Status of Women Committee on May 1st, 2007

[Jacquie Maund]

I don't think it's in one package. The National Council of Welfare did a report on the cost of poverty a few years ago. There are bits and pieces. There's a piece that the London Children's Aid Society did on costs associated with increased children in child welfare. So there are bits and pieces. I haven't seen something that puts it all together.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

I think sending anything in our direction that has that would help us. I think it would be a help, because it helped Ireland to sell it.

The other point I have is about targets. I thought that was really significant. They are not what we had at the beginning. We've been talking about child poverty for 20 years, and nothing has come of it.

Would you give us a target to suggest, as to how to start?

[Jacquie Maund]

Sure. It would be a 25% reduction in the child poverty rate in five years, 50% in ten years.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

Thank you.

My final question is in the area of jurisdiction. As food banks, we have provincial associations. We have also a federal association, the Canadian Association of Food Banks. We find, when we're trying to deal with the child poverty file, that it's so difficult in jurisdictional terms. You have the federal government doing its thing and then you have provincial governments that come in and out, depending on who the administration is.

In your view, in light of what Ontario has done in its recent budget, do you see signs of hope at the provincial level, or does it worry you a bit that each province is coming up with its own solution, one not necessarily harmonized with the federal plan?

[Jacquie Maund]

I think there's an opportunity to harmonize. I think the provinces maybe are moving faster than the federal government at this point, but I think there's an opportunity to harmonize.

What we've talked about here are steps that we think can be taken at the federal level. We have provincial partners. I'm the Ontario coordinator, so I also have recommendations for what the provincial government in Ontario could do.

Campaign 2000 is currently working on what the components of a national poverty reduction strategy might be. We're beginning to flesh out how the federal and provincial governments might work together to undertake something like this.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

That would be helpful.

Thank you, Madam Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

You have one more minute, if you want to spend it.

[Glen Pearson, Liberal, London North Centre, ON]

No. I know others want....

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Okay. Ms. Minna was about to, but I guess I passed the chance.

I'll come back to you another time.

Ms. Davidson and Ms. Grewal, you have five minutes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you, Madam Chair, and I am sharing my time, so I'll be quick, with about three questions.

Certainly this is a huge issue, and I think you can see that everybody around the table agrees that it is. I think we also know there has been a lot of talk about it over the past however many years—twenty-some years—and we still see disturbing comments such as on the handout you gave us, “How's Canada doing in meeting the resolution? No Progress.” Those are things we shouldn't have to be looking at.

As governments over the past numbers of years, we should have been able to put something in so that this statement would be incorrect. Now is the time when we need to get something done, so let's hope the will is there to do it.

I have just a couple of questions. You base your statement and your statistics on the poverty line. What is the poverty line?

[Jacquie Maund]

Well, what we use is the Statistics Canada low-income cut-off. We use the pre-tax low-income cut-off.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

And what is that?

[Jacquie Maund]

It varies by the size of the family and the size of the community. I'll give you an example. I'll use 2004, because the data I used were from 2004, so it's two years behind.

Say you are looking at one mother with one child in a large city with a population of 500,000. If her before-tax earnings were $25,319, she would be considered living below the low-income cut-off, which is the de facto poverty line that's been in use for about fifty years.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Is everybody using the same thing? I've asked this question before, and people have told me that there is no poverty line now; it's a moving target, depending on.... Nobody can give.... You're the first person who's ever given me an answer with a figure.

[Jacquie Maund]

There are different measures of poverty. There's the low-income cut-off, which StatsCan defines pre-tax and post-tax. There's also what Europe uses and how the OECD does their reports that track different countries in terms of how they're doing. They use the low-income measure, which is 50% of median income. So they use LIM.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

I was interested in Canada, what we were using.

[Jacquie Maund]

There's LICO in Canada or there's what's called the “market basket measure”, which HRSDC, I think, started developing a few years ago. We're a few years behind. It hasn't been developed consistently. So certainly for our purposes, if we're looking historically, we always use the LICO because we can get that data every single year.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Do most organizations use that? Are most of the data based on that?

[Jacquie Maund]

I would say so, but I can't speak on behalf of all organizations. I would just say that if you're tracking the number over time, LICO is always available every year from Statistics Canada, so that's the one we use.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Okay.

Very quickly, in terms of the existing provincial plans, is there a similarity in them at all? You had said they probably could be harmonized, but is there a similarity in them now, or are they very different?

[Jacquie Maund]

We're looking at Quebec and Newfoundland. Quebec is a little different from other provinces, to begin with. They have their own child benefit. They're way ahead in terms of setting up a child care plan. So they've had a good start. Newfoundland...there are similarities. They look at housing. They look at child care. They look at income support. There are similarities there, yes.

[Patricia Davidson, Conservative, Sarnia—Lambton, ON]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Yasmin Ratansi]

Nina.

[Nina Grewal, Conservative, Fleetwood—Port Kells, BC]

Thank you, Madam Chair.

Thank you very much for coming here to speak with us today.

Denmark, Finland, and Norway are among the most wealthy nations, but they have the lowest rate of child poverty, and I assume the lowest rate of female poverty as well. So what is their secret? I want to know if you have some comments on that. Is it simply higher government spending, or is there another explanation for their success?

[Jacquie Maund]

The countries that have the lowest child poverty rates, below 5%, are Scandinavian countries. I can't describe their programs in detail. I can certainly refer you to a UNICEF report called Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005.

Basically my understanding is that they have a number of supports for families in terms of income support and generous parental maternity leave support. So it's certainly programs that support families. They also have a much stronger system of affordable housing that families can access. Those are the basic things. They also have better labour markets in terms of better-paying jobs. So they have the good-quality jobs plus the social investments and programs that support families.