Evidence of meeting #67 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 manitoba.
10:55 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
All right. I'm going to wrap it up.
Tony, do you have one more question?
Go ahead, Gerald. I'm sorry.
10:55 a.m.
As an Individual
I'd like to see a recovery-based national mental health plan with actual teeth, because mental health affects everybody. It affects all cultures and socio-economic groups. We're going to pay the price if we don't start taking care of our people, and it's getting to that point now.
I'm not talking just about severe cases. A lot of the problems are with people who have maybe not severe mental illness, but they're getting there. And I think these people need to be treated.
We need a national plan. We don't need to keep talking about it. We need to have something implemented that helps people with mental illness.
10:55 a.m.
NDP
Tony Martin NDP Sault Ste. Marie, ON
I just wanted to respond again to Martin and ask him a question. Or maybe somebody else has a comment.
I mentioned the failure of the market to list everybody. I mentioned the failure of the private sector to provide affordable housing. I am also very cognizant of the fact that labour market strategies targeted at poverty have not really made a big dent in poverty. And that seems to be where the federal government is falling at the moment, as you suggested.
How do we make that bigger? Do you have any suggestions as to how we get beyond that? I know that's probably a long answer. Are you cognizant of that fact, that this labour market strategy is very limited in its ability to actually deal with poverty and the causes of poverty?
10:55 a.m.
Co-chair, Manitoba Federation of Non-Profit Organizations Inc.
Absolutely. It's a very narrow scope. It is very much limited to how labour market adjustments take place and what the agreements allow for. Within that, there are obviously targeted populations that are identified in a way that's actually trying to address those people living in poverty who need those kinds of skills, and so on.
I don't think, in a sense, that it actually has a very long-term perspective of how to do that and how to build the layers of it. It seems to me that under labour market agreements between the provinces and the federal government, the transfer of the resources is still based on how governments and how the provincial governments actually define that environment and where their priorities are. So they're not tying the LMA directly to a strategy on poverty. It is unscoped and it's not necessarily going to be that useful.
Again, it's a cycle of how LMAs are actually put into place. It's always based on a three-year timeframe based on an environmental scan provided by the province. If it's out of context with the poverty strategy, it will not necessarily address that issue. That's one of the issues. I continue to hear that. It's not connected to the poverty strategy. It's in isolation of that, tied directly to certain communities that are deemed to be important in terms of priority areas, but not identified in terms of a long-term strategy.
10:55 a.m.
Director, Manitoba, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
I'm sorry. This is my area of research, so I thought I would respond.
One of the biggest problems with labour market policy right now is that we are trying to train people really quickly to enter the labour force and to match them with existing jobs. The problem is that you can't train people who have really complicated lives in a really short time. People are coming from all sorts of situations. There are low literacy levels, and you can't expect in six months, or two years, which is the maximum, that people are going to be prepared to get the kinds of jobs they need that will give them economic success. We need to look more broadly and look at providing people with long-term funding so they can move into the workforce and have access to the good jobs that are available. We also need to couple that with demand-sized strategy so that we're creating good jobs, so people have access to the new jobs that come into the market rather than the precarious jobs that are available.
10:55 a.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Dean Allison
Listen, I want to thank all our witnesses once again for being here and taking the time. We really appreciate your input. As I said, as we look at completing this report over the next couple of weeks and months, we look forward to including those recommendations that you have made.
Once again, thank you very much.
With that, the meeting is adjourned.
