Good morning. Thank you.
What I wanted to do was review briefly some of the different kinds of work I've done on the issue of poverty and poverty reduction. I hope to give the committee an idea of what kinds of areas have been addressed, and if they have questions in those areas, I'm happy to try to respond to them.
My background is a bit different in that I've had the opportunity to work at all levels of government, not only in policy analysis but also in the implementation of programs. In the early 1990s, I chaired a process leading to the redesign of the Ontario welfare social assistance system.
Like Mr. Cook, we found, in one of the many background studies we did in which we asked social assistance recipients what their concerns primarily were, that they were concerned about the lack of human rights and the lack of dignity in the program they had to depend on. We tried in the redesign to focus on human rights, on training and education leading to an escape from poverty, and on job placement and job support ideas, which have been put aside, I think, by other governments since.
I also had the opportunity to work for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, where I and a colleague did the background study on social assistance and the role of social assistance in first nations communities. What we found—and I think the results, unfortunately, are still relevant 20 years later—was an extraordinarily high level of dependency on social assistance. There are many communities where social assistance is the primary form of economic support. Even though there was some debate in the 1990s about the numbers, the department, as a result of pressure from the Auditor General of Canada, made some revisions to the data. Nonetheless, the dependency rates in first nations communities remain extraordinarily high, and that remains a significant issue to be addressed.
In the more recent past, I've had the opportunity to do some work on two issues more closely related to your program, as it is outlined in the resolution. The first was on the old age pension. In fact, with some data provided by one of my colleagues on this panel, Richard Shillington, and with some data we prepared ourselves, we found that the previous government's proposal to increase receipt of the old age pension from 65 to 67 years of age would, in fact, have a significant impact on people with low and modest incomes. We then explored a number of alternative ways of finding the same amount of money through, for example, reducing the floor at which the tax back begins or changing the tax-back rate. I can certainly provide a copy of that, which was prepared for “How Ottawa Spends”, an annual produced by Carleton University.
Last, I've had the opportunity to do some work on the issue of principles for the Canada social transfer. Members will probably be aware of the history. Between 1966 and 1996, there was a piece of legislation in place called the Canada assistance plan, which had a series of principles associated with it that were meant to provide standardized contexts for the delivery of social assistance and social services across the country.
When that was superseded by the Canada health and social transfer, and then eventually by two separate transfers, the Canada Health Act, which expressed principles for the health part, remained. However, other than the “no residence” requirement, there were no principles established for the Canada social transfer.
In a piece that I wrote recently, I argued in favour of some basic principles similar to the Canada Health Act for the delivery of social services across the country. I have also been a strong proponent of establishing some basic principles for the social assistance part of the Canada social transfer as well.
That's what I wanted to say this morning. Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here.