Thank you, Madam Chair.
I would like to thank the panel for their presentations. It's been very insightful today, and very worthwhile. Certainly it's a panel that I would like to see come back, because we will be running out of time today.
I taught school at the junior high level for 22 years. A lot of my students--quite a few of them, an inordinate number of them--over the years landed up pregnant because they were older kids, and if they had a baby in our province, they were allowed housing. They were allowed an apartment. Of course, this was all under the social welfare program in the province.
The thing that always struck me as a teacher--I taught in the area of mathematics and science--was that in the teaching of students, when you start young, I believe, and you educate a population, it's very important to give them information. Here in our committee we have discovered that many older women do not know what they can apply for, so they don't apply for it. I know that many young people going out into the workforce do not know about RSPs and what they should do. They don't start planning for their retirement when they enter the workforce, which, as we now know, is what people should do.
I'm wondering if the National Council of Welfare has ever had an initiative that worked with schools, especially starting at the junior high level, where they had lobbied to have courses put into schools that would actually teach the population: this is what the world is like out there, this is what it costs to live, this is what happens if you make choices and become an unwed mother, if you make choices and have to leave home for whatever reason or leave home because you want to, to get in with peers. The courses would teach about the practicalities of living out there, the meat and potatoes of surviving and building a household.
When we talk about poverty, we all sort of shake our heads and wipe our brows and say, “My, this is a terrible problem, and we need to solve it.” We try to implement initiatives that will help that. But have we done anything to actually target the younger population before they enter the workforce so that they go out with the tools, with some sort of understanding of what they have to face, when they get out there?
There's a whole population in the public and the private school systems that.... I can tell you, as a teacher of 22 years, that what you teach in that classroom makes a huge difference. I'm wondering, when you look at all these alarming charts, if some of the focus should be right on the school systems.
I know it's a provincial jurisdiction, but here at Status of Women we also put transfer payments into the provinces for post-secondary. By the time they get to post-secondary, I think there's an overlap there, as there always is, in everything. When you're talking about affordable housing and things like that, it's a symbiotic relationship. Transfer payments are sent to the provinces, and the provinces make those decisions.
So we can't just make gross general statements, we have to be very targeted. I'd be very interested to know if there's any concerted initiative to do that, or if we can think about doing that, in all the provinces across our nation.