Human Resources Committee on Nov. 1st, 2016

[Kendra Milne]

I think the first step, when we're looking at new policies and coming up with a road map for a strategy, is that it has to take into account the different causes of poverty. The causes are complex. It may be education. It's caregiving for many women. It may be disability-related. There may be systemic discrimination against immigrant and racialized people. I don't mean to suggest that it's easy, but I think we need to back up a step and look at what's causing people to be in poverty in the first place.

When we're looking at, for example, changes to EI parental leave, we need to make sure we're looking at changes like those at the federal level through a gendered lens. That consultation is happening absent that discussion despite the fact that 90% of the people who use those leaves are women. We don't look at the long-term effects of, for example, longer leaves and whether they contribute to women staying out of the labour force longer and therefore their long-term economic insecurity. We don't look at those things.

With respect to areas within provincial jurisdiction, I think a key is to use that big national comprehensive human rights lens and gendered lens and then to potentially look at conditional funding to support provinces to comply with human rights obligations and to design programs in a way that meaningfully meets the needs of people in poverty.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

We will now go over to Mr. Warawa.

You have six minutes, sir.

[Mark Warawa, Conservative, Langley—Aldergrove, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses.

I have a question for you, Mr. Lee. I've just been going over the website for Canada Without Poverty—I'm reading a paper and listening at the same time—and it says, “Understanding how systemic causes come together to create barriers demonstrates that poverty cannot just be solved through 'jobs' alone.” Then there's an additional paper written, Dignity for All: A National Anti-Poverty Plan for Canada.

You said that we need to retrain and retrain and retrain. I was just talking to my colleague here, and in my own life, there were times when I myself could have been considered living in poverty. Things were extremely tough in the eighties. People were losing their homes. We lived on wieners and beans and Kraft Dinner as a family. It was very difficult. I had employees, and they got paid and I didn't, because that was my responsibility as an employer.

Those were tough years—I think the interest rates went extremely high, over 20%—but we made it through hard work. As the economy changed, I re-educated and retrained. My credentials were no longer marketable, and I adapted to a change in culture.

We heard from Ms. McLachlan that she has a master's degree, and yet she has identified herself as living in poverty. Could you touch on the importance of retraining and making yourself marketable in a changing culture?

[Dr. Ian Lee]

First, let me just deal with that. I'm dealing with the macro statistics; I'm not dealing with anecdotal data. There are always exceptions. I can find any exception to any statistical norm. So the fact that one person, the famous Ph.D. in English literature, is driving a taxi in Toronto.... I've never met the person, but I'm sure the person exists. But that does not invalidate the idea that post-secondary education is absolutely correlated....There's StatsCan data on this for 50 years.

Every additional year of post-secondary education leads to higher incomes. That's the absolute correlation with post-secondary. Remember, post-secondary is not just university. It's colleges, universities, and trades, for those who think it's a bias towards university education, because I don't have that bias.

The data is crystal clear. So is the American data, by the way. I'm only talking about the U.S. because we share the same continent; we're English-speaking mostly, with the important exception of Quebec. We're both English common-law countries sharing essentially the same climate, the same geography, the same legal system, and the same economic system. Their data is almost identical to ours.

Every additional year of post-secondary education leads to higher incomes and lower percentages of unemployment. That is not a one-year trend. That has been since the end of the Second World War. That's about 75 years. That's the “long run”, to use Keynes' famous phrase.

There's no question about the importance of education. I didn't say it was the only solution or the be-all and the end-all, but it is certainly very important.

Second, to come to your question, I have believed what I told you all of my adult life, obviously. But I think it's becoming more acute today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s because of the enormous transformation that is occurring in western economies, which we all know about. I call it the digitization of the economy.

Every year, I tell my students that I'm preaching to the converted. I teach only fourth year, and they're about to graduate. They're doing the fourth year of their B.Comms. I'm telling them to go and tell their brothers and their sisters and their parents and their cousins that if any of them are pooh-poohing education—because it is fashionable in some quarters to pooh-pooh post-secondary—that my confident statement is that today, if you have a grade 10 or a grade 12 or a grade 8 education, you are going to be poor for the rest of your life.

Of course, there are always exceptions and some person can raise a hand and say, I'm a high school dropout, and look, I became a self-employed multi-millionaire entrepreneur. But they are the exceptions; they are the statistical outliers. We have to look at the data set, which is the aggregate. As I've said, in this new economy that we're moving into, we have to be more educated, not less educated. We have to be focused.

If we want to have a serious conversation about poverty reduction, we have to realize that education has to be right at the centre. I'm using education more broadly than just going to university. I'm talking about college. I think the colleges are doing a phenomenal job, by the way. I think they're doing a better job probably than we are in the universities, I'm ashamed to say. And of course, there are the trades.

We have to be talking about that and we have to reduce the barriers. It's not just the barriers that Mr. Poilievre mentioned. I fully acknowledge them. They've been known for literally 50 to 60 years. They've been discussed in past federal budgets. I'm talking about the barriers that prevent a person who is on welfare, on social assistance, or on unemployment insurance from going back to school.

I would even say that we should be saying to those people, if you're on social assistance or unemployment insurance, we'll make a condition that you go back to school to obtain the social assistance or the unemployment insurance. We should be turning it upside down when we know that this new economy needs people much more skilled than did the economy in 1968 or 1981, when you could get by as a male with a grade 8 education and you'd have quite a nice life. Those days are so gone it's not funny.

We have to put education right at the centre of any discussion about poverty. Everything else is just noise, because it's not going to happen unless we retrain. We are a very sophisticated economy, but there's no room for people who are not well skilled or trained in this new economy. They're going to be permanently unemployed or go through a series of employment, unemployment, and employment at the margins of society.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

We'll go over to Mr. Ruimy, please.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you very much, everybody, for some really great, interesting presentations.

My theme since we started this has been measurability. We've heard about LICO and the LIM. We also heard the suggestion that 85% of Canadians are ready for retirement.

I'm curious to know, Ms. Farha and Ms. Milne, whether you think there are better ways of measuring poverty, because that's really what it comes down to. It could be that there are five million people who are poor in this country by one set of standards. It could mean a lot higher number. It could mean a lot lower number. How do you think we should be measuring poverty?

Ms. Farha, you go first, and then we'll go to Ms. Milne.

[Leilani Farha]

Thank you.

Actually, I don't share your concern, to be perfectly honest. I think the LIM is a decent measure and it's an international measure, so I think it's useful.

I've never been an advocate for a poverty line necessarily. I think we kind of know how we're doing in the country, to be honest, and when the numbers are as high as they are, we know that we have a problem. So I'm a little less concerned.

I think people need to be out there measuring. I'm not discounting that, but that's just not where I would put my emphasis. We have the LIM. I think it's okay and it serves our purposes.

I don't know if Ms. Milne has a different opinion, though. It would be interesting.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Okay.

Ms. Milne.

[Kendra Milne]

In anti-poverty work in B.C., most organizations have switched to using the Market Basket Measure purely because it addresses regional differences in cost of living. That said, I think what I often see happening, having worked in this area for a while, is that we tend to get really bogged down in debating which measure is the right one.

Again, I also agree; I don't suggest that we shouldn't be measuring, but I think doing so can often detract from solutions. It creates this debate that gets away from really working on addressing the causes and coming up with a solution.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you, Ms. Milne. That leads me to my next question.

Coming from B.C., I do know about the single-parent assistance program. I think it's a great program. Is there any feedback that we've been able to get as to how it's working?

Part of the reason I keep coming up with the measurement is because, in order to solve problems, you have to know where you are and then where you're going.

That is a great program, but can you expand on it a bit, please?

[Kendra Milne]

It has only been in existence or in operation for a little over a year now, so I think we're just looking at potentially, probably soon, hearing reports from the social development ministry here about its working. We haven't heard anything yet.

It's interesting that it comes with a sort of basket of reforms to income assistance that are very focused on single-parent families and childhood poverty. They've been very piecemeal in nature and in the way they've unravelled, but there has been a shift from forcing folks on income assistance to exhaust every other measure and to be destitute before they can access those benefits to a lens that is more about allowing families to access supports and other forms of income while still maintaining their welfare benefits as a more effective way to move them out of poverty. So while the single-parent employment initiative program is a very targeted and piecemeal program, the recognition of the underlying causes of those families' poverty is the beginning of the kind of long-term, human-rights-based recognition we're talking about. Programs such as that might be some of the very implementable steps across the country to work towards those long-term, human-rights-based goals.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Farha and then Ms. Milne, if we could make adjustments to delivery of social assistance programs in Canada, what do you think would be the most influential change?

[Leilani Farha]

I think the Canada social transfer should have conditions attached to it. I know conditionality is pooh-poohed and people say it's impossible. I don't agree that it's impossible, and I'm seeing that move in the United States and in other countries as well, where you just simply say, in order to get this money, you need to meet our international human rights standards, which means social assistance rates have to be set at a realistic level.

I think that would be a massive change, actually.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

Ms. Milne.

[Kendra Milne]

I would really agree with that. I think the only other piece I would add to it is that it has to address the feminization of poverty throughout women's lives. It has to come hand in hand with affordable and accessible child care, because we just know that is such a massive obstacle for women.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Okay.

I have only about 30 seconds. Can we speak to any of this towards disabled or indigenous folks?

We haven't really spoken about disabled folks. They are part of that population, so how can we speak to their needs with government programs?

Ms. Farha.

[Leilani Farha]

I think what Ms. Milne is saying about women and the need for a gender lens absolutely applies to all disadvantaged groups, and we can name them and give you the rates of poverty for each group.

People with disabilities are amongst the poorest in the country. Absolutely we need to be examining this from the point of view of persons with disabilities, and presumably you'll be hearing from or you have already heard from one of the organizations representing their interests.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

It's Mr. Zimmer for five minutes, please.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for coming.

I'm going to preface the conversation a bit. I've heard a lot of solutions from the Canada Without Poverty folks, and talking about not necessarily costing more money. I think what needs to be understood is that somebody has to pay the bill at the end of the day for any kind of programs that we have, and often it's the same people you are referring to, who are living in poverty. They are the taxpayers who are hit the most by programs that are changed. An earlier witness suggested doubling CPP. That one initiative alone would cost every person who is paying into it about $6,000 per year. We are talking about $6,000 per individual. If you talk about a household, it's about $13,000 extra per year. This is before-tax money.

I think Ms. McLachlan started by saying that we are a very wealthy nation. We are actually a nation that's $636 billion in debt, which is about $80 million per day and about $17,000 per Canadian. Again, the same Canadians in poverty you are talking about have to pay the bill.

Mr. Lee, you said something that concerns me—that we are in a time of low economic growth. Indeed, in the past, in the eighties—maybe in the late eighties.... I am from a resource sector area, northern B.C. We do oil and gas and forestry. I know we have to have solutions that don't necessarily cost more, but let's talk about efficiency.

From your perspective, Mr. Lee, how would you address a strategy for poverty reduction? Most of these programs that are talked about today are simply going to cost taxpayers a lot of money, and the taxpayer has to pay the bill.

[Dr. Ian Lee]

I'll just preface my answer to that by saying that I think there is a disconnect between what the people appearing before your committee are saying writ large and what the finance minister, Minister Morneau, is going to tell you this afternoon. It's not me—he is going to tell you that the revenues are down, not up. People coming before this committee are saying, “Spend a lot more”, while the government revenues are going down. That's what I mean by a disconnect or mismatch between the advice you are getting and the economic reality that Minister Morneau faces. That's not going to change.

I have one more quick point, just to get this on the record. There is a very substantial number—I don't want to say dozens—of highly reliable studies from very authoritative sources—I'm talking the IMF, the OECD, the Federal Reserve bank, the Bank of Canada, Finance Canada—showing that aging.... The only debate is, how much does aging reduce the economic growth? There is no debate that it reduces growth. Some say it's 1%. Some say it's 1.5%, and some say it's 2%. We know that the days of the seventies, eighties, nineties, and even the first decade of the 21st century are behind us. We are not going back to 4% and 5% GDP growth. We are looking at 1% to 2% GDP growth. The only question is—which is what I said in my closing comments—whether there is any way we can grow the pie so as to counter this drag on the economy called aging.

I am not a defeatist. I'm not saying, “Oh, well, the game's over. Let's all give up and go home.” I am saying there are things we can do. I don't agree that it's classical tired old Keynesian stimulus—just print and spend money. The advisory committee to Minister Morneau has pointed the way: economic immigration, infrastructure, an infrastructure bank, and so forth. There are things we can do. We can reduce the huge barriers to interprovincial trade in this country, which will raise incomes. Every time we talk about raising incomes, every MP should say, “Ah, that means more revenues to the federal and provincial governments to spend”, because that's what we are talking about.

It's not about how we can spend more money for anti-poverty programs, when we are not even confronting the underlying problem, which, in my view, is the lack of employability. Secondly, we are advocating solutions that are going to be very expensive and that, the reality is, Minister Morneau is not going to accept. I don't believe that any finance minister will accept an enormous increase in spending on CPP or on the social transfers. We have to deal with the reality we are confronting.

As I said, I think we can do things to increase the size of the pie, which means more revenues flow in to spend for health care, social policy, and so forth.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

Absolutely, Mr. Lee. One thing I can relate to you is that I was a mature student, just like you. I was a carpenter for many years before that. I wanted to attend university. I wanted to see, I guess, a different side of life, other than as a tradesman. I went to university at 29, and here I am. We didn't come by it easily. It was a lot of hard work.

[Dr. Ian Lee]

It was.

[Bob Zimmer, Conservative, Prince George—Peace River—Northern Rockies, BC]

I think a lot of the incentive for me to come here was that hard work. I knew that if I wanted to see my life get a little bit easier, I had to do some more work and go to university. Two degrees and twenty years later, here I am.

I wanted to ask you something quickly, Ms. McLachlan. As a person who's a part of a national organization, you say you're still in poverty. What's your definition of poverty? Please give a very brief answer.

[Harriett McLachlan]

A very brief answer is that I'm making choices between paying my hydro and buying food. I don't have enough money at the end of the day. I can't make ends meet. That's basically it, but I'd like to respond to his—