Human Resources Committee on Feb. 14th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Welcome, everybody. I apologize for our tardiness getting started. We're usually pretty good on getting going on time, but as you know we had a vote this morning that interrupted a little.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, June 13, 2016, the committee is resuming its study on poverty reduction strategies.

I'm very pleased to welcome here today by video conference Kenneth Green from the Fraser Institute. We also have, from the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, Stéphan Corriveau, board president, and Jeff Morrison, executive director. From the City of Prince George, we have Mayor Lyn Hall and Chris Bone, manager of social planning. Finally, from the Front d'action populaire en réaménagement urbain, we have Émilie E. Joly, community organizer.

We're missing one witness. Hopefully he will join us.

Also, from the Nunavut Roundtable for Poverty Reduction, we have Aluki Kotierk and Aqattuaq Kiah Hachey joining us today.

I also wanted to acknowledge MP Hunter Tootoo who is joining us for the first time today. Welcome, sir.

[Hunter Tootoo, Independent, Nunavut, NU]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We're going to get started. Because we have so many joining us today we're going to keep the introductions to a maximum of seven minutes. We're going to start with Dr. Kenneth Green from the Fraser Institute.

The next seven minutes are yours, sir.

[Dr. Kenneth Green, Senior Director, Natural Resources Studies, Fraser Institute]

Good morning.

Thank you for inviting me and giving me this opportunity to testify on what I consider to be one of the most important topics in public policy in our time, which is poverty, and particularly for me, energy poverty. We've done some research into this, the first done in Canada, to look at this question and that's what I'm going to talk about to you today.

First, we need to understand that energy is absolutely omnipresent in the lives of Canadians. We take it for granted that when we plug something in, power will flow; when we flip a light switch, the lights will go on; and when we gas up our car, the gas will be there and the car will function. But those are really the most superficial and obvious ways in which we consume energy.

We use energy to heat and cool our homes. We use energy to cook our food and to clean our homes and our clothes. We use energy to make the clothing that our children wear that keep them warm in the winter and keep them comfortable in the summer. We use energy to call our families and call 911 when we're ill or when someone else is ill. We use energy to preserve our foods and medicines.

Many people don't think about this, but without a refrigerator, your insulin is not preserved. Many of your drugs are not able to be preserved, and you can't necessarily have access to state-of-the-art health care. In fact, the cost of providing medical care is very highly infused in the cost of energy used to produce super-concentrated, pure, sterile substances that are moved while temperature controlled to the point of their destination so that you can have your modern, useful medications and medical treatments.

We use energy to transport ourselves to work, to home, to leisure destinations, and again to doctors, to clinics, to churches, to sporting venues, and to other countries to visit our families.

Energy is basically at the root of everything we do as Canadians and as people in a modern technological civilization. We use energy to produce virtually everything in the room around us. If you were to look around your room, everything you see started with an infusion of energy and is maintained on a daily basis with additional layers of energy put onto it in order to preserve the things that we make, use, and do.

Affordable, abundant energy is really central to the well-being of Canadians. This is the reason we wanted to look at the issue of Canadians' access to abundant, reliable, and affordable energy.

We know for a fact that many people around the world do not have that. According to the International Energy Agency, there are 1.2 billion people around the world who lack access to electricity. Think about that. They don't have access to electricity. They can't charge a cellphone. They can't turn on lights to study by. They don't have lights in their homes in order to read. They, of course, don't have televisions. They don't have access to modern technologies, and more importantly, they don't have access to the kinds of technologies and computers needed to teach their children so as to liberate them from physical labour and that sort of thing.

Another 2.7 billion people have to cook their food using biomass—that is, wood, dung, and other things such as that—indoors with poor ventilation, which causes a massive amount of disease.

That's internationally and that's not here in Canada, but we wanted to see what the situation was like in Canada, so we looked into the question of whether there is energy poverty in Canada and how much there is.

We used the definition that's used internationally, which is, if a household spends more than 10% of its total expenditures in the year just providing energy in the home, that's considered a definition of energy poverty because that's the point at which you start having to make significant trade-offs between buying higher quality foods or keeping the temperature where it's healthy and safe, getting your kids training in sports versus keeping the air conditioning going in the summertime or the heat going in the wintertime. The 10% threshold is recognized more or less internationally as a red line of entering into a state of energy poverty if you're paying that much just to heat your home.

We looked at this with data from Statistics Canada's survey of household spending here in Canada. We wanted to find out how much energy poverty there is in Canada. We were, frankly, surprised. In a country that considers itself, or has at times considered itself an energy superpower, we looked at the data and found out that when only energy used within the home—just heating, cooling, refrigeration, and that kind of thing—was included in the calculation, 7.9% of Canadian households were classified as being energy poor in the year 2013. That's when the latest data was available. That's up slightly from 7.2% back in 2010.

Atlantic Canada—and this, personally I found shocking—which is aggregated in the Statistics Canada data, so we can't pull it out by individual province, had the highest incidence of energy poverty in 2013. We found 20.6% of households were spending more than 10% of their entire expenditures just keeping the house warm. British Columbia had the lowest, at 5.3% of that level.

When gasoline expenses are included in the calculation, the incidence of energy poverty increases substantially. In 2013, 19.4% of Canadian households devoted at least 10% or more of their expenditures to energy, including both inside the home and for transportation. Alberta was the lowest, at 12.8%. There were five out of seven Canadian regions that experienced a decline in energy poverty from 2010 to 2013 when gasoline expenditures were included.

We also looked at where energy poverty falls with regard to income quintiles. What we found was that over 15% of the two lowest-income quintiles in Canada were in energy poverty when you included just energy in the home. When you included energy in the home plus the transportation that they needed to get to work, it was 30% of homes in the two lowest-income quintiles that were in energy poverty. Other income quintiles were much, much less.

I'll just give you a quick rundown by province. In 2013, 5.3% of households in British Columbia were in energy poverty; 6.8% in Alberta; 12.9% in Saskatchewan; 6.7% in Manitoba; 7.5% in Ontario; 6.2% in Quebec; 20%, as I said, in Atlantic Canada; and as a whole, we had 8%. With fuel, gasoline, British Columbia had 14%; Alberta about 13%; Saskatchewan 23%; Manitoba 20%; Ontario 19%; Quebec 19%; Atlantic Canada almost 40%; and Canada as a whole, 19.4%.

In a powerful country like Canada, in a country that has some of the world's biggest energy resources found anywhere and the technologies to extract and develop and use those, we nonetheless have a significant fraction of Canadian households living under the definition of energy poverty. That is, they are spending a bigger share of their household expenditures to keep warm and to move them to and from work, to and from school, to and from sporting events, and to and from the supermarket. That's a significant component of poverty overall, because it is, as I said, in so much of what we do.

We were asked to come up with some strategies for reducing this, and I'd say—

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Sorry, could you just wrap up? Thank you.

[Dr. Kenneth Green]

I will, yes.

How could we reduce energy poverty? One thing we need to do is reconsider our current approach to energy and climate policy. We've settled on an immediate transition to renewable fuels, which are more expensive than conventional fuels such as gas, which is highly abundant and also a Canadian resource. We need to reconsider that approach and look at the previous approach, which was to accept that natural gas is going to be a bridge fuel until we can develop renewables that are more reliable and more affordable than the natural gas resources we have abundant to us here in Canada.

We need to increase our research and development into cleaner, more affordable renewables. Right now they're not deployable at scale in affordable ways. We need to find better ways to make those renewables cheaper so that people will want them, not have them imposed upon them.

We need to harmonize our energy regulations with U.S. markets. Our costs are higher than the U.S., our competitors, for manufacturing, as well as households. We need to find ways to bring our costs more into line with our American neighbours and competitors.

I would argue that those should be the focus of government right now, not necessarily aggressive greenhouse gas emission targets and more renewable energy targets that are not based on the reality of providing affordable, reliable, and abundant energy to Canadians.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much, sir.

We're going to move quickly to our next speaker, who is Stéphan Corriveau, board president of the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association.

The next seven minutes are yours, sir.

[Stéphan Corriveau, Board President, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to the committee for undertaking this important study of a Canadian anti-poverty strategy. With me is Jeff Morrison, CHRA's executive director. We'll share our presentation.

As a national association representing the interests of the social and affordable housing sector in Canada, the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association (CHRA) is really pleased that the committee has drawn a clear link between poverty reduction and access to safe and affordable housing.

Housing that meets those characteristics is essential to enable individuals and families to have access to healthy living, access to education and academic success, and access to stable employment, which helps establish and develop families. Those are fundamental cornerstones for an anti-poverty strategy.

Since housing is an indispensable need, the cost of housing and the share of household income that goes to it are among the main factors that determine poverty. Having access to affordable housing increases the ability of households in difficulty to get out of poverty and to improve their conditions in the long term. When we see the real numbers and the current situation in Canada, we may be shocked by the situation. Actually, 1.6 million households in Canada, which means more than 3.5 million people, spend in excess of 30% of their income on housing. These are renters, not people who invest to acquire property and develop capital. About 850,000 of those households spend more than 50% of their income on housing. We can easily imagine what the consequences are on their ability to feed themselves, to educate themselves, to raise children properly, and so on.

Households that are in such precarious situations are predominantly made up of people from groups subjected to discriminatory practices. They include indigenous people, single-parent families, low-income people, racial minorities, persons with physical disabilities or mental health issues. Problems of access to adequate housing and the strategies to address them would benefit from being considered from a human rights perspective.

We are making an important proposal that the right to adequate housing be explicitly recognized in Canadian legal instruments. Somewhere in Canadian legislation, there must be a reference indicating that we have the right to quality housing. We are talking about affordable and adequate housing.

As you know, just as we speak, while developing its anti-poverty strategy, the Canadian government is taking other steps to define a national housing strategy. As we understand it, following this consultation, the strategy will be announced shortly after the next budget. We are talking about the housing strategy, but it is essential that the poverty reduction strategy and the housing development strategy be closely linked.

While we were holding consultations, the CMHC hired independent firms to conduct surveys with all Canadians. There were all sorts of public consultations and private consultations, and a report with the results of the consultations was published.

In all the provinces, in all the regions of the country and in all the categories of stakeholders, people said that the housing and poverty issues were closely linked and that those two needs require a joint response. If it has been established that there's a link between the two and that it's the collective desire of Canadian society, of Canadians across the country, how do we go about developing this strategic framework?

In October 2016, during the consultations on the national strategy, CHRA presented a brief entitled “Housing at a Crossroads: CHRA's Vision for the Next Generation of Housing Policy in Canada”. A copy of our brief was submitted to the clerk of the committee. You will be able to consult it.

We have an ambitious goal: by 2035, all Canadians and Canadian households should have access to safe, affordable and adequate housing.

There are 24 recommendations to do so in technical terms. We will not go through all 24 recommendations, but my colleague Mr. Morrison will present the main ones.

[Jeff Morrison, Executive Director, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association]

Thank you, Stéphan.

First, I will very quickly talk about our recommendations.

Our first key recommendation was to strengthen the role of housing as a social good. For example, we recommend specific measures to prevent and eliminate homelessness. We recommend the introduction of a federal program to subsidize the supply of rent-geared-to-income housing units available all across Canada. We talked about supporting supportive housing by increasing dedicated support to social services, because, after all, social housing is more than just a roof over a person's head. It also offers key social supports with regard to mental health and addictions, legal supports, and so forth, which are all instrumental in tackling poverty.

Second, we recommend that the existing supply of social housing capacity be maintained and that policy tools be put in place to grow the stock. With federal operating agreements already expiring, there's deep concern in the social housing sector as to whether non-profit providers can continue to offer subsidized housing to those in greatest need. In our submission, we identified some tangible policy options to maintain and grow capacity, such as expanding the surplus federal real property for homelessness initiative, which would essentially make land available, creating a stand-alone housing financing mechanism, and removing the GST from capital costs for social and affordable rental housing. By maintaining and increasing capacity, we're providing a necessary but required support for poverty alleviation.

Third, there's no question that Canada's urban and rural indigenous peoples suffer much higher rates of homelessness, core housing need, and substandard housing. For example, one in 15 urban indigenous people will experience homelessness compared to about one in 128 non-indigenous people. In 2011, a CMHC report revealed that 22% of non-reserve aboriginal households were living in homes that did not meet suitability standards, compared with 13% for non-aboriginal households. Social housing for urban and rural indigenous households faces a further challenge in that almost 100% of indigenous housing units are rent-geared-to-income models, meaning that the expiry of operating agreements will hit indigenous housing providers harder than other housing providers who employ a more mixed model.

As a result, CHRA is recommending that a distinct strategy to address rural and urban indigenous housing providers be created. Within that strategy, we recommend creating a unique indigenous housing trust, increasing investments in indigenous support service organizations, and improving indigenous representations within organizations such as CMHC.

Finally, a national housing strategy, just like an anti-poverty strategy, will be meaningless unless a robust implementation plan is put in place complete with national indicators and investment in research. That's why CHRA is recommending the creation of a housing research hub with a model somewhat similar to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which would bring researchers and housing together to define gaps and report upon national housing and homelessness indicators.

Parliament should hold the government to account for the results of both its housing strategy and its anti-poverty strategy objectives, and having indicators complete with research is the best way to do that.

[Stéphan Corriveau]

Chair, there's no question that a strong housing system that meets the needs of Canada's most vulnerable population is a required basis for a national plan to address poverty. We congratulate the committee for undertaking this study and for its recognition of the importance of housing to combat poverty.

Once again, my thanks to the committee for inviting us to be part of this discussion.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much for being here. It was great testimony, and I'm looking forward to hearing some of the responses to the questions that I know are coming.

I want to just take two seconds to recognize that we've been joined by a very large group. This is probably the most we've ever had come to HUMA to witness one of our sessions. Can one of you explain where you're from?

[Katherine Takpannie, As an Individual]

We're from Nunavut Sivuniksavut. It's an eight-month Inuit college program for [Inaudible—Editor].

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's fantastic, excellent. Thank you very much for coming.

[Some hon. members]

Hear, hear!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

This is great.

I'd also like to acknowledge that we've been joined by Nicolas Luppens, coordinator of Groupe actions solutions pauvreté.

If you wish, if you are settled—I know you just sort of ran in—the next seven minutes could be yours, sir.

[Nicolas Luppens, Coordinator, Groupe actions solutions pauvreté]

Okay, let's go.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We'll throw you right in. Go ahead.

[Nicolas Luppens]

Thank you for inviting me. I will speak in French because it's easier for me.

My name is Nicolas Luppens and I am the coordinator of the Groupe actions solutions pauvreté. Our organization is a round table on combatting poverty, located in Haute-Yamaska, near Granby in Quebec. We cover the entire Haute-Yamaska region. We work on developing a number of strategies and innovative approaches in order to find solutions for poverty. Our mandate is to look for measures and solutions to solve the problems of poverty in our own local area.

In the past, we worked within the framework of a provincial action plan called the Government Action Plan for Solidarity and Social Inclusion. From that initiative, we were able to draw certain conclusions. Having worked with those on the ground, today we are able to provide expertise at that level, expertise that really does come from the community organizations working very closely with the people.

I would now like to give you a summary of what we observe in our area.

Our region has a significant shortfall in social housing. In terms of the government strategy, social housing clearly is a priority. In Granby, for example, as for other cities in the country, there are five social housing units for every 1,000 inhabitants. We are well below the Quebec average and a long way behind some cities.

The fact that, in 1994, the federal government withdrew from the strategy to build social housing is critical for our area. So, in the next federal strategy to fight poverty, it is vital for social housing projects to be funded. From what we can observe on the ground, with the people with whom we work, this kind of involvement helps a lot of people. It means that they do not have to spend a major part of their income on housing. The cost of housing has sharply increased, not just in Montreal, but all across the country. So adopting a federal housing strategy is vital.

In addition, we are being affected more and more by the problem of homelessness. A growing number of homeless people are asking for emergency assistance with food and shelter. For example, in Granby in recent years, as in almost every other part of Quebec, the number of people seeking food assistance has increased between 10% and 20%. Food assistance strategies really need to be expanded, as do approaches to homelessness through the homelessness partnering strategy, which, in our opinion is not adequately funded. In our region, we need more funding for that strategy.

During the election campaign, the Liberal Party announced a food safety strategy. We want to prevent people on the ground from going hungry and from experiencing all the problems that causes in terms of looking for jobs, social inclusion, and so on. For us, this is fundamental. We need direct assistance to ease the hunger in households living in poverty.

In the few minutes that I have left, I will talk about the recommendations arising from the fact that we have introduced the Government Action Plan for Solidarity and Social Inclusion in Haute-Yamaska.

We have noticed that, over the past few years, provincial strategies have been one-time five-year action plans. They should have continued, but every time a new action plan was implemented, the services were cut.

For the organizations on the ground, that involves a loss of expertise every time. Those cuts also go hand in hand with a loss of resources and assistance. In addition, services cannot continue.

In the fight against poverty across Canada, strong leadership is needed to recognize the fundamental rights of people who live in poverty and to make the fight a priority across the country.

We need measures that last longer than two or three years, so that we don't have to start from scratch afterwards with a new budget.

As I said earlier, there is a loss of efficiency for stakeholders locally. There is also a loss of expertise when there are constant budget cuts.

We are asking that action be taken on the structural causes of poverty. Action needs to be taken at the level of basic needs, but it has to be done on a global scale. Let me explain.

Household income must be increased. We think that's one of the strategies that would make the most sense, given that households are being squeezed right now. As we know, there's a high debt load in Canada. A poverty reduction plan must be developed bearing in mind both people's income and housing, which is fundamental. Those are two core priorities that must be highlighted.

Measures must also be taken to reduce social inequalities. A number of sources indicate that social inequalities are not declining. The gap has been growing more and more in the past few years.

Access to public health services must be improved without discrimination. Those services must be universal and of high quality.

Attitudes must be changed, for instance by launching an awareness campaign, not just by putting up posters, but also by reaching out to schools. An approach like that has worked for us. We have implemented local awareness strategies in primary schools and especially in secondary schools. That has produced excellent results. That has helped people understand poverty, feel more empathy for those people and avoid passing judgment too quickly. Even among decision-makers, there's sometimes prejudice that clouds their decisions. Young people should be educated, through the launch of a big national campaign explaining that poverty is not a choice.

As I said earlier, GASP recommends that the income of single people be increased. That's the category of people that has suffered the most from the latest social progress, if I may say so. Most of the social policies that have been implemented lately have targeted families a great deal. We now see that the situation of single people living in poverty has not improved. So the focus should be more on single individuals.

How much time do I have left?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Two more seconds.... Go ahead and wrap up.

[Nicolas Luppens]

Right.

I think that, overall, I've said what I wanted to say.

The action we're calling for isn't sporadic, but extends over time. That's the main recommendation we wanted to make today.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you so much.

I understand that the brief you have is being translated and will be provided to everybody as well, so if there is anything you had to skip at the end there, we'll make sure we all see that.

We're going to go now, via video conference, to the city of Prince George with Mayor Lyn Hall and the manager of social planning, Chris Bone.

Your Worship, the next seven minutes are yours.

[Lyn Hall, Mayor, City of Prince George]

Thank you very much. I will ask Chris to start us off.

[Chris Bone, Manager, Social Planning, City of Prince George]

Thank you very much for the invitation to appear as a witness. The mayor has asked me to provide a few comments to set the context for his presentation.

We have reviewed the document, “Towards a Poverty Reduction Strategy”, that was prepared by the Government of Canada and have reviewed all of the current and planned Government of Canada initiatives to support poverty reduction. In particular, over the coming months we look forward to more direction from the Government of Canada so we can appropriately mobilize our community to participate in the plan in person and in online consultation opportunities.

We also understand that, as part of the strategy, the Government of Canada will be launching the tackling poverty together project. We have some associated recommendations to make later in our presentation.

Our comments today, therefore, relate to what we understand to be the focus of the standing committee in relation to this broader consultation and strategy development process.

In terms of background, we would like to let you know that, in 2012, the city of Prince George was one of seven communities selected to participate in a pilot poverty reduction project that was initiated by the Province of B.C. and the Union of B.C. Municipalities.

That project was intended to provide low-income families with tailor-made springboards out of poverty. As such, the goal was to develop successful strategies that addressed the unique needs of families living in poverty. Over a two-year period, the City of Prince George actively facilitated a community process to identify what was needed to enable these low-income families and individuals to find their way out of poverty.

However, the City of Prince George withdrew from the pilot project when it was evident that without a provincial poverty reduction framework with the associated policies and resources, community organizations would only better serve those living in poverty, not give them a pathway out of poverty.

Since that time, the city has refocused its efforts. It has initiated a collective impact process with the assistance of the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. Our community has identified a shared vision of improving children's health, and we fully expect that poverty reduction will be one of the key strategies that enable the achievement of that vision.

Having said that, we know, as identified in Northern Health's chief medical health officer's report on growing up healthy in B.C., that we can only address poverty reduction with the support and resources of all levels of government.

With those brief comments, which also provide some context, I would now like to turn to Mayor Hall so that he can provide his comments to the committee.

[Lyn Hall]

Thank you very much, Chris.

Good morning, everyone.

In relation to its focus on housing, we want to urge the committee to carefully consider the analysis of consultation feedback outlined in the recently released Let's Talk Housing report. As noted in the report released by the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development, the feedback was received through a broad range of outreach efforts, which helps to frame the challenges facing Canada's housing system and details innovative ideas.

The City of Prince George was an active contributor to the consultation process, as were a number of community-based organizations within the city of Prince George.

There are a number of themes that emerged from the consultation process that are particularly applicable to the city of Prince George, which serves as a service hub for many northern communities. For those of you not familiar with Prince George, it is located in the central part of the province of B.C., and is, in fact, a hub to many service organizations, such as housing services, RCMP services, and medical services.

It helps indigenous people achieve better housing outcomes, adopts a housing systems perspective to ensure that housing needs across the continuum are addressed, and sets clear outcomes and targets in relation to housing so that progress can be monitored and reported. We want to take a collaborative approach to housing by building on the capacity of all orders of government to achieve a national vision of housing.

We would like the committee to recommend that Prince George, B.C., be chosen to participate in the tackling poverty together project. This will provide the opportunity to consider how utilization of a collective impact approach may enable systemic change in relation to poverty reduction, and it will provide the opportunity to shed light on the challenges associated with poverty reduction in the absence of a supporting provincial framework.

We are aware that no B.C. communities have been invited to participate in the tackling poverty together project, and we believe that in order to get a comprehensive picture of the Canadian context, B.C., and particularly a community with a large percentage of indigenous peoples as residents, must be included in the study.

In Prince George, we are also challenged with distressed neighbourhoods and urge the committee to consider how the federal government may be able to support, through policy and programs, a community development corporation model such as the one currently being trialled in Edmonton, Alberta. We note the model creates and expands economic opportunity for low-to-moderate income people in high-need neighbourhoods by implementing a full set of tools requiring a cross-governmental approach to poverty reduction that integrates both orders and departments of government.

Criteria for current funding programs often cause divisiveness amongst the very partners required to initiate innovative multi-sectoral approaches to addressing complex social issues. We'd like to close by reiterating the need for the committee to ensure the mechanisms necessary to ensure there is collaboration and commitment between levels of government to address poverty and that associated policies and funding initiatives are aligned with a shared vision.

It is also critical that poverty reduction targets be established and associated progress measured using a shared definition of poverty and agreed-to metrics.

Thank you very much to the committee for giving us an opportunity to say a few words, and we'll certainly be available for questions later on. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you for joining us today.

Now we'll go over to Émilie Joly from FRAPRU. You are joining us via video conference. The next seven minutes are yours.