Human Resources Committee on Feb. 17th, 2017

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Mr. Ruimy, you have a shortened question time, about four and a half or five minutes.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thanks. I want more than that.

Very quickly, before I move on to Ms. Kipps, Mayor Read, do you have any comments on that?

[Nicole Read]

I do. South of the Fraser has a very significant homeless problem. There is a street in Surrey that has a large number of homeless people. We recently saw the death of a youth who was aged out of care who died in a tent in Surrey. That was just recently. We're seeing homeless issues on both sides of the Fraser Valley, north and south.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

We're going to switch gears.

Ms. Kipps, I hear the frustration that's going on and everything, but I also know that we've got great things going on in our community. We've got great people who are, like my colleague on the other side, working together. There are challenges, but I'd like you to speak to some of the great things that you guys are doing that are having an impact on our youth, for instance, and on our seniors. You have the floor.

[Vicki Kipps]

Thank you very much.

What a great opportunity to highlight some of the successes that are happening in our community. Really, it's a short answer to say that those successes are derived from engaging people in the solution.

When we talk about the value of engaging stakeholders, I wholeheartedly encourage that. It's engaging people with lived experience, either living in situations of poverty, raising a child with a developmental disability, having a teenager with a mental illness, or having a senior who is living at home and being in that sandwich generation. The situations of life that we find ourselves don't matter; it is engaging people in the solutions.

We have had tremendous success in our communities of Pitt Meadows and Maple Ridge by bringing people together. We have an organization called the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows-Katzie Community Network. It's not a stand-alone organization, if you will, but it's a co-operative of faith-based organizations, government organizations, social services organizations, and citizens who come together and brainstorm solutions for our community.

Because of that, we've made a commitment to each other not to compete for funding when there are those provincial or federal grant opportunities, but rather to partner to see which organization has the competency to do that well. We support each other. We partner. We have found that we serve far more citizens and we address far more needs in our community when we work collaboratively through that community network, through things such as Alisa's Wish and the youth wellness centre to support dire situations that we know of on the street. We are all connected via email; obviously we're respectful of ethics and confidentiality, but we do not hesitate to reach out to each other to say, “There is this youth” or “There is this senior” or “There is this family”, and what can we do?

I would encourage some bravery to continue to look at wish number one—that there would always be new funding—but reality number two would be the courage to look at the reallocation of funding, at innovative solutions, and look at some of those initiatives across the country and some of them right here locally.

Dr. Matthew Chow, the psychiatrist, is a leader who is turning psychiatry on its head. We are providing psychiatric services to more youth in our community than in Vancouver, because of his approach from a community-integrated model. The idea is to be innovative.

Thank you.

[Dan Ruimy, Liberal, Pitt Meadows—Maple Ridge, BC]

Thank you.

Very quickly, I'm going to move on to Mr. Harvey.

When we had our national housing strategy round table, you said something to me in regard to a national housing strategy going hand in hand with a mental health strategy, and you gave me a number.

Do you remember that conversation, and can you talk about that?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Give a very brief answer, please.

[John Harvey]

I can barely remember yesterday, let alone....

I'll draw on the numbers as they come to mind, and our experience at Covenant House.

We know that 30% of the homeless youth we serve have acute mental health issues. About a year ago, we had a change in our model for the crisis program, the short-term residential beds, and we went to gender-specific programming. At any given time, historically, about 25% of our population would be female. Since we made that change, we've brought it up to about 50%. In the female population, no less than 60% of the time will we have an actual diagnosis of mental health issues. The diagnosis of mental health issues in the homeless population is significant.

We do know, and the research bears it out, that if you put somebody inside a house, with a roof and four walls, safe and clean, you will find the mental health issues stabilize, even if you did nothing else.

Of course, doing nothing else is not enough. I want to make this point here. We are in a crisis with respect to homelessness, and it's been a long time coming, but homelessness is only a symptom; it's not the actual crisis. That's where our attention is drawn to, and rightly so, but we got here over the course of 25 years, and we have an opportunity right now, again....

In 1968 we started a very similar conversation, and we're going to keep having this conversation until we actually say, “What is our responsibility?” The question we're going to ask with respect to housing is this: “Is housing is a right, or is housing a privilege? Are timely medical supports a right or a privilege? Is education for our youth a right or a privilege?” Those are fundamental. If you go down the rabbit hole, you're going to come out in different places on different answers. It's how you choose to answer that question.

I also want to point out what Mayor Read pointed out earlier: Housing First is great—we need to get people into buildings—but it has to come with the accompanying resources to support the individual to stay. In terms of evidence, Housing First is only for mental health and addictions. For everything else there's a lot of evidence informing us that it's promising, but we only have the evidence to know that if you put individuals who have mental health issues and addiction in housing and support them, they are going to have a good outcome.

These are nuances, technical questions. I'm going to go back to what I said before: what do we believe to be true of our citizens?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Excellent. Thank you very much, sir.

For the last word, it's MP Sansoucy.

[Brigitte Sansoucy, NDP, Saint-Hyacinthe—Bagot, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I am pleased that for the second time in two days a woman who works in the field is challenging us to be courageous.

Ms. Read, you said earlier that you had witnessed the situations indigenous communities experience. In the context of our study, what particular situations should we consider? What should we propose to allow different solutions to emerge from those communities?

[Nicole Read]

You know, I would be remiss to not say that we have a very bad history as Canadians in dealing with some of these issues with aboriginal people, most notably taking kids away from their families and putting them in residential schools. That's created a huge fracture that's multi-generational, and it's going to take time to heal.

I believe first nations in this country need to be engaged on the issues to speak to what kinds of resources they need and how to use funding. Clearly, we need to make sure that aboriginal children are connecting to education, that we are really supporting aboriginal children in our public education system and giving them opportunities to access post-secondary education.

We have reserves in this country that don't have proper housing or safe water. We're dealing with, on some of our reserves, third-world living conditions. We can't do that anymore. We have to be able to engage first nations leadership across the country and look at ways to fund, with a large significant package, ways to get the reserves up to the standard the rest of our country enjoys. I think that's very important.

Also on the issue of health care, I watched on the news—and I'm sorry I can't recall the actual aboriginal community that had a suicide pact most recently—and saw that a private donor came forward and donated over $300,000. Why is a private donor having to donate $300,000 when aboriginal children on reserve have a suicide pact and parents are losing their children? That's not acceptable. We need to support these communities.

We have gone through litigation for years to reach a settlement agreement and to get an apology on residential schools. But the whole taking away of children from a family.... The children didn't get parented in residential schools. They didn't learn how to be parents. Then they came out of the schools and they had their own children. There's so much residual pain that's connected to the history of that system that it is going to take many generations to heal. In that healing journey, we need to make sure that we're supporting people emotionally with mental health resources and parenting resources. I think that's really important.

Many good recommendations came out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission around these issues, and we have very good leadership in Canada from aboriginal people who have some really good ideas about the things that we can do to reduce poverty and to give our aboriginal children of the future the best chance they can get.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much. I'll have to close it down there.

I want to thank each and every one of you for taking the time to come and speak to us today. There were a lot of very good questions, a lot of very good answers, and I think a lot more questions to come. Thank you very much.

Thank you to committee members. We will be breaking for lunch and coming back into this space for our second round.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Good afternoon, everybody.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), the HUMA committee is continuing its study on poverty reduction.

We're very pleased to have our second round of witnesses here in Maple Ridge, B.C., hosted by the venerable MP Dan Ruimy.

I apologize for getting started a bit late. We will get started immediately and hear from all of our witnesses.

From the City of New Westminster, we have Lorrie Williams, councillor. From the Community Education on Environment and Development Centre Society, we have Christian Cowley, executive director, and Teesha Sharma, youth services director. From the Co-operative Housing Federation of British Columbia, we have Thom Armstrong, executive director. Finally, from the Multicultural Helping House Society, Marius Alparaque, program coordinator, pre-arrival and post-arrival programs. Welcome to all of you.

I will be giving each of you seven minutes to introduce yourselves and tell us why you're here. Once we're done that, we'll have questions, obviously, for everybody.

To start us off, from the City of New Westminster, we have Councillor Lorrie Williams. Welcome.

[Lorrie Williams, Councillor, City of New Westminster]

Thank you, and thank you for not saying “minister”, but rather, “minster”.

There are two things you don't do in New Westminster. You do not say “New Westminister”, and you don't turn left at Sixth and Sixth.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

I'll take your word for that.

[Lorrie Williams]

If you come to our town, we'll shake our umbrellas at you if you do that.

Thank you for this opportunity to address you today. I think this is a very important task force and I'm awfully glad that the government has set it up.

A few months ago a man came to our council to speak at the open delegation segment of our meeting. Our citizens are afforded five minutes. It's a risky move, but I'm proud of my city's courage in allowing an open mike.

This man was almost in tears as he described his situation. Both he and his wife had low-paying jobs and had been managing until he became a victim of a rent eviction. His rent was going to be almost double and he could not find any other affordable accommodation in our city. He desperately wanted to stay in New Westminster, near his work as he had no car, and where his children went to school. This is an example of some of the challenges facing the working poor. This is why New Westminster has made a real effort in poverty reduction, and this is why we have developed a real poverty reduction initiative.

We were the first municipality in Canada to institute a living wage bylaw in 2011, and we are considered to be a municipal leader in the areas of child care, homelessness, and housing affordability. Despite these efforts, however, poverty remains a pervasive issue in New Westminster. We cannot do it alone. We need the support of senior levels of government.

I will share with you our numerous strategies because you have asked specifically for suggestions on how to reduce poverty.

It started, as all municipal things do, with the formation of a committee tasked to develop a strategy. As a result, 29 municipal actions were identified as directly addressing the needs of people, including families, who are living in poverty and with low incomes. These actions include, first, a living wage bylaw that ensures that municipal staff and contracted workers are paid enough to meet basic, locally calculated expenses.

I'm going to give all of these to the committee so I'm hoping that you'll be able to use them. We're very proud of them.

Second is an affordable housing reserve fund and two small sites for affordable housing projects. Third is a secure market rental housing policy. This is to prevent people from changing our rental units into condos. It's not allowed in our city. Fourth is a tenant relocation policy in 2015, and a rent eviction action plan.

Fifth is a rent bank program, and I'll just stray a bit to tell you that Judy Darcy spoke yesterday in the legislature about the rent bank that New Westminster has set up with the help of our local credit unions. This, of course, is to allow people who are going to be late on their rent to come and get money to cover their rent.

Sixth is a child care grant program and a reserve fund. Seventh is having a community and social services asset map for people in need to find out where to get help. Eighth is a newcomer's guide that acts as a resource to newcomers during the first six months and after arrival. There's even a parks and recreational subsidy program and an affordable active living.... We give very cheap swimming lessons, skating, whatever.

Now, this is the thing that we're most proud of. Our full poverty reduction strategy contains 70 actions, which you can find in the reports that I have shared with you. I have made copies for the entire committee.

In addition to the strategies, a chief consideration is to raise community awareness regarding poverty and its impact. As a means of building support for its implementation and to reduce the stigma associated with poverty, the committee prepared “Poverty Mythbusters”, a document. Each week we put one of the myths into our local paper so that people can read and understand what poverty is really about.

Given that I now have the ear of the federal government, I will say what an important role you have to play, as you are best positioned to reduce systemic barriers contributing to poverty. You have the resources to initiate policies, programs, and services, to raise people, including families, out of poverty.

Many of the issues are beyond the jurisdiction or the scope of municipal government and its community partners. We have only eight cents of every tax dollar. That's all that's going to municipalities. You're asking too much of us. We are struggling with infrastructure deficits, provincial downloading, and an aging population.

Please, develop a national housing strategy, and give us more money. I assure you, we will spend it wisely. We interact daily with the problem. We know what to do. Just help us to do it.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much. I'm sure there are many questions milling about in the minds of our committee members right now with all these fantastic strategies.

From the Community Education on Environment and Development Centre Society, Christian Cowley and Teesha Sharma, the next seven minutes are yours.

[Christian Cowley, Executive Director, Community Education on Environment and Development Centre Society]

Thank you very much, Chairman May.

Today we have two things to ask of the federal government. One is to create a specific and distinct strategy for youth homelessness, and the other is to directly fund long-term youth shelters and housing for the reasons we will be revealing next, in terms of lived experience.

My colleague, Teesha, has lived every aspect of the youth homelessness that we're going to be talking about today. She has suffered through it all and come out very strong, as we believe every one of the youths who are currently in the situations we're going to describe can, within one year of us finding them in their situations.

We're actually going to speak about two distinct populations. The first is children aged 13 to 18 who land on the street, usually at the age of 13 or 14. The second is youth who have not gotten there yet. If we have that long-term housing and shelter there for them when they land on the streets, they will not encounter these situations.

I'm going to turn it over to Teesha to describe some of her regrettable experiences.

[Teesha Sharma, Youth Services Director, Community Education on Environment and Development Centre Society]

I'm just going to open by saying thanks a lot.

We spent the morning listening to a lot of facts and statistics, and seeing how things look on paper. The reason I am really grateful to be here—nervous as hell but really grateful—is that I want to be able to provide you with a sense of how it actually feels, what it actually looks like, and how things actually play out, because I think a lot of that tends to be put into a nice report, and we lose the human side of things. I will be providing the analysts with some of that. Feel free to ask, if you have questions after this.

[Christian Cowley]

We have 16 youth on the street here who are living as sex slaves or gang tools. Usually the story is that they have trauma at home, usually abuse, or torture in some cases, and they are brought to the notice of a provincial ministry that then tries to put them into foster care. That usually fails because sometimes the foster care homes are also traumatizing for these youth. Then, they are offered services that they're not able to use because of their trauma.

We often hear the terms “trauma-informed approaches”, or “trauma-informed care”. It seldom actually takes place.

I've met with the ministry and they've given me a long list of wonderful programs that these youth are supposedly given, and then there are the youth who refuse these services. The reason they refuse them is that the programs do not take into account their trauma and the things they've faced.

It could be something as simple as going to a ministry psychological counsellor and being asked by the counsellor to close their eyes in a room with a person of the same sex as their abuser, and then being cited as being non-compliant and told, “Don't come back.”

Abandoning youth.... Even when we do give them housing, the list on the website indicates about six or eight different services that they get. They don't get those services. This is the situation that these youth face.

The typical story we have in writing for you. We were able to get that done. It wasn't in time for translation, so we hope you do get this document later.

A typical pathway for one of these youth...and we have eight girls and eight boys. Teesha is in direct contact with all of them.

The typical path is that a youth experiences significant trauma at home. This can be anything, including torture—literally. People take bets with their friends on torturing their kids. This goes on. This is true. The scars and bruises finally get noticed. A good teacher can find them. The ministry gets notified about the youth, and the ministry lets them down in many ways. The youth becomes homeless and is thrust into survival mode. They hit the street at the age of 13 or 14. They are then targeted by a predatory adult who gives them clothing and warmth and food for about a month before they switch the youth into being a sex slave by grooming them.

The youth encounters multiple barriers to accessing resources and support. Their need for belonging and protection continues to increase, and is actually exacerbated by their ongoing trauma. They are groomed by that predatory adult. They are usually introduced to illegal substances and then become dependent on them. They become dependent on that predatory adult for some aspects. They are also literally imprisoned by them. They are blindfolded when they are transported to clients' homes. You'll see them wearing sunglasses. There's a blindfold under those sunglasses.

Their mental capacity diminishes under this kind of treatment. They've long lost any kind of trust in adults. Anybody coming to them with services is not likely to be believed. They don't have the skills or resources to have the capacity to change their circumstances individually.

[Teesha Sharma]

I'll give you a little bit of an idea of what happens. I many times had to go through this cycle where my dad would break one of my bones and I would get sent to an emergency shelter. You can stay there for seven days, but you cannot be in that shelter during the day. We don't have any emergency shelters in this area, so they were often sending me to the Downtown Eastside without support during the day. You can go back to the shelter and try to sleep for a few hours each night, but after seven days you're discharged back into homelessness. You try to find another youth shelter that has a bed, but they all are operating at capacity because the need is so great.

What kept happening to me in my situation—it's what happens to a lot of the youth I work with now—was that I would get sent back home many times after seven days of respite, and then something worse would happen at home.

That cycle just continues and continues and continues until you stop telling anybody what's going on. You just live with it until you either commit suicide or you....

Our youth don't have options. I just want people to start thinking about “seven days”. If you have something that is catastrophic or damaging happen to you in your life, and then you're told that you have seven days in a shelter of some kind and then it's over, I think we can all agree that those seven days won't be enough to get anything fixed in your own life or to change anything.

[Christian Cowley]

In 2014, with the change in policy of the homelessness partnering strategy, all support for youth shelters was terminated. It went exclusively to the housing first policy, which I laud highly, but we have zero resources for youth in our community. There is no food source for which they are eligible unless they are 19 or older. There is no shelter.

There are, I think, 23...?

[Teesha Sharma]

There are 20 low-barrier beds in all of B.C., and they are operating to capacity every single night.

[Christian Cowley]

There are only 20 beds for all of the Lower Mainland, which has two million to three million people. Our youth homelessness segment for this age group alone, between 13 and 18, is 16 in a population of 100,000.