Human Resources committee  Yes.

Human Resources committee  Sorry, more awareness around...?

Human Resources committee  Okay, for us, we do a lot of speaking in the first person. Today we saw Mr. Wood speaking about his story and the impact certain things had on his life. We use the same. We use first-person stories. It's a low-income worker who goes out into the community to talk about what they'

Human Resources committee  I also sit on the income security reform working group for the province. Some of the materials I've come across suggest that very low assistance pre-employment and punitive ideas, such as you must force a job search, aren't working, and they haven't worked for 20 years. What we a

Human Resources committee  Definitely. We need regulations stopping payday lenders from the very high rates and the—I'm going to use this term loosely, and it's totally a personal term—entrapment involved. They target communities that can't afford these loans.

Human Resources committee  It gets to the point that, even if someone's working at an adequate job, so much of their income is going towards maintaining it, that it's creating this cyclical poverty in communities. That's what we're referring to when we suggest lowering the amount of interest and how they r

Human Resources committee  Definitely, especially for pharmacare what we have found, in a specific single scenario, a single mother gets sick and can't afford antibiotics. She avoids actually taking time off because she doesn't have sick days. Even the inclusion of sick days would help. She gets so ill tha

Human Resources committee  Just briefly, revising CPP and GIS is important because when women as mothers take time off during their working years, their CPP is always lower. When teenagers are looking for work it's difficult when seniors are taking those part-time jobs that students usually rely on. The ot

Human Resources committee  Thank you for that. Honestly, one of our biggest programs is an adaptation of Housing First. We have found that once people are stabilized, there is a rapid reintroduction to employment. Once you lose a job and you become homeless, it's very hard to continue to search for work to

Human Resources committee  The Canada child benefit as implemented has helped enormously. We've seen our numbers rise, especially in single-parent households, so that's fabulous. We're looking at teenage single parents but also women going through separation and divorce. The problem isn't so much that wo

Human Resources committee  Good morning, Chair, Vice-Chairs, and committee members. My name is Laura Cattari, and I am speaking to you today on behalf of the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction. In May 2005, the Hamilton Roundtable for Poverty Reduction was co-convened by the Hamilton Community Foun