Human Resources Committee on Feb. 16th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I call the meeting to order. Good morning, everyone.

This is fantastic. For the record, I'm sitting under a disco ball. I just wanted to get that in the blues.

[Some hon. members]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We're a bit punchy this morning. I apologize. We got in very early this morning. I don't smoke, I promise, but it sounds like I'm on my second pack of the day.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday June 13, 2016, the committee is resuming its study of poverty reduction strategies. We're very pleased to be in Medicine Hat, Alberta, continuing the component of our study on housing in neighbourhoods.

We are joined at the table by member of Parliament, Glen Motz. As a point of housekeeping, I just need to seek unanimous consent from the committee that Glen can ask questions.

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We've been looking forward to this visit, and MP Motz has been very passionate about making sure that we stop here on our cross-country tour. We're looking forward not only to the testimony but to some of his insight as well.

Very quickly, I would like to introduce our first panel. From Medicine Hat Community Housing Society, we have Robin Miiller, chief administrative officer, and Jaime Rogers, manager, homeless and housing development department. Welcome to both of you.

From the Prairie Rose School Division, we welcome Reagan Weeks, assistant superintendent, Alberta Education.

From Turner Strategies, we have Dr. Alina Turner, principal. Thank you.

Welcome also to John Brown, associate dean in the faculty of environmental design at the University of Calgary.

We're going to allow you to start us off this morning, and each organization will receive seven minutes for their opening remarks. After everyone has had an opportunity to speak, we'll have a series of questions.

We're going to go in reverse order, beginning with Mr. John Brown, associate dean, faculty of environmental design, from the University of Calgary. The next seven minutes are yours, sir.

[John Brown, Associate Dean, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary]

Thank you very much.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Alberta.

I am an architect and I am here to speak about an innovative housing option that we are developing as part of a research project for seniors. It has applicability to poverty reduction.

I will provide a little background before I speak to the images you have in the package I provided.

According to the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' report in 2015 entitled “Seniors and Housing: The Challenge Ahead”, we are facing not only a wave of seniors but a wave of seniors who are increasingly challenged with poverty.

For a bit of context, there are currently five million adults over 65, and by 2036 that number will become 10 million. On average, housing affordability affects older seniors more severely than it does younger seniors, which makes sense. To put that in some context, in Edmonton, for example, the population aged 80 and over is going to increase 266% between 2006 and 2041.

Housing affordability is a particularly acute challenge in Canada's largest urban communities, where there is a higher concentration of poor households led by seniors. According to the FCM report, 23.4% of Canadian senior-led households currently face housing affordability challenges. Almost half—48.1%—of senior renters are living in unaffordable housing. By contrast, 15% of senior-led homeowners in Canada face affordability challenges, usually because those people own their own homes.

Affordability challenges extend beyond just the cost or provision of the housing, and that's my interest as an architect. The reality is that most Canadian homes, whether they're owned or rented and whether they're apartments or single-family houses, are not designed to meet the needs of seniors, particularly when they develop mobility and other health concerns. These homes require modifications to accommodate aging in place, which is difficult and expensive, and which further decreases affordability.

[John Brown]

These modifications are usually not possible to do in rental accommodation, so the people who are most challenged economically are not able to acquire these modifications, but even when those modifications are possible and affordable, they are needed only for a very short period of time, so their value is undermined. Undertaking those kinds of drastic modifications—say, widening doorways when you're trying to create a bathroom that's accessible out of one that's not—often undermines the long-term resale value of these properties as well, which for larger family groups that are also economically disadvantaged causes another problem.

There is also the increase in informal care cost by family members when older family members are in inappropriate housing and need additional care, and that further erodes financial capacity.

The reality is that many seniors end up in hospital or long-term care because their home cannot support their needs. They're the so-called bed-blockers. This can also be very expensive, not only to seniors and their families but also to society as a whole.

The age-in-place housing project that I have attached is an attempt to address these problems. Although it's not specifically a poverty reduction scheme, it does address the needs of affordability in this age category. You see before you a prototype for a prefabricated modular portable temporarily leased project.

Let me go back through that. It's prefabricated, so it's mass-produced, so we get the costs down. It's modular, so the interior can be specifically adapted to the medical and mobility needs of each particular resident. It's portable, in that it's designed to be placed in the backyard of almost any house in Canada, and it is temporary, so it's only there for the time period it is needed.

We're doing a first-generation test in the community this fall. If that proves to be successful, we'll start thinking about what the business model might be, but it would be centrally owned as a public/private partnership, a private corporation, or a public corporation, so they would centrally own it and lease it to the individual. Just as you don't have to pay for an expensive IV pump or an oxygen concentrator or a wheelchair, you simply use it for the time you need it, and there might be some sort of pay arrangement. That's the same situation we would have here.

Our hope is that in the long term, either as part of an affordability strategy or as part of a health care provision, there might be some sort of copay arrangement that would offset that cost. You'll see on page 2 how this might be arranged on a lot where there is a street in the backyard. It would arrive by truck. It's about 420 square feet and it would be placed in the backyard with an umbilical cord connection to the house.

We foresee that this could either be at an older person's house—the person can no longer live in it and moves into the backyard then rents out their house—or it could be a family member's house, and they live in the backyard. It could be two friends, both of whom are elderly, and one can no longer manage, so the couple moves in behind. It could be a true third-party situation, where someone who is interested might rent out their property in a similar way to home day cares and that sort of thing.

I see my time is up. Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

You had about 30 seconds left, so I wasn't going to call you too quickly, but thanks for keeping me on my toes.

We're going to go to Dr. Alina Turner, from Turner Strategies. The next seven minutes are yours, and you can use all seven.

[Dr. Alina Turner, Principal, Turner Strategies]

I thought about what would be most useful for you, having looked at some of the materials that you've already covered in your trek across Canada, and also respecting the fact that we are in Medicine Hat and have an interest in what's happening locally.

I thought I would give you a better sense of the promising practices that we're seeing from a broader system planning perspective around poverty and then challenge some of the assumptions around a focus on strictly income.

A lot of the presentations you've seen have tended to focus on basic needs-related issues, with things like housing, income, savings, etc., which are absolutely essential. I'm not saying that those are not necessary to a poverty strategy, but looking from the ground up, we're seeing something of a more holistic picture. I wanted to take you through some of those ideas, which are also specific to Medicine Hat's new poverty strategy. You'll hear more about that from my colleagues.

When we asked people experiencing poverty or vulnerability what it means to be living in poverty and what an end to poverty looks like from their perspective, they obviously often talked about their need to afford housing and their inability to pay rent on time. They also talked about the mental stresses that come with that experience.

We wanted to shift the lens from a conversation just about whether we should support a living wage or basic minimum income and say to you that if we want to really tackle poverty, we need to have a multi-dimensional lens to it.

I try to illustrate how interconnected these issues are on slide 4, which shows the key factors to end poverty. There you see it ranges from health and wellness to housing, transportation, safety, inclusion, and belonging. There are about 13 of these factors. When we ask people living in poverty what it means to them to have a life that's full of well-being, these are the factors.... Oh, it looks like you're a little bit confused.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

No, I'm just looking for your package.

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Okay. Maybe I'll wait until you get the package. Shall I keep going? All right.

This idea of a multidimensional approach to poverty reduction is what—

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

I have a point of order, Chair. This is so you don't keep saying things when we're focused on something else. Do we have a package?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We'll find that out right now.

Committee rules say that we can't distribute it unless it's translated. For the purposes of the ability to explain, if I can get unanimous consent to distribute, will we do so?

[Some hon. members]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

We're going to suspend for one minute while we get this organized....

Actually, I'm going to suggest we come back to you. I'm not sure how long this is going to take.

I suggest we move on, because we have to do all the presentations before we do questions anyway. I am going to suggest that we move on to Ms. Reagan Weeks, assistant superintendent, Alberta Education, from Prairie Rose School Division.

You don't have a presentation that we have to worry about?

[Reagan Weeks, Assistant Superintendent, Alberta Education, Prairie Rose School Division]

I wrote a policy brief. Unfortunately, it's not translated.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

That's okay. For the next seven minutes, go ahead.

[Reagan Weeks]

All right. Thank you kindly.

I work for Prairie Rose School Division, which services rural areas all around the city of Medicine Hat.

Rural poverty has some interesting aspects that are unique compared to the challenges faced in more urban centres. We serve north all the way to New Brigden, which is in the Oyen area. We serve Ralston and Jenner, and then from Foremost through to Bow Island. The geographic area is very vast.

It is a moral imperative that every student be systemically supported regardless of their socioeconomic status or any other background variables to reach equitable educational outcomes. A comprehensive framework for addressing poverty has been created by this poverty coalition team. I'm excited to consider the role that education in our area might play in the realization of this plan.

In the policy brief there is some theoretical and empirical support for framing schools as vehicles for improved community outcomes and a discussion of the potential and current roles that we play in the implementation of this framework

Adverse childhood experiences, which are often referred to as ACEs, have a far-reaching impact on children's neurophysiology and on the academic and non-academic competencies required for school success, such as language, working memory, executive functioning, persistence, aggression, and avoidance. Ample evidence exists that the physical, psychological, and emotional burden of enduring high levels of cumulative risk is a driver in unequal achievement.

Schools can play a key role by implementing the successful community involvement plans that influence both beliefs and educational outcomes by mitigating some of the risk, resulting in the attainment of higher levels of education and assisting students in building social capital within their community.

I'd like to speak to a problem that is very apparent in southern Alberta and in areas of Manitoba as well, and it relates to the idea of “opportunity to learn”, which is an academic concept that has been created by Gee. They argue that for “opportunity to learn”, affordances are not enough. “Affordances” refer to any perceived action or possibilities that are created by organizations. In order to actually attain “opportunity to learn”, a person must have the capacity to turn an affordance into an effectivity, which means they must actually realize outcomes.

In this area, we serve a large Mennonite population that speaks Low German, and these students often miss vast chunks of school. They're encouraged to leave the school system by grade 9, and females are often encouraged to leave much earlier than that. In congregated home-school settings, uncertified teachers and often people who are illiterate are running these settings, and these people are often segregated from the larger community.

We have made significant efforts and strides in addressing the educational needs of this community, including establishing programs in health care aid and culinary arts that target females to learn. In their communities they're often allowed to work in those fields. This means it may be possible for these females to be independent in the future, should the need or want ever arise.

Continued efforts in this regard are critical in order to meet the growing needs of this population. The numbers of these children are difficult to estimate, because they have a migration lifestyle; however, we know that in our immediate area we are attempting to serve well over 2,000 of these students.

I'd also like to talk to you today about community system planning. We have a program in our area called Fresh Start for School in which over 35 local, provincial, and federal organizations assist 330 students and their families at the beginning of the year. The philosophy is that when families are well, children are well and better positioned to learn.

Here is a quick narrative around this. We had a young gentleman attending one of our high schools whose shoes were so small his toes were coming out of the end. When this program delivered those shoes to him, he actually cried with joy. He was able to reduce a number of stresses in his life, which meant he was better able to engage in the curriculum we were providing in that school and more likely to reach success as he moved forward.

These organizations include health, so people are able to receive everything from immunizations to haircuts at the site. Everything is amalgamated, so people are also able to enrol in services, the goal being that once you've used this program, you won't need to use it again.

Having said that, we also know this will not end poverty and that further work is needed to better integrate these services so that referral processes are amalgamated and we're able to have a consistent response, rather than a one-time effort.

The next thing I'd like to talk about is the business innovation that is occurring. We've established a number of dual credit opportunities that allow students to seek trade certifications and begin their work on college credits and other types of certifications while they are still in high school. This helps with the school-to-work transition and helps reduce costs for students for whom post-secondary education seems financially out of reach or who are required to work. We've also established two night schools that allow children access to educational outcomes, particularly our Mennonite population and other children who have to work. These are run by certified teachers, and we keep them open to the general public and have flexible enrolment. We're also working hard to ensure that we have the technological infrastructure so that people can access these programs remotely.

Transportation is probably our largest barrier. Funding models fail to account for our vast geography. As a result, deficits within the transportation budget are required annually, just to ensure that children make it to school every day. Further, rural poverty is less researched and less mitigated. Services do not scale in our rural areas and are more difficult to access due to transportation. Therefore, resources allocated to these citizens end up, in large part, going towards windshield time in order to ensure professionals are able to reach people who are desperate for the limited therapy hours.

We'd also like to note that within our working population, the Alberta school employee benefit plan notes that one in three teachers, or one of their family members, accesses antidepression or anti-anxiety medication, as compared to one in 10 in the general Alberta population. We know that we need to improve wellness in our schools and in our educational system, so as a result, we have been implementing a comprehensive wellness model.

We are also training six facilitators in a Connect program, which is empirically supported attachment-based parenting. These programs will be taught free of charge to parents in over 10 different communities to help assist with the mounting socio-emotional needs that we are seeing in our child population.

I would like to conclude with the work that we have done in early childhood education spaces. Across the communities we serve, we have a number of early childhood education spaces within our schools managed by local boards and taught by certified teachers. Additionally, space-sharing approaches have been created in a number of sites whereby private child care spaces are offered within our schools. This saves on infrastructure costs, assists parents with transportation expenses, and also allows for shared expertise. This work needs to be expanded.

Finally, I would like to conclude with the work we would like to see next, and that is the creation of a child wellness centre where we would be better able to comprehensively serve the mounting socio-emotional needs that we are seeing across our communities. This would include family wellness therapy, an amalgamation of service providers, and leadership through appreciative inquiry, which recognizes the strength of the families that we're serving and also the various professionals who are working to achieve the mitigation of adverse childhood experience.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

We're going to return to Dr. Turner now. We'll give you back seven minutes. We all have your presentation now.

[Dr. Alina Turner]

Do I have seven minutes?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Yes, go ahead. My apologies.

[Dr. Alina Turner]

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.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you so much.

Last, but definitely not least, from Medicine Hat Community Housing Society, we have Robin Miiller and Jaime Rogers.

[Robin Miiller, Chief Administrative Officer, Medicine Hat Community Housing Society]

Thank you so much for having us here today.

I'm going to say a few things that you have probably heard already, because they're important points. Alina just mentioned the value of ensuring that we listen to the voices of people with lived experience, and while this is a slightly different context, the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society has lived the experience of leading very complex plans in our community to end homelessness.

I am very proud to be the leader of the community organization that led that plan in our community, along with Jaime Rogers, who is one of my colleagues. I'm very proud that she has been personally responsible for leading that work in our community. In Medicine Hat, we have evolved as an organization that I lead, the housing organization that you would understand as your housing authority or housing management body. There are many of these across the country.

We've evolved in understanding the value not just of housing people in inexpensive housing; we also understand that people often walk through our doors with a multitude of barriers in their lives, affordable housing being only one of them. We have expanded our approach to not just the provision of affordable housing but also provision of connectivity to the community resources that are necessary to ensure that people have stability in their lives in all areas. We've included the development of outreach programs within our organization that work directly with people to address other issues in their lives besides housing. That is also the approach that is taken in our plans to end homelessness.

I want to speak to some very specific points that we believe are important elements around affordable housing. Then I'm going to let Jaime speak to some of the issues that are relevant. She's much more eloquent on this subject than I am.

From the viewpoint of an affordable housing lens, what we feel are the most important elements to focus on are lending our voice to the call for a national and provincial housing strategy; renewed government investment in new affordable housing options; repairs and upgrades to existing housing stock—we manage more than 500 social housing properties that are falling into disrepair because of not having attention paid to these matters—and exploring how current affordable housing options can best integrate with community systems. It is thus not just housing alone, but housing first.

There are also the elements of challenging and working alongside provincial and federal governments to rethink eligibility requirements and affordability criteria. The definitions we run on today are very outdated. They're actually many times inappropriately serving people who could manage on their own, and this does not leave us the flexibility to serve people who are in deeper need.

We are working in our organization towards the goal of providing a nuance and perspective to affordability, what we call “affordability indexing”. It will examine existing affordability rates and current subsidy rates based on adjusted income and will propose new rates based on total income, including income benefits that are provided to low-income families. Currently there are 291 households on the wait list for social housing in our community. This represents 505 individuals, including 109 children.

Access to safe, appropriate, and affordable housing, not only in our community but across Canada, is a national crisis. Increased investment in this area is necessary. With the development of a national housing strategy, we're optimistic that the strategy will include a comprehensive investment and implementation plan.

I think this is a key point in a strategy: that plans will go very slowly unless there is committed investment over the long term. Resources that have supported our plans to end homelessness in Alberta and in Medicine Hat were deeply invested in by provincial government, and that was one of the keys to our success, as well as promoting local decision-making, as you have already heard, and the authority to develop and invest in housing options for the local context. A community is in the best position to know what is going to work for its community members.

We need an accountability framework for those receiving funds for affordable housing, including provincial and territorial governments. With funding comes accountability, and with accountability comes a responsibility for delivering on outcomes. We know that works. We've been working under this framework for the last seven years.

Now I'll talk about long-term planning versus being reactionary.

Medicine Hat is recognized internationally as the first community to end chronic homelessness, yet one additional economic hit or natural disaster has the ability to set us back exponentially from where we are today.

Our systems, while robust and comprehensive, rely on continued and sustained government contributions. This economic hit could be gas and oil industry-induced or government-induced through lack of continued investment in strategies that have proven outcomes.

Lastly, poverty reduction is homelessness prevention. Access to appropriate housing should, therefore, be seen first from a perspective of a preventive response to homelessness. Currently, access to appropriate affordable housing is sometimes experienced by those living in poverty as a stroke of luck. We should not have to rely on luck to have appropriate housing.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Do you want to add anything?