Human Resources Committee on March 24th, 2010

[Senator Art Eggleton]

We did look at all sorts of different possibilities. When you come up with 74 recommendations, you're covering a lot of territory. We may not have covered it all exactly the way you might have mentioned, but overall these recommendations will have the effect of lifting people out of poverty. That's our bottom line. That's what we think needs to be done.

We particularly looked at the most vulnerable in our society. We've talked about the disabled. We've talked about the newcomers. There are lone mothers, who represent a very large percentage of the people who have children in poverty. There are the aboriginals. Again, education is very key there.

There are so many different instruments that we've recommended to help lift people out of poverty. Education and training, to me, are vitally important.

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

If I may interrupt, Senator, you said you had some short-, medium-, and long-term things. I wondered if you looked at some of the mechanisms such as the ones I mentioned to see whether they work--because I don't think they work--and to see how those funds could be redirected in the short term to actually become more effective as we develop this national poverty strategy, which is what I think we ultimately need to do.

[Senator Hugh Segal]

If you're asking whether we did a detailed program evaluation around effectiveness for all these programs, we had neither the resources nor the capacity to do so, but it's a very fair question.

I would say that an area where there was a strong conclusion that involves federal and provincial funds was the ineffectiveness of welfare, which is a multi-billion-dollar program--

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Absolutely.

[Senator Hugh Segal]

--that has not enough strength to support, but just enough to entangle, and we think it's quite negative. That, in and of itself, if it were to be reformed appropriately, would produce a lot of funds for other activities, because both the provinces and the feds are implicated in welfare.

Take the universal child benefit, which in part of my political affiliation I support. I think it was a constructive and important step forward. We said that over time it has to become more generous as things progress; to the government's credit, it has moved up slowly, although some would argue not fast enough or robustly enough, but I would be one of those who would say that all those programs have to keep pace as long as we're not prepared to look at the holistic solution, which is a basic income floor.

The problem, if I may say so, with incrementalism, which this report actually calls for and which I support as the vice-chair, is that it gets you into a series of small steps that do not change the fundamental issues on the ground--

[Maria Minna, Liberal, Beaches—East York, ON]

Senator, if I may just--

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

I'm sorry, your time is up.

Go ahead, Mr. Lobb.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thank you.

I saw the recommendations, and the one thing I thought I didn't see in there is something I'm very passionate about. It is financial literacy, fiscal literacy, and the basic general life skills of being able to fix something in your house, such as a pipe or a vehicle.

I don't think this applies to the most vulnerable, but these are the people you're talking about, people who have two jobs, who are working, and who are still struggling to get by. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on those very basic things.

I can tell you that through my constituency office I see, almost on a daily or weekly basis, people who enter into those very aggressive utility contracts or people with massive credit card debts who shouldn't be getting into credit card debt. It's basic life skills, such as which bills to pay first. We have people who pay for groceries and then the utilities get shut off. These are the things I'm talking about. I'm talking about seniors who get into reverse mortgages or lines of credit or students who have purchased vehicles or have taken trips to Cuba with their student loan money. They are basic life skills that somewhere along the line either the parent missed out on or the system missed out on.

I wondered if you saw that in your study and what your thoughts are on it.

[Senator Hugh Segal]

One of the areas where we saw it, of course, was in the abnormally high level of dropouts from poor families. Those kids don't finish high school. They don't get exposed to any kind of opportunity for any formal training on those life skills, which some schools do and some schools don't do. There's not enough of it out there.

I rejoice in the decision of our Minister of Finance to appoint a task force on financial literacy. It involves some leaders in the industry in terms of what public education should be and can be.

My sense is that if there were an instrument we could use to make sure kids stayed in school longer, and if we could then provide the resources through the task force on literacy for schools to do more about those life skills, I think we'd begin to find the solution coming together. It would have some significant impact on people's lives and maybe reduce the number of folks who get themselves into difficulty unnecessarily.

I think the other core issue is that the problems that produce the life skill failure often cluster around the poverty question, so if we can make progress on the poverty question, we are likely to see the other problems diminish a little bit. However, the focus on life skills is fundamental. Part of what happens in many of the not-for-profit organizations,

I am thinking of Sun Youth in Montreal.

and others is that they work on life skills with new immigrants and kids to give them, with other folks who've been through it, some real capacity.

However, we did not deal with it in a detailed way in this report, and it's very constructive that you bring it to our attention.

[Senator Art Eggleton]

There is one recommendation that deals with literacy programs. I referred to adult literacy as being quite important. It's recommendation number 22:

The Committee recommends that the federal government sustain strong financial support for adult and family literacy programs, with a special priority given to groups over-represented among high-school non-completers.

This brings us back to what Senator Segal was just talking about. One thing I want to note is that amongst our promising practices is the one called Pathways to Education, whereby the dropout rate in a place such as Regent Park in Toronto went from 56% down to 10%. That was audited. That's a great victory.

I was very happy that the Minister of Finance put in his budget $20 million for Pathways to Education so that we could do the very kind of thing that we said in another recommendation here should be done; that is that it should be spread to other parts of the country, because it's a promising practice that I think can have applicability right across the country to make a big difference. See the Minister of Finance's budget, on page 73.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

I'll quickly sneak in one final question.

Three things I've seen in our study so far—mental health, basic income level, and housing—are all wrapped together in one. What are your thoughts on Dr. Kirby's commission. Where do you see his commission addressing those three issues?

[Senator Art Eggleton]

I'm very pleased that you mention Michael Kirby, because he was my predecessor as chair of this committee, and it was this committee—I was very pleased to be a member of it, although briefly at the time—that produced the Out of the Shadows at Last report. One of its recommendations was the Mental Health Commission and the kind of work they're doing now. They're doing a lot of good work in terms of the homeless population. About 30% of the homeless population have mental difficulties and addictions and a combination of both. They're doing some excellent work in that regard, and it's a product of our committee. We are working closely with them. In fact, the Mental Health Association of Canada was one of the first to come out and endorse our report.

[The Chair, Conservative, Candice Bergen]

Thank you.

Mr. Martin, please.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you very much.

I want to talk for a couple of minutes about the paper you've suggested, the green paper, and get some clarification. You suggest “by 31 December 2010” for a green paper that would include costs and benefits, which I think would be critical to any movement forward.

Were you suggesting that the paper be launched by December 31, or that it be complete by December 31?

[Senator Hugh Segal]

Don't forget that this came out in December of last year. Our hope would be that the government would do a green paper that doesn't say, this is the path we're choosing, but merely says, here are some options that emerge from analysis of best practices, things that have failed, what other countries are doing on this issue. The Bolsa Familia in Brazil, for example, is, as you know, a huge step ahead for maternal health, something our government is very committed to. Lay that all out in a way such that we can all have an informed discussion, with the numbers that our colleagues would like to see with respect to cost—which I think makes very good sense—and the numbers with respect to investment and the numbers with respect to how the cost of not doing anything is eating away at our fiscal and tax base.

Then we could all, notwithstanding our political affiliation or in which house we serve, have a frank discussion. We could invite the premiers into that process. Provinces could look at the numbers and make their own conclusions about their own direction. What Ottawa would be doing, in that context, is contributing a huge, updated fact base, because the other side of Confederation is that sometimes our national statistics about poverty aren't as precise or clear as those of our European friends, because different provinces and the federal government keep them in different ways.

It's important that we get the facts on the ground so that we can move forward in an enlightened way. I would think that if that emerged by next December—we could all make lists, and you'll probably have before you as witnesses people who are the experts who could help put that together very quickly, and there are superb people in the department as well—then we could have a full consultation with the country, with Parliament, with the premiers. First ministers could take their own decisions, and you'd begin to get some collaborative movement, which I think is necessary if we're going to move ahead in a coherent way and make the eradication of poverty a national priority.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I guess it would be helpful, then, if we added our voice to that call. I'm suggesting that we might even get a bit of a headstart on it in the work we're doing now. We have the Parliamentary Budget Officer, who does analysis and has capacity, it seems, to do some very good work in terms of costs and cost-benefit projections. I want to suggest to the committee that out of this conversation I might bring forward a motion to ask the Parliamentary Budget Officer to begin to do some of this work for us, so that we might have a start and begin to understand the cost-benefit analysis.

[Senator Hugh Segal]

The only caveat I would offer to the committee for their consideration is that the cost issues are defined by how the program is modelled and designed. For any parliamentary budget officer, even with the best of intentions and expertise, to answer the question, he would probably ask new questions about what your priorities are for how this program might work.

In the case of the green paper, we're talking about a look at the whole gamut of income security programs that exist and an analysis of that. Whether this committee wants to take it to the Parliamentary Budget Officer is beyond my pay scale.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

I guess I'm looking, initially anyway, at a much narrower sort of review of what we spend now and what the cost is of not doing anything.

[Senator Art Eggleton]

We have some studies in here. I mentioned the group of economists—Judith Maxwell, Don Drummond, and others—who put together some costing on poverty. There's no doubt that the budgetary officer could do more. In fact, at one point in time, we talked about engaging him to help us do some costing, but he had other concerns at the time.

[Tony Martin, NDP, Sault Ste. Marie, ON]

Thank you.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

I think you left off, before I finished the last round, talking about the federal-province transfers. If you were to take people off the welfare rolls, it would free up some money for the provinces and you would shift it over to the federal government. But then you hear my colleague from the Bloc saying, “We don't want to have any social transfers reduced to the provinces; we want it going the other way.”

How do you see managing the expectations of the provinces and territories, given what you're proposing—and, I'm assuming, just transferring some dollar responsibilities from one level to the other?

[Senator Hugh Segal]

Let's take a look at a basic income approach. How would it work? If the federal government brought in a basic income, a guaranteed annual income supplement such as we have for seniors, if we just brought it down five years, from 65 to 60, then all those Canadians who filled out the part of a form that had their income at a certain level would get topped up, and they would not be living beneath the poverty line.

Clearly, on a slip-year basis, so as to give the provinces time, when you looked at your transfers, the amount of money transferred for welfare would be reduced. That would give the provinces more money, because they don't have to match, and it would also provide some managing and balancing relief for the feds as to how much they transferred over time, because the matter would be addressed from within their own fiscal system.

We do it now in a host of ways, largely by meeting with the provinces on a regular basis and working out a new formula. We're operating under one formula now with respect to health care, and I assume the provinces and Ottawa will have to start meeting relatively soon to discuss what the formula going forward should be. This could be the sort of thing that is introduced into that discussion, if there were some political will to do so.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

It sounds like a fairly comprehensive thing. You're taking it beyond just that. You're talking about a sort of guaranteed income across the line for everyone in Canada, are you not?

[Senator Hugh Segal]

That's right, but let me be clear: I don't have a bias about how we get there. If we get there by taking the 65-year-old number, reducing it to 64, and then 63, and then 62 in affordable bites, I'm not troubled by that.

[Ed Komarnicki, Conservative, Souris—Moose Mountain, SK]

You're saying going progressively is an option.