Evidence of meeting #23 for Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was seniors.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
The mental health issues are across the board, and we have youth who are just starting to learn that they have mental health issues, and they're couch surfing right now, so they're not part of any study.
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
I know that indeed at municipal levels there are a lot of initiatives going on to actually track and measure this. There is quite some knowledge gained as to how to do that. I could connect you to people who would give you a really direct answer on that one, because I know there are advances being made. But couch surfing will be an issue. It's hard because these are the people we don't find with Stats Canada surveys or in administrative databases.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
That's the problem. Would you be able to forward to the clerk those references and contacts? I think it's important that we look at that.
Associate Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa, As an Individual
Yes.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
I'm going to extend that to anybody else who may want to jump in and give us your thoughts on the whole mental health issue and how it relates to poverty. It's a tough one, isn't it?
Professor Emeritus, School of Social Work, Carleton University, As an Individual
You were asking about measurement. There are a series of studies that have been done municipally across the country. It's possible, using that data, to get a broad picture of the number of people who are homeless. It's clear when you're working at the municipal level that there is a major slice of people who are homeless and are dealing with addictions and mental health issues. That's partly because the services that have been provided at the local level have been inadequate to accommodate the mental health issues they present.
Liberal
Dan Ruimy Liberal Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC
We see a lot of municipalities dealing with this. How do we as a federal government even look at policy if we're not capturing that on a grander scale?
Professor Emeritus, School of Social Work, Carleton University, As an Individual
The federal government has been engaged in a homelessness strategy since the late 1990s. The only way that the federal government could proceed using those funds would be to be more directed in the way those funds are spent, not simply for more shelter but in other directions as well. For example, some of the cities have moved in the direction of housing first. The Mental Health Commission of Canada had an experiment on that and strongly recommended moving more in that direction. That would be one way—using those funds and directing them more to the social services connected to the shelters being built at the local level.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My questions are for Mr. Cook.
When you were the executive director of the Calgary Poverty Reduction Initiative, what were the main lessons you learned regarding developing strategies to reduce poverty?
Director, Canadian Poverty Institute
The major lesson we learned about reducing poverty was what I started with. It is more than just an economic condition. We did start with that economic focus and quickly found that it's as much a social condition as an economic condition. As such, the strategy we need to employ is more than just a matter of increasing income. If it was just a matter of increasing income, there are a lot of policy measures that could be taken. They would solve the economic dimension of poverty, perhaps, but they wouldn't solve the broader context of poverty.
More importantly, I don't believe they would get at preventing poverty. As some of the other panellists have mentioned, people fundamentally exist in community, and when we see community breaking down, it leaves us vulnerable to poverty. Poverty reduction from our perspective—and this is one of the key lessons—is as much about strengthening the bonds of community as it is about providing income support. When you do that, you prevent poverty and you tackle income, but it's almost a by-product of a larger strategy.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
Still in the context of your work on Mayor Nenshi's team, what did you observe about the situation of seniors who struggle with poverty in urban areas?
Director, Canadian Poverty Institute
Poverty among seniors. I think our other panellists have spoken about the economic dimension of that poverty. Certainly, many seniors are living in precarious economic circumstances, but to return to my earlier theme, they're in a precarious social condition. Social isolation is both a cause and the result of poverty. When people are isolated without supports around them, they are more likely to fall into poverty. When they're in poverty, they're also more likely to be isolated because they don't have the ability to interact, to access those social supports and resources around them.
People can become much more vulnerable very quickly because of the social isolation they may experience.
Liberal
Yves Robillard Liberal Marc-Aurèle-Fortin, QC
Finally, how can the notion of prevention be included in a poverty reduction strategy?
Director, Canadian Poverty Institute
When we think about preventing poverty, which is what I really think we need to think about much more than remediating it, we have to look at the sources of vulnerability.
Another key learning, I think, we took away from the mayor's task force is that we're all vulnerable. When we're talking about poverty, it's like talking about cancer. There isn't one cancer. There's lung cancer, leukemia, liver cancer. We use one term as a catch-all, but they're very distinct. Poverty is a spectrum of vulnerability.
To address poverty from a prevention standpoint, we need to look at how we are all vulnerable. We looked at four sources of vulnerability. There's a personal vulnerability, which is about me and the assets or needs that I bring. There's also the vulnerability that comes from life stage, as seniors, as children. There's also the vulnerability that comes from disruptive events. No matter how prepared we are, things happen to us. We may lose a job. We may get sick, or a spouse or a child may get sick. There may be a natural disaster.
Then there's systemic vulnerability, those things about our systems that don't work well: asset limits on preventing people from accessing welfare assistance that make you divest your RESP before you can qualify for welfare.
To address poverty from a prevention standpoint, we have to look at all four of those quadrants of vulnerability, and it really needs to be a universal approach, rather than a targeted approach. Targeted approaches, I believe, really focus on remediating poverty for people experiencing it now, but they don't do very much to prevent it in the long term.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
If I might, I will begin with Philip Cross, former economic analyst from Statistics Canada.
Whenever the subject of poverty arises, the question we ask ourselves is what should the government do about it, as though we automatically assume that government is the solution.
At the previous meeting, I looked at the data on inequality in Canada and found that inequality grew most in the province of Ontario over the last 15 years, which might seem surprising to some people, because this is a province where the government has taken an extremely active role, instituting massive so-called stimulative deficits, growing government spending almost without fail faster than the combined rate of inflation and population growth in every year of the last decade, expanding new programs and initiatives, $36 billion in green subsidies to windmills and solar panels, and so on.
One would think that if an expansive government were a solution to inequality in Ontario, you would have seen a decline, but in this province, we've seen the largest increase of any others.
I wonder if Mr. Cross might comment on things that government is doing to cause poverty in the first place, rather than simply solutions it could offer after the harm has been inflicted.
Senior Fellow, Macdonald-Laurier Institute
The specific programs that.... Well, I don't want to get into specific programs. I think the general flavour of the response is that government can have the best of intentions.
Governments cannot legislate prosperity. That leads to mistakes like they have in Alberta, where raising the the minimum.... Everyone wants to get rid of low income, and everyone wants to help poor people, but raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour is unlikely to help. It might even hurt. It could very well be that those people whose minimum wage you want to raise may end up losing their jobs altogether. They can end up being worse off, so I think there's a counsel there for government to be cautious. There are unintended consequences from policies. They may in fact make the situation worse.
I go back to the overall argument, too, that these policies may slow overall growth. I think we've clearly seen that in Ontario. It has been chronically below the national average over the last 10 years. Most of its indicators related to unemployment and incomes have deteriorated. This is going to hurt the very low-income people who I think everybody most wants to help.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
Thank you.
My next question is for you, Dr. Shillington.
In 2004, you advocated a tax prepaid savings plan. Am I wrong in saying that?
As an Individual
I believe that was the issue of the RRSP and GIS clawbacks. Yes, I was in favour of some form of tax prepaid savings plans.
Conservative
Pierre Poilievre Conservative Carleton, ON
Without overburdening us with all the technicalities, how would that differ from tax-free savings accounts?
