Human Resources Committee on Feb. 16th, 2017

[Jaime Rogers, Manager, Homeless and Housing Development Department, Medicine Hat Community Housing Society]

Yes, please. How long do I have?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You have about a minute or so, or whatever. We're fairly flexible here.

[Jaime Rogers]

Thank you for that.

I would like to thank the Honourable Glen Motz for arranging this today, and I thank you all for being here and listening to what we have to say and valuing that.

I am a single mama, and I have to tell you something personal. My daughter gave me the best advice this morning. She gives it to me every time I go to speak. She says, “Mama, please don't try to speak French today”, so respectfully, merci.

I want to talk to you about two things, and then maybe pose a challenge to you as well.

I have the privilege to work in this wonderful community of Medicine Hat. I lead the local plan to end homelessness. We launched that plan in 2014. The difference with that plan, and where Medicine Hat has seen success, is we delivered on it. To have a plan is one thing; to do the work is something very different.

I challenge you as you're looking at your poverty reduction strategy to have an implementation plan and investment with it. That is how the work will get done. As you heard from my colleagues, community delivery is very important.

In Medicine Hat, we have ended chronic homelessness. We still have work to do. It doesn't mean that people won't experience homelessness. What the important take-away is, and what it means, is that our system of care is so robust and comprehensive that when people experience homelessness—because they will—that system is there to quickly pick them up and provide housing and adequate supports for them. That is key.

I want to switch now to poverty reduction.

Last night and yesterday, we had the great honour to publicly launch about six years' worth of hard work. Most recently, in the last six months, Dr. Alina Turner was our consultant on that. It was called Thrive, Medicine Hat and region's strategy to end poverty and increase well-being.

I need to tell you a bit about the title. One of the conversations that happened at the tables was about why we were saying we're ending poverty, because that can't be done. Our challenge back to the community was that if you do not set the standard as ending something, you will never achieve it. To strive for 80% of something is not good enough.

We framed it in the context of suicide, because that is a strong indicator of community well-being. To have a plan that says two suicides are acceptable this year is morally irresponsible.

Therefore, I challenge you to end poverty and increase well-being. Be bold. Be bold with your message. Unless you are bold, municipal governments, provincial governments, and community will not be bold, so please take a leadership role and be that bold.

Poverty costs Albertans $7.1 billion to $9.4 billion annually. Right now that money is going to managing people in their poverty. It's not going to actively get them out of that stage that they are experiencing. Invest wisely.

Please also know that one of our strengths around our plan to end homelessness was taking the stance that homelessness and now poverty do not know party lines. They don't discriminate. We have had such great success in Medicine Hat because we have the support of our community, of course, and our municipal government, our provincial government, and our federal government representatives. When we say it takes a community, we mean all levels of government. Medicine Hat is a great example of where that actually comes together.

Our Thrive report outlines 13 different strategies, as Dr. Turner alluded to. It's not just about income. It's not just about job creation. It's about truly creating a sense of belonging for all members of community. We know that when our community members are thriving, the rest of the community thrives. Business thrives. Industry thrives as well.

I challenge you, again, to be so bold and set that motion and that framework in place, please.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you, and thank you for reminding us why we're doing this.

I said this in Winnipeg yesterday and I'll say it again here: there's nobody in the House of Commons right now who doesn't want to end poverty. This group that I've had the pleasure of getting to know a little bit better, though sometimes being stuck in New Brunswick.... We're on the same page. There may be different ways we want to accomplish that goal, but the goal stays the same.

We are going to move now to questions. First up, we have apparently the Honourable Glen Motz.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you first to each of you for being here today and for taking the time to give us a perspective from lived experience.

In the six minutes that I have for the first round, I want to ask a couple of different questions.

Reagan, you talked initially about a successful community involvement plan. What does that look like? Can you, in a very short time, explain what a successful community involvement plan looks like from an educational perspective?

[Reagan Weeks]

Sure. In our school division we have used the work of Epstein to establish the community involvement plan. There are a number of components to this.

We've signed three formal partnerships with post-secondary institutions across Alberta that allow us to deliver programming remotely. We've also created something called parent-teacher academic teams to better engage parents who see barriers to being involved in school. This will include everything from hiring interpreters for Low German-speaking people to ensuring that in schools our students have access to languages such as Cree.

We have created partnerships with the local food bank, which has been instrumental in helping us address food security issues in schools. We have partnered with art galleries. We have three community schools that have municipal libraries on site that allow interaction between the larger community and the school. We have created a number of buildings, including a new building in Schuler, in concert with community organizations that allow them to access the building outside of regular school hours. This allows a reduction in infrastructure costs and reduces our costs as well through the use of the infrastructure for multiple purposes.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Thank you very much, Reagan.

Robin, let me ask this. You mentioned in your presentation that the system has to rethink how we do assessments of individuals, either to make them qualify or to not have them involved in a process.

Can you just expand briefly on what that actually looks like when played out, from your perspective?

[Robin Miiller]

One thing we've recognized in our process is that we....

Are you talking about my comments around the wait list, and people—

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Yes, you used the wording that we need to work on rethinking how to assess the needs of individuals.

[Robin Miiller]

Right.

We've recognized within our system that the approach we were taking may not have been identifying people's actual circumstances in reality. We were using assessment tools that were giving us a needs assessment score, but they weren't necessarily giving us an indication of what the actual need of that individual was.

For example, we know that the social housing legislation in Alberta prioritizes single parents or parents with children—families—over homeless individuals. This was a system designed specifically to serve families, and it had a purpose at the time and there were priorities at the time that needed to be addressed. However, that legislation has not been revised for 25 years, and it is now mis-serving.... It proposes to serve those in greatest need, but the definition of who is in greatest need has changed. The assessments that are used to determine who is in greatest need are misaligned with the actual needs of the individual.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

If I understand this, it's that the bottom line is that assessment tools moving forward need to be current, flexible, and adjustable to community or individuals, to some degree; obviously there has to be some standard.

[Robin Miiller]

Absolutely. You need to have services to meet people where they are, rather than have people fit with a system.

[Glen Motz, Conservative, Medicine Hat—Cardston—Warner, AB]

Okay, fair enough.

I'll give most of the time to you, Jaime, on this last question. I appreciate the comments you made. True to who you are and what makes you successful, you challenged.

In an ideal world, how does the federal government play out “being bold” in poverty reduction?

[Jaime Rogers]

I think being bold comes in many different forms. Part of it is knowing what's happening in your ridings, and in your communities as well. Bringing that information back, as you are doing right now, is instrumental.

As well, please question what we tell you. Always question what you're hearing. Talk to people with lived experience, those who are actually experiencing poverty. We can all sit up here on an expert panel as witnesses, but talk to people who are experiencing it and are having challenges working within that system right now.

I know this will likely be happening, or you have avenues to do it, so respectfully, continue that. Be bold.

Look at your current policies. There are policies right now that are not working. I know policy change takes a long time. Just to illustrate this, I'll share one example that concerns the homelessness partnering strategy.

We are both a housing management body, a community-based organization, and a community entity. Something brilliant happened with the homelessness partnering strategy. We went from a three-year funding investment cycle to a five-year cycle. The federal government stated that Housing First was the priority. It has changed how the rest of Canada addresses homelessness.

It allowed us a couple of things. It allowed us to do longer-term planning with our communities. It also allowed us to leverage it and say to the provincial government, which does one-year funding, “Our federal government was bold enough to commit to five-year funding.” That has allowed us leverage points.

That's just one example, when you look at your policies, of what communities are saying and what's working well. Be bold and take those leaps of faith with your communities. They will do the hard work for you and implement your policies as they should be implemented, because people matter.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Now we go over to MP Long.

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

Thank you, Chair.

Good morning, everyone.

First I want to thank MP Motz for the invitation to this wonderful city. You have a great MP there, very passionate, and I have a lot of respect for him.

I have so many questions. I want to start with Ms. Weeks.

It's really not on housing but on early learning. It's about how in Saint John, New Brunswick, we're coming up with an early learning pilot called Learning Together, whereby we're going to propose that we go into priority neighbourhoods in Saint John, where there is 60% to 65% child poverty, and come up with an early learning concept with the schools.

How important do you think it would be, from a federal government perspective, to come up with a national early learning program offering structured early learning for three- and four-year-olds across the country?

[Reagan Weeks]

Well, I certainly think there is a role for the federal government in a strategy for early learning, but I also think it's critical to contextualize it according to community.

One challenge you have in establishing early learning programs is that if the children are not integrated with the larger learning community, then sometimes you can actually widen the gap inadvertently through a well-meaning strategy.

For instance, in Alberta we often have children who are funded with program unit funding, and so they're identified with sometimes very minor needs related to speech or other types of activities. Those children are amalgamated in many cases into one early learning setting, so that you have students who are struggling with language all together in one place.

The wisdom of that is questionable. Perhaps we need to do a better job of how we roll out this program. While I think it's very important, and I think many provinces would be in alignment with what you're doing in New Brunswick, I think we also need to have room to contextualize it.

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

I think the belief is that governments are great at alleviating, with the Canada child benefit or with various programs, but to get upstream of poverty, our long-term goal, I think early learning is something that nationally we should move forward on.

I also want you to comment on parallel parent programs and how important they are.

[Reagan Weeks]

I would argue that they're absolutely essential. I'll only speak to our area right now, but we are noticing, because of the expansive cumulative risk our children are experiencing and the high number of cases we have of students in our schools, that support for parents is critical. When the stress levels are so high, parents seem unable to take a step back and develop attachment-based parenting strategies. With these programs, which are offered in a non-threatening manner and are offered to the population at large and not just through specific referrals because a deficit has been identified, we're hoping for a significant uptick. We some of this work a trial in September. It was very well received, and we had a significant cross-pollination of families who attended, so we're hopeful.

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

We see a lot of parents in Saint John who want to help. They just don't know how to help.

[Reagan Weeks]

Precisely.

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

That's the issue.

Ms. Turner, thanks for the presentation. It was great.

Have you seen direct benefits of the Canada child benefit in Medicine Hat?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

That's a good question. I spent 20 hours going through the impact of that exact issue because I was recalculating the living wage for this report.

Yes, absolutely. Just to illustrate that, when Medicine Hat initially took on poverty work back in 2012, I believe the living wage calculation was $13 per hour. Obviously, when we recalculated for today, in 2017, it was $13.65, so it went up 65¢ an hour. Seriously, we put in all this work and it went up 65¢? What are we going to tell the community? The whole point was to make a case. It was even less than the minimum wage that was being proposed at $15. When we looked a little bit deeper as to why that was, it was because of the impact of that benefit being introduced six months into last year. Without that benefit, the living wage would have been closer to $15 per hour versus $13. You've effectively ruined the argument for a living wage in Medicine Hat because of that benefit, but it shows you how important it is.

Now, that's for children. If you look at singles, obviously, that benefit is not visible.

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

I'll just jump in. I think what's coming out of this and what we're seeing is that, again, I believe wholeheartedly that transformational change nationally comes from federal programs. The Canada child benefit is something that's a transformational initiative. The OAS/GIS is not the be-all and end-all, but it is very close to a living wage; it's inadequate, but nearly a living wage.

Can you comment on who we're missing and how—I think we know who they are, single people—and what you think we should do to try to help them?

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Unfortunately, I think the populations that get missed are the ones that our systems themselves find ways not to serve, so it's the chronically homeless and the people who have active addictions. It seems to be the ones who consistently get shut out of the system that we do have. Housing First is the first time when we said no and said we were going to flip things on their head and prioritize those who have been marginalized.

The trick with that is there always seems to be a loser in these initiatives, because even with Housing First, that investment has prioritized the chronically homeless population, but we've now forgotten about those who experience homelessness as a transitory experience. This has reverberated across the country. As awesome as Housing First has been and as great as it is that our cost-savings argument has leveraged those initiatives—we say that this guy's costing $100,000 and now he's costing $10,000—a youth who hasn't been going to emergency care, has been living on the street, and is engaging in the sex trade for survival is not costing us, so that extremely vulnerable youth is not a priority now because of our Housing First focus, so I would say that you need to consider the unintended consequences in all of this. In my research, I've talked to so many youth who say—pardon me—“I'm not effed up enough to get help.” That's not the intent, I'm sure, but it happens a lot.