. We warn that results are not going to appear overnight, and probably not even in one generation.
Because CED considers more than the economic issues, it affords communities the time and resources they need to recover from the ravages of addictions, neglect, violence, and cultural upheaval, all of which are at the root of social exclusion. An economic business development plan typically is not going to deal with those issues, and so it's not going to work.
We recommend that the federal government consider implementing a comprehensive CED policy such as the Manitoba government's CED lens. This is what Brendan was just referring to. While this provincial policy has not yet been implemented in an effective way, the necessary foundations have been laid that would facilitate moving concepts into action, so it would be a good model to follow. Also of crucial importance is securing funding over the long term so that valuable programs are not cancelled every time government changes hands. A CED approach is an important component of a comprehensive poverty reduction plan such as Brendan was referring to, an idea that will no doubt be discussed at some length in the hearings.
We haven't finished our project yet. We have about 47 projects under way, and some have been finished. As the reports are done we post them on our website. It is an ongoing project. We have about three years left in it. We would encourage committee members and others to use our website as a resource for what we consider to be pretty solid public policy prescriptions to dealing with poverty and marginalization.
Thank you.