Human Resources Committee on Nov. 2nd, 2017

[Mona Fortier, Liberal, Ottawa—Vanier, ON]

Thank you very much.

Now, I'll throw it over to Mr. Vaughan.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to ask questions.

The question back to Marika Albert would be, who gets to choose who is on the housing list in terms of co-housing? If public dollars are being spent, is it a public list, or is public money being used to make private choices as to who co-tenants with you?

[Marika Albert]

Can you just repeat your question again? There is a technical difficulty.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

Sure. Who gets to choose? If public dollars are financing co-housing models, is it a public list, or is it private and can they make choices as to who they let in and don't let in?

[Marika Albert]

Currently it's private, so the people who are working together choose who lives there.

One of the challenges is that after you come together initially as a group, somebody then passes away. Then how do you make that decision around who gets to buy your unit?

If it's publicly funded, there needs to be.... I don't think I can answer that question very well right now, but there needs to be more investigation on what that should actually look like. If it's publicly funded, the access should be broader, but we do need to think about it. We need to spend some time researching that aspect more fully.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

I'd like to raise another issue. One of the big challenges is aging indigenous seniors. If they are living in those environments, one of the patterns of care we need to support and we need to grow is the use of intergenerational supports for elders who sometimes bring in young members of the family to make sure they don't get surrendered to Children's Aid.

Do these co-housing models allow for that, or do we need to build specific indigenous communities for it? How do we manage that?

[Marika Albert]

I think it really depends on the design of the co-housing model. If there is a group of people who want to build something with larger units to have room to bring in family members to do caregiving, that's totally an option. They do sometimes have caregiving suites on site where family members can stay to support people.

I think also that this is a question that's really important to bring to indigenous communities. I think the folks in indigenous communities whom I know and work with would say that this is a model that they would want to keep in their community. It would reflect what they're already doing, but it would provide the structure to do that.

[Adam Vaughan, Liberal, Spadina—Fort York, ON]

As one last question, one of the other issues we're dealing with is the re-closeting of gay and lesbian, bi and trans, and two-spirited individuals. As they age, they often have to move back into communities where generational change hasn't happened. What happens when somebody who moves into the home ends up having to deal with that? If it's a private corporation and public money is funding it, how do we ensure that their human rights are protected in the private setting, when we've surrendered public dollars to a private corporation?

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Please be very brief.

[Marika Albert]

That's a very good point. I think we would have to look closely at how human rights legislation would provide a regulatory framework for that.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you.

Now we go over to MP Steven Blaney, please.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I want to thank all the witnesses for their very interesting comments. I would like to especially thank Ms. Westhaver for her testimony. I really liked when you brought the human touch of what you said, bringing a sense of peace in palliative care. It reminds us that there are humans behind this important work that this committee is doing.

I would like to focus my question with Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee, it really struck me when you said that the single most important issue for western countries is aging. I believe Mr. Miller also reverberated this comment.

I have a paper here that you wrote in 2016. It was entitled “Ottawa's plunge into deficits needs an exit strategy”. In this paper you said:

The biggest risk is that we slide inadvertently back into a fiscal hole that we cannot extract ourselves from.

My grandmother used to say, “He who pays his debt grows rich”.

I'm sorry; I went fast and I switched languages, but that's what my grandma used to say. She was not speaking English at that time, but that's what she said.

She would say, “He who pays his debt grows rich”.

That's kind of what she said.

My question to you is this. We are in relative period of prosperity, and still we are running a deficit. Are those deficits and the debt that Canada already has putting at risk our capacity to cope with what you described as the grey tsunami? As a society, are we playing with the future, not only of the country but of being able to cope with the needs of the elders that are coming in a large number in this country?

[Dr. Ian Lee]

Thank you for the question.

My answer is very nuanced. I have never ever suggested that Canada is about to go bankrupt. I am saying this as someone who has travelled around the world to many, many countries: we are truly one of the wealthiest countries on the planet earth, per person. I'm not playing words with GDP; I'm talking per person. We have one of the highest standards of living in the world. Actually, basically, we're tied with Germany, by the way.

My issue with the deficit is in terms of not today and not tomorrow and not with the federal government. It's with the provincial governments. I think within a very near future you are going to be called upon to bail out some provinces. How about New Brunswick? No offence if anyone is from New Brunswick. How about Newfoundland and Labrador? We aren't even yet at the tsunami, and the PBO has very clearly shown that provinces are going to be vulnerable because the burden of aging is going to fall disproportionately on them and they have fewer revenue sources than the federal government.

To finish the nuance, we are reducing our degrees of freedom because money is finite. That is to say, no government has infinite resources, so money spent today on this, on x, is not money that's available tomorrow to spend on y or z.

What I'm saying is that we know there's a tsunami of aging coming. We know that. This isn't a theory. It's coming, so we should husband our resources—sorry for the gendered language—and not squander our resources on things that are not essential. It's about choices.

Andrew Coyne has made this argument brilliantly. It's about choices, and budgets are about making choices, as Aaron Wildavsky, the late, great dean at Berkeley, used to argue all the time. That's my fundamental criticism.

It's not that Canada is going to fail and it's not that Canada is going to go bankrupt. We're reducing our degrees of freedom for the future.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

I'm sure your students will miss you soon, but you also wrote—

[Dr. Ian Lee]

I'm not retiring.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Oh, good.

My other question is in regard to old age security. You mentioned choices. What best choices can be made about the age of retirement in regard to what you've just said?

[Dr. Ian Lee]

I have argued very often that the answer is on our face in terms of, sadly, the tragedy of employer pensions failing, as we've seen with Sears, Nortel, and so forth, but we have brought it upon ourselves through this fraud that we have perpetrated on ourselves for the last 20 or 30 years in Canada. It's called “Freedom 55.” I believe that Freedom 55 is a fraud. It is an arithmetical economic fraud. It says that you can work for 20 or 30 years and go at age 55. We know life expectancy for a male is 81 and for a female is 84, so you can collect $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000 a year for the next 35 years and everything is going to be fine. Does anybody believe that you and your employer and the investment returns fully funded that kind of retirement in the 20 or 30 years you were working? Of course not.

We are not only putting people out and retiring them when we need more and more people in the workforce because of the aging, but we're creating a policy problem called “unfunded pension liabilities”, which is irresponsible. That's why chief economist Fred Vettese has argued for adopting the CPP model of age 60 to 70, with flexibility to the citizen. You take a penalty if you retire below 65, which is the current situation anyway with CPP, by the way, under the reforms, and you take a top-up if you go after 65. You boost your pension payout if you take your CPP after that.

We should adopt that across the board as the policy option, and in the process get rid of early retirement below 60.

[Steven Blaney, Conservative, Bellechasse—Les Etchemins—Lévis, QC]

Okay. I'm short on time and I don't want to abuse it, but thank you for those great answers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Bryan May]

Thank you very much.

Now we'll go to MP Morrissey, please.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Albert, in your opening statement you made reference to customizing the design of housing for seniors with dementia. Could you elaborate a bit on where you see the customization and how it deals with the issue of dementia?

[Marika Albert]

I can speak more broadly to how a community can do that. There are a couple of things. One is when we think about road signage, when we think about walkways, when we think about how we indicate whether or not and how you cross the street, where people can find information quickly, throwaway signage, all those things don't sound as though they're much, but they can create a much safer and more conducive environment for our citizens who are suffering from dementia.

The Alzheimer Society of British Columbia just created an amazing tool kit about how municipalities can redesign their communities or start to make small changes to then make it easier for residents with dementia to get around through things such as signage and accessibility—for instance, by making sidewalks smoother and making it harder to get stuck in certain areas. There are really some built environment changes that can happen.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

That's more from the community side. Do you see anything specifically in a co-habitat housing situation that would have a positive impact on dementia?

[Marika Albert]

One of the things is that co-housing developments are closed environments, so it would be difficult for residents to wander off. There are always people around, so there are people watching and looking out for each other. They also make signage clearer. There are pathways that are clearly designated. They can create environments where residents with dementia can create patterns. They know where to go and they have mutual support of their neighbours to support them through that process.

There's much more information in our report that I can send to you.

[Bobby Morrissey, Liberal, Egmont, PE]

Okay, thank you.

Mr. Miller, you said, “The federal government can give resources back to CMHC”. What were you referring to? What resources would go to CMHC?

[Glenn Miller]

At one point, until about seven or eight years ago, CMHC had a research arm that conducted research in co-operation with provinces and municipalities and the private sector. That disappeared. It vanished. They no longer carry out that type of proactive work.