No, no worries.
As I said before, the reason I wanted to do my presentation a little bit differently from the way maybe others here are doing theirs is that I wanted to try to put myself in your shoes. I think what you're being tasked to do—to look into a poverty strategy for the country—is essentially great. I have to think about all the research that's out there and what it's telling us about how to actually effectively end poverty, and how we go about doing that.
Through my experience working with different communities around issues such as homelessness, domestic violence, and obviously child abuse, I see that a lot of these social issues are so interconnected that to narrow things down to income, teaching people how to budget better, and increasing RESP use in the country seems to miss the mark on how intersected these social issues are with income, housing, and other basic needs.
In Medicine Hat, when we took on the creation of a poverty strategy, we took a step backward and said let's not assume we're the experts and let's not assume the research is going to guide this from the top down. Let's just simply begin with conversations in the community. The conversations included 500 Medicine Hatters, about 150 of whom had been in poverty during the consultation process. They self-identified as being in poverty.
We also talked to those who were saying they were not necessarily in poverty at the time; however, most people in the community had experienced poverty at some point in their lives.
What you realize early on is that you're not building a strategy for those people. You're not building something for those who fall through the cracks, even though there certainly are those who consistently do so, and do so intergenerationally; you're actually building something for all Canadians. Therefore, it has to work and it has to make sense and it has to have the buy-in of everyone. It doesn't make sense to just create this bubble around a particular subgroup that we consider disadvantaged, or the underclass, etc., and then build strategies that target them as “others”.
If you actually roll that back to the experience of people with the issue of poverty, you find that it's something that connects us all. You have to flip that and look at it not just from a deficit perspective, as Reagan mentioned as well, but look at it from a strength perspective. It's not something that you want to consider with questions about what they are doing wrong and what we can do to fix them. Look at it from a strength perspective, and focusing on the strength piece takes you from unending poverty to a frame of enhancing well-being as well. That's why the Medicine Hat poverty strategy is one that seeks to end poverty but also enhances well-being for Medicine Hat as a whole, not just one particular group.
The other piece I will begin to walk you through is the diagram of a star, for better or worse. My design skills are not the best, but it's on page 4. It tries to illustrate the various factors when you talk to people living the issue day to day, or those who have experienced it at some point of their lives. It's not necessarily the income that becomes your cut-off.
Oftentimes in this work and in research we get into debates, which at some point become quite irrelevant, around whether we should use this income measure, the MBM, the LICO, or the LIM. If you look even more broadly internationally, you'll see that there are hundreds of these measures. It's quite ridiculous. The way we measure disadvantage has become a business in and of itself. It takes us into that path of those people creating boundaries around that, as opposed to looking at it from the holistic perspective and lived experience.
When people talk about where they're vulnerable or how they define poverty from their perspective, it's often things that are not necessarily income, but things like health and wellness or mental health and well-being.
You see there are some quotes on page 3 about how this is laid out in daily life. When we asked “What does ending poverty mean to you, and what does experiencing poverty mean to you?”, they said, “Not having to worry about food or deciding what bills to pay”. The key word there is “worry”. “My children will not have to live the way I did or their children will not have to live the way we do now”. That's healthy families, healthy children, early childhood development. Again, they don't talk about income strictly.
Lastly, it's not about just surviving, that basic needs piece; it's about thriving, and it's not just about my thriving on my own. It's about the entire community thriving as well.
I would encourage you to think about a poverty strategy that is built from a strength perspective, and one that is holistic and multi-dimensional. I know oftentimes we like to put boundaries and say that the national housing strategy is dealing with housing and the mental health strategy is dealing with mental health. Poverty is an issue in which, if you do it justice, all those pieces come into play. Your challenge is to show the country a vision of how we're going to end poverty from all those perspectives. That means building something that's going to call out systems that may not necessarily be federal systems either.
Besides that piece, I would also say that the local community's role in doing this work on the ground is unfortunately not something you can cut and paste. We've seen a lot of success in Medicine Hat around the work to end homelessness, and I know that's why you're here in many ways. What's magical about this work is that it can be applied to things like poverty. It can be applied to any of these factors we talked about, because at its core is the idea that we have shared accountability. We have key people who can drive this forward and manage a community system from a system perspective. It means tying together all these pieces towards common objectives, using evidence that's based in practice to actually implement it moving forward.
That's something you can't do at a federal level. Your role is around enabling policy, supporting things in principle, and making sure the resources are there to do the work on the ground. At the end of the day, though, it's by community and for community, and it has to be bought into at this level for it to work. It's a great balancing act that you have to do moving forward, to encourage that leadership from the ground up as well, without it being interpreted as a top-down initiative.
The last point I would make—and it's something I'm very passionate about—is that we're not going to solve this issue by relying on NGOs and government alone. I know you know that, but often when we look at the role of the business sector, we just see it as a pocket for donations. The innovative approaches that are emerging in the social enterprise realm have so much promise and so much applicability to this whole notion of community well-being and addressing poverty from that first perspective.
I love this idea with the homes because I think it's a perfect opportunity for social enterprise. Having a social innovation fund that encourages the incubation and acceleration of these types of initiatives, again supporting a locally based implementation of those social enterprise ideas, would go a very long way to building a third sector that's playing in this field. It's neither non-profit nor government, and it becomes sustainable in the long term without grants. That's something I would strongly encourage you to consider as well in your deliberations.