Human Resources Committee on Feb. 16th, 2017

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you again, everybody. Good morning, and congratulations on your Medicine Hat Tigers.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I was part owner of the Saint John Sea Dogs—the Memorial Cup-winning Sea Dogs, I might add.

I'm going to read a quote for you. It was in an article you wrote that I read just last night.

“You have leaders that are really good at executing. ... There is this perfect marriage of visioning, a sense of urgency and this ability to execute and practise....”

You said poverty is a lot more than just money in the bank: it's mental health, recreation, food security, and access to good jobs.

I have a question. I have great respect for Medicine Hat and what you're doing here. I see a lot of parallels between that and what's going on in my city of Saint John, New Brunswick. You're lucky, because obviously you have great presenters this morning, as well as great people in your community, such as your mayor and community leaders like yourselves, and a good MP too. Not every city or community has that leadership. They still have the needs, but they just don't have that leadership.

Ms. Turner, can you talk to me about how important it is to have alignment between the three levels of government—federal, provincial, and local—and what we can do as a federal government to help that? Maybe, as I think someone said, it would be like a quarterback or something in the community. Can you elaborate on how important alignment is between the three levels?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

You kind of nailed it: how do you recreate magic, and when the perfect storm comes together, how do you recreate those conditions?

I'm not from Medicine Hat. I'm from Calgary. I work with lots of communities on different social issues. I have more of a comparative perspective. I'll kind of parachute into Yellowknife or St. John's or Victoria, and there are always these quarterbacks and these key people there. If I do my job right to help them move forward, I narrow in on that magic person or persons and help them leverage these relationships to create that alignment.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I guess the issue I have with that is that if I look at some cities I know, it's not easy just to pick that one person, because picking that one person may alienate two others.

I think the other issue to throw on there is that sometimes there is such a duplication of services, with the same groups fighting for the same money and, as you said, with getting multiple funders.

How do you suggest that we as a federal government make this better?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Where I was going with these key people is that there's usually not just one. There's usually a grouping of them. This idea of a quarterback is about bringing together those key movers and shakers in the community and creating some kind of a formal entity around them and giving them the mandate to do this planning work. That's across the community of care in a particular locality, so In Medicine Hat, with the plan to end homelessness, they had a council of champions.

With the plan to end poverty, which they just launched yesterday, Denise, the president of the community college here, is one of the inaugural members of this council of champions. The council of champions are the superstars of this quarterback team. Jaime is the one running on the field and actually implementing. That's how you bring together these interests, because the province has a stake in that grouping as well, and so do the feds.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

I hear you.

One of the challenges or opportunities I see, though, is that from a federal perspective we may have a certain priority, whether it's a housing strategy or...and then it goes to the province. Depending on the government and whether there's alignment in the government, sometimes those priorities may not match with our priorities and may not match with the local priorities. Even provincial governments have their own agendas, with upcoming elections and all that kind of stuff.

How do we make that better?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Unfortunately, for better or worse, you come and go. The interests of governments are always changing. What you need to do is build an infrastructure at the local level that is beyond the politics. That's why we said there's no colour to this. If you build the infrastructure right, we'll navigate the politics. We've been navigating them for decades. There are different policies that we need to align with and merge with to still meet community needs.

I think that's how you do it. You build that solid community-level infrastructure to do that.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

Ms. Weeks, do you have situations in your school boards in which you literally lose track of kids? For example, in Saint John we have children showing up at school at five years old, ready to go, and they don't know how to tie their shoes. They're not socially functional at all. A lot of times we step back and say, “Where did they come from?” Not to simplify this, but they're born, they disappear for four years, and then they're at school.

Do you have that occurring? Do you have any ideas as to how we can make that better? Could we maybe register them at birth and track these kids through the system?

[Reagan Weeks]

The short answer is yes, we also have that challenge. Our response has been less about how to track them at a younger age and more about creating responses in the community that are welcoming and that will invite parents to partner with us.

We do have early screening. We have teams of occupational therapists, speech therapists, mental health workers, and social workers who go out into all of our remote communities and host events at which we can have early screening and identify whether certain therapies are needed. That occurs across our region.

Also, we are currently in the development of something called the collaborative response model. This model includes four tiers of support. Tier one would be something that could occur in a classroom. Tier two would be targeted specialized supports that can still be maintained in the classroom. Tier three would be school-wide supports, and tier four would be supports required outside of the school. We do this in the areas of literacy, social and emotional wellness, and general academics.

Certainly our hope as we weave this together is that fewer children will fall through the cracks.

We also have credit recovery, which is very well established and continues to be refined. We also have a number of attempts to help increase our graduation rates.

[Wayne Long, Liberal, Saint John—Rothesay, NB]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We now have MP Zimmer for six minutes.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Thanks to our witnesses for coming today.

I'll start with you, John. I'm a former carpenter. I've built a lot of buildings in my day. What I see with your plan is that it's brilliantly simple, but it's going to be effective. I just want to know where it's at.

You might have explained this and maybe I didn't hear you, but have you manufactured any of these units? Are there any functioning today?

[John Brown]

This is a four-year research project at the University of Calgary. It is a collaboration of the medical school, the architectural school, and the school of social work.

We are currently building our first real-world prototype. It will be finished in May. We have established three in situ tests that we're going to be conducting. The first will be in a downtown Calgary neighbourhood. The second will be in a rural community. We're thinking of the south zone of AHS, so we're looking at a hamlet or a farm. The third would be on an institutional site within Calgary, some sort of care facility, so that it becomes a kind of way station for people to be discharged.

It takes about three months, we think, to put one of these onto a city lot because of the approvals that are required. We'll be running that through till probably the spring of 2018. At that point, we'll evaluate commercialization potential, next-stage testing, and that sort of thing.

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

Do you have a cost per unit? I can see the idea that you suggested, whereby it can be put on the back of a lot, seniors can rent out their house, and everybody will be happy.

[John Brown]

That's right.

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

Do you have a cost?

[John Brown]

That's what everybody asks. Until we actually start manufacturing them, we won't know for sure. One of the good-news items is that Alberta has a very deep infrastructure in building portable structures. We're working with some of those partners right now.

The key to think about is to shift... It's a leased piece. We don't ask how much it costs to make a piece of medical equipment; the value is in the service it provides. If these buildings are able to last for 30 years, we're anticipating that the cost would be in the $1,000-a-month range or maybe $1,500 a month, as real costs, but without looking at potential subsidies that could come either from the health care system or from the municipal affairs area. When you start comparing that with the cost of providing either hospital care or—

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

Yes, there's no question about it.

[John Brown]

Yes.

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

It's better, and they're happier too.

Moving on to Alina, we've seen these “magic” people. We've seen them in Saint John. We saw them in Winnipeg yesterday. They are the people who really are integral to the success or failure of a program. You can see programs that run but are not successful, usually because somebody is there who is just not motivated or who isn't personally involved in the situation.

I want you to expand on what it actually looks like in Medicine Hat, because we've heard all the lingo and the jargon. We've heard about all the strategies all across Canada. What makes the difference in Medicine Hat? Why does it work here?

I also want you to expand on something, because you mentioned something about infrastructure. Give us what it looks like here, not just platitudes from 29,000 feet. What does it look like here?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Jaime really should be answering this, but I'll tell you about it from the outside perspective. I did this job in Calgary as well.

Day to day, the quarterback is essentially on the phone all day with the various providers. Jaime's sitting in her office and gets a call from the police, who say, “Hey, Joe's out on the street again and acting up.” Jaime goes down there and talks to Joe. She talks to her Housing First provider and says that she sees vacancies in their program and Joe's on the list, so she asks why he's on the street and why he isn't in housing. She's literally walking people through the system at that micro-level.

Then she gets a call from the premier's office that there are complaints about how homelessness hasn't really ended in Medicine Hat. She deals with the premier's office and creates briefing notes on what's going on in Medicine Hat.

She's doing all those levels of work and, as one person, is managing about $3.4 million plus the federal HPS money. It's about $4 million that she oversees.

She'll do site visits. She'll check up on all the programs to make sure the clients are happy, that the programs are meeting all their fidelity standards, and that the services are good. She does the research and analysis. She has a database that tells her exactly how many people are in each program and how they're doing. She knows how many are in shelters and how many days it will take her to get them from shelter to housing.

That's really what that quarterback does on a day-to-day basis.

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

I like the analogy of a quarterback too. It isn't a manager. A manager has a different connotation to it. A quarterback is in action, controlling plays and making them successful.

It's really hard to limit our comments and questions to six minutes, but I would ask you to submit anything more you have of what the structure looks like in Medicine Hat. What we're looking to do here is replicate what you're doing as well as we can and put it across a pan-Canadian map approach.

I just have one more question for Robin.

You say we need a national housing strategy. We've heard that a lot, but what does that look like? Is it rental subsidies? Is it home ownership? How does it involve aboriginals on reserve? Is it a comprehensive approach?

It's easy to say “national housing strategy”, but again I would challenge you.

We've heard a lot of people talk about problems, but we haven't heard, “Here's the map to the solution.” You guys know the solution better than we do, and that's why we're here, but what is your solution for a national housing strategy, and what does it look like? What's the blueprint?

[Robin Miiller]

The blueprint? Wow.

The issue for me is that I think the voices of those people who are serving people in housing programs are not heard as often as they need to be. I think that the integration of housing and health and income is critical to ensuring that housing programs, whatever they end up looking like, are successful.

Warehousing people in inexpensive housing does not work. We know that if that's what happens, as landlords of non-profit and social-housing-type programs we end up managing those social issues in very large, dense population situations.

I think that the integration of supports within housing is a big piece of it. I'm not able to respond to your question at an academic or policy-planning level, which may be what you were looking for.

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

I would challenge you to work on it, because we need something to go ahead with.

I see that the quarterback within the system is what you're asking for, but we have two responsibilities. We're responsible to the taxpayers, who pay a lot of money in taxes every day. They are real people, the same people we want to keep out of poverty, yet we still want to help those who are in poverty and deeply need help. We see the balancing of those two things. We need a housing strategy that's responsible with taxpayers' money but that also does a great job at providing housing for needy people.