Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to be here this morning and to share our thoughts about poverty and Canada's income security system.
I'd like to begin by commending the government for their renewed commitments to poverty reduction and for initiating this program review.
As the Government of Canada's discussion paper “Towards a Poverty Reduction Strategy” notes, poverty is a very complex and multidimensional issue. I want to begin by stating that, at the Canadian Poverty Institute, we share that view, and we understand poverty to be a condition of compromised economic, social, and spiritual well-being. By economic poverty, we mean lack of access to income and resources. By social poverty, we mean lack of connection to the social supports that we need to thrive. We think of spiritual poverty in terms of lack of meaning or connection to a spiritual tradition that can sustain us.
As this is a social as well as an economic condition, we believe that poverty reduction must focus as much on strengthening our interdependence as it does on building up our individual independence. Consequently, we understand income security to be a fourfold responsibility of the individual, the employer, the community, and the state, and we need to discuss income security within that context. As you all know, trends over the past decades have eroded our capacity on all these fronts. Job quality, as reported by the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, has been eroding for some time, and precarious work has been growing. This puts increased pressure on individuals and the state.
The erosion of benefits, the reduced investments in social infrastructure, and the elimination of national standards have all contributed to a compromised social safety net.
As we have worked with and listened to people living in poverty or vulnerable to poverty, we have heard significant concerns regarding Canada's social safety net. They have told us that programs, services, and supports are increasingly difficult to access, particularly by those who need them the most. Services are fragmented, and they suffer from a lack of coordination. Benefits are largely inadequate. Crucial, life-altering decisions often seem arbitrary, and there is a lack of recourse to appeal. The design and delivery of programs and services compromise the dignity of people as human beings.
In 2013, I had the opportunity to work on the mayor's task force on poverty in Calgary. We held a conversation with some residents of a downtown homeless shelter, and we asked them, “What is the most important issue that you face as a person living in extreme poverty?” Surprisingly, to me, the answer was, unanimously, “a violation of my rights.”
Increasingly, we are coming to understand and acknowledge that poverty does constitute a violation of rights—economic, social, and cultural rights. Canada is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and as such, we bear certain obligations under that covenant. In our recent submission to the UN universal periodic review of Canada's progress on meeting those obligations, the Canadian Poverty Institute, along with a number of other civil society organizations, noted the following: inadequate welfare incomes and punitive welfare regulations, inadequate income support for seniors, inadequate minimum wages and growing employment precarity, rising food insecurity and homelessness, growing health inequalities, persistent gender inequalities, and inequitable access to child care and early childhood education.
In response, the United Nations commission recommended that Canada develop and implement a gender equity policy, strengthen the Employment Equity Act, ensure that minimum wages are raised in all jurisdictions, ensure that social assistance rates are adequate, revise the employment insurance program, and implement a national housing and homelessness strategy. We are pleased to see progress being made on almost all of these fronts. As a national institute with the mandate of addressing and eradicating poverty, we concur with these recommendations, while we also recognize the challenges of making progress in a federal structure like Canada's.
I'd like to propose some principles that we believe may guide a redesign of Canada's income security systems, and then offer some specific recommendations.
It's our position that the following principles should be foundational to Canada's income security programs. In keeping with our understanding of poverty and our international human rights obligations, we believe an effective income security regime must be rights based, based on the international covenant. It must be universal, based on the acknowledgement of our universal human vulnerability. It must be inclusive in its design and implementation, and it must be holistic, respecting the principle of the indivisibility of rights. It must be horizontally integrated, taking a whole-of-government approach. It must be designed to promote human dignity, based on principles of trust. It must also be fair, based on the principles of transparency, accountability, and the right of appeal.
These principles provide some guidance for how we may move forward in rethinking our social safety net. Accordingly, we submit the following approaches to a renewed income security framework. First is reinvesting in critical social infrastructure, such as housing, food security, child care, skills training, and access to health care and prescription medications. Eligibility and benefits under existing income security programs, such as employment insurance, social assistance, and seniors income supports need to be revised to ensure that benefits are sufficient to provide an adequate income.
We believe we need to restore national standards. With the elimination of the Canada assistance plan, the ability to influence the design and delivery of programs across the country was compromised. We believe we need to return to national standards, with some measure of conditionality in programs, such as the Canada social transfer.
We believe we need to work in partnership. While there's a need for national standards and principles, programs, in their design and implementation, must be tailored to local context, working in partnership with other orders of government such as first nations, civil society organizations, the business community, and with people living in poverty.
Last, we believe that we must have an integrated and holistic approach. As we are aware, poverty is complex. It's multi-dimensional, and responses to poverty often tend to be piecemeal as a result, and we end up addressing individual symptoms rather than structural causes.
We believe there are two opportunities that currently present themselves that could be the foundation of such an integrated approach. The first is the ongoing discussion of basic income, which guarantees rights and provides an adequate standard of living in a dignified manner. The other is to ensure a living wage, recognizing that income security is a partnership and a fourfold responsibility, including the responsibility of individuals and employers.
We believe that we can and need to ensure the provision of quality employment that pays a living wage with benefits. This can be accomplished through re-establishing a federal minimum wage, by providing tax incentives to companies paying living wages, and through the procurement power of the federal government and in its role as an employer.