Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs,
Science and Technology
Issue 28 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, March 3, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 3:45 p.m. to consider the dimensions of social cohesion in Canada in the context of globalization and other economic and structural forces that influence trust and reciprocity among Canadians.
Senator Lowell Murray (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Ms Johannson is the Chairperson of the Canadian Association of the Non-Employed. We have been furnished with a description of that organization in both official languages. I suspect that in her brief opening statement, Ms Johannson will tell us something about the organization and address herself to the subject that is before us, namely social cohesion.
Welcome, Ms Johannson. Please proceed.
Ms Joan Johannson, Chairperson, Canadian Association of the Non-Employed (CANE): I am not going to say anything about our organization. I am going to launch right into the issue.
Social cohesion within any group of people is only possible if certain criteria are met. Individuals become a community when they have a common belief system, common values and common resources available to everyone. That does not mean that we are all identical but rather that there is enough in common so that we can identify with each other. The other person lives in my world and experiences the things I do. The average middle-class Canadian has no idea of what it is like to live outside of the mainstream, to be marginalized, to live in poverty.
At one time in Canada, 90 per cent of the population identified themselves as middle class. We were a country that had social cohesion. Now we are a country where people look at their neighbours with fear and distrust. The rich build gated communities and those at the bottom do not even have a place to sleep. Some people have access to the whole world via the Internet and some people cannot afford a phone.
How did this happen? A contented society with universal social programs fell asleep. After years of fighting for a just society, we thought we had made it and we became complacent. Now, finally, we are just beginning to look for new ways to regroup and to rebuild trust and respect among all Canadians. The first step is to identify these forces of change.
Globalization is not new. However, the type of globalization that we are experiencing today is. Globalization today means money moving around the world at the speed of light thanks to technology. It also means destructive trade deals with fewer and fewer restrictions on corporations and how they do business. There are few standards for workers' health, safety and wages or for the environment. That is deliberate government policy, planned and implemented to give global capitalism free reign.
Some people defined this economic system as trickle-down economics. We were lulled by them into thinking that those policies would benefit us all. The implication was that everyone would get a piece of the pie, the crumbs from the rich man's table. Actually, global capitalism would be more accurately described as vacuum cleaner economics, as everything is sucked up to the top.
At the same time, we are experiencing a technological revolution on the scale of the industrial revolution. Society needs fewer and fewer workers to produce goods and services. Manual labour is done by machines. Clerical labour is done by computers.
We did have a choice. When we saw this happening, we could have said that everyone will do less paid work and everyone will benefit from the new technology. Instead, we have condemned millions of men and women to unemployment, taken away their employment insurance benefits and reduced welfare rates. Not only that, we have justified our mean-spirited, uncaring attitude by maintaining that the individual worker is to blame for his or her non-employment. We have bought the belief that the individual worker is responsible for his or her fate. That belief has been deliberately and systematically expounded by many politicians such as Margaret Thatcher in her famous quote: "There is no such thing as society, only individuals."
Also, millions of dollars have gone into a propaganda campaign led by institutions such as the Donner Foundation, the Fraser Institute, et cetera, to convince us that global capitalism benefits everyone. If it doesn't benefit you, there must be something wrong with you.
Finally, not only have our beliefs on how the world works been manipulated, but our value systems have changed. The highest value is now to become the independent, isolated individual who needs no one. The isolated individuals are not part of communities. Rather, they are connected to huge bureaucracies that neither know nor care who they are. People are considered to be machines who can be manipulated and controlled.
The very worst institution that we have created is the social security system. People are totally powerless to access the basic necessities of life and they are hounded day after day to keep looking for a job, any job. Ordinary Canadian citizens are treated as incompetent losers. The only hope that I can see for a humane income security system is a form of guaranteed annual income or a negative income tax. That hope has been severely dashed in the last year by the destructive and punitive way that the new child tax benefit has been implemented.
The groups in our society that should have challenged what has been happening have been curiously silent. But I do see a change coming. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers has opened up the Workers' Organizing Resource Centre in Winnipeg, where unions and community groups have taken the first step towards working together. The United Church moderators have had consultations on the moral economy. Many people today are writing about new ways of thinking based on systems theory, which treats people as organic parts of a total organic system. That leads us to build institutions in totally different ways. Instead of blaming and controlling institutions such as we have now, people are beginning to talk about and then to build alternatives, such as the alternative justice system.
For some of us, there is a struggle to form our own community. We continue to hope and to support each other. I am a Canadian and my hope is to be able to say that once more with pride, not with sorrow.
The Chairman: Thank you, Ms Johannson.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I must say I find this very severe.
The Chairman: Yes, it is very severe but it is very articulate and comprehensive.
This is the Canadian Association of the Non-Employed, which consists of people who are unemployed or under-employed, unpaid workers, part-time workers, self-employed workers, et cetera. Is it an association of individuals?
Ms Johannson: Yes.
The Chairman: Or is it a federation of groups?
Ms Johannson: No.
The Chairman: How many people belong to this organization? Is it national? How are you funded?
Ms Johannson: We started six years ago. At that time there had been a number of concerns about things such as welfare and UI cuts, and people were demonstrating. There was a group in the community called the Church and Community Inquiry into Unemployment, with which a number of us were involved.
The Chairman: Was this in Winnipeg?
Ms Johannson: In Winnipeg, yes. We realized that demonstrating and talking to community groups was not, in the long run, going to be enough. We realized that we had to join together and support each other and try to bring about some change.
When we started, I would say that most of the people were on EI at the time. I would say that now most of the people are on welfare. Few in our group now are on EI. Most of their benefits have long run out. It is a transient group because of the work force. There is lots of contract work going on. People will come in, get a job for a few months and go away, and then come back again. We always say, "Do not be afraid to come back. We welcome you back. We recognize that you might be working today and not working tomorrow."
We constantly battle the despair. We have very few resources. Trying to build something has been incredibly difficult. As I said, there is a new pilot project by CUPW called the Workers' Organizing Resource Centre that started a few months ago. We have moved our office in there. People are ecstatic that we have resources -- space, a photocopier and a fax -- to actually do some things.
We have a conference every year, thanks to individuals and a few community groups. The conference last year was called, "How Do You Create a Job?" We put our thinking together and distribute this information into the community. I am constantly reassuring people that the situation is not their fault, that they need to be proud of who they are and the gifts they have and not sink into despair. I am battling against the mainstream of society, the media, the politicians and everyone else who basically say that if you do not have work or if you are living in poverty there must be something the matter with you.
The Chairman: We know that you are based in Winnipeg and the organization is essentially a Winnipeg organization.
Ms Johannson: Yes.
The Chairman: What can you comfortably tell us about your own background and experience?
Ms Johannson: I have a master's degree in social work. My last job was six years ago when I did a five-month contract on research into child welfare at Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg. My field of expertise is child welfare, prevention and empowerment. There is no money in the system to pay people to be involved in that. The child welfare system, like all systems, is struggling to survive and the money goes only for desperate cases. My particular area of expertise is not funded.
I must say that I have a totally different view of life experiencing and living poverty than I had as a professional helper, making a good salary and trying to help people who live in poverty. These people are not clients. They are my friends. After many, many years of struggling, I consider that being in my situation has actually been a gift.
The Chairman: Within the last couple of days we have heard comments not dissimilar to your own about the child tax benefit, by which I take it you mean the national child benefit.
Ms Johannson: Yes. I will tell you about that.
The Chairman: I want you to tell us about it. I have a view that when it started it was, in principle, a good social policy and it created good federal-provincial relations. Now we are hearing that there is a clawback on the part of the provinces. Is that what you are referring to? Is that the problem?
Ms Johannson: Yes.
The Chairman: Tell us about it.
Ms Johannson: My most vivid memory about that was sitting in my office talking to a young mom who had come in to discuss something else and we started to talk about that. I offered her a cup of coffee. There were some cookies on the desk too. We get some food from Winnipeg Harvest. She asked if she could have a cookie. I said, "Sure, take a couple," because obviously she was hungry.
Then she told me about this cheque that she got in the mail from the government, this new child benefit, and how excited she had been that she was going to be able to buy her child some necessities. A couple of days later she got her monthly welfare cheque and found that that amount had been deducted from the welfare cheque. She was devastated by this because she had not known. Nobody had bothered to tell people that the amount they would receive would be deducted from the amount they would get in their welfare cheques. Therefore, she was no better off. I did not inquire, but I assume that she was worse off because she had spent that money thinking that it was a little bit of extra money.
The Chairman: As I understood the intent here, that is exactly what was not supposed to happen. The idea that I thought the federal government had negotiated with the provinces was that if you were on welfare you would be no worse off, you would probably stay right where you are. There were to have been three tranches from the federal government that were going to add up to something like $2 billion. I think it was about $800 million each tranche. By giving this added room, the provinces would be able to do things to remove those disincentives that exist in the welfare system for people to move into the labour force.
I do not have to tell you about this. You can tell me more about it. By moving off of welfare into the labour force, people lose various other benefits that they get. So the provinces would be able to provide programs and benefits to people who are moving off of welfare into jobs. That is the way it was supposed to work. You are telling us -- and a witness the other day told us -- that that is not what is happening. The provinces are simply clawing back.
Ms Johannson: It is a joke. They are taking the money and doing things like saying they will set up nutrition classes to tell people how to cook nutritionally. Many people do not have the money to buy the groceries. I am sure they would rather have the money to buy food than to be told how to cook it. The assumption is that people who are poor are ignorant and do not know how to eat in a nutritious way. There are all kinds of assumptions.
When you are poor you are assumed to be illiterate, lazy, ignorant and every other negative you can think of, no matter if you have a university degree or not. Many of the people in CANE have university degrees. That has no significance if you are in the system.
Senator Butts: I am disturbed at how severe you are making this sound. I have had experiences that are very different.
I should like to follow up on the child tax benefit. It is the way it is because that is the only way the federal government can do it. If your province is not doing it right, you should fight with your province. Some provinces are doing it as it was planned.
I worked on the children's agenda and it is the best that it can be. The idea was that the low-income people would get it because it would keep them from going on welfare. In my province, Nova Scotia, a woman with two children receives exactly half the welfare that the same family would receive in Ontario. You cannot do it the way you want to do it. Unless we fix the Constitution, you cannot tie in those provinces to do it.
Ms Johannson: May I beg to differ, with respect?
Senator Butts: Some provinces are doing it but they have volunteered to do it. Other provinces are not doing it. You cannot sit in Ottawa and force them to do it. There is no question that that is under provincial jurisdiction.
Ms Johannson: I beg to differ. The provinces that are giving the program to all parents only do so because there was a vast outcry by the anti-poverty groups that were organized enough to force the provincial government to do it. One of the places where we really fall down is that the anti-poverty movement is very poor and does not have many resources. However, the federal government has the ability to set standards.
When the federal government gives money it can very easily say that this money is to go to all poor families regardless of the source of income. Please, I beg you, do not say that the federal government cannot do something. Of course it can do something. It can give money and say that the money is to go in this way to all families. In this country, that is how money used to be given.
Senator Butts: You are misunderstanding.
Ms Johannson: We had a family allowance system that worked perfectly well and gave money to every family and every child in this country.
Senator Butts: The point is that the federal government is giving it to families. The provincial government does not get it: the family gets it. The provincial government says that if are you on welfare and the child tax benefit brings you over a certain amount, the province can deduct from your welfare so that you end up just the same as you were. That is what the child tax benefit is written to do.
I talked to several provinces while I was working on this, and I still think it is a good game. The poor people who used to say that they were better off on welfare will not say that any more because they keep whatever they get if they are not on welfare.
In my province, I tried to get the premier to agree to put that money into daycare. There are 6,000 youngsters with single parents and only 2,000 have daycare places because the province buys the places. If you can do it any differently, talk to Minister Pettigrew. I spent hours talking and arguing with him.
Ms Johannson: I would be very happy to have that opportunity.
Senator Butts: Just try it. In some provinces it is great, but you cannot sit in Ottawa and tell the provinces what to do with welfare.
The Chairman: Ms Johannson, you are saying that the national child benefit is badly conceived, period. You are against it.
Ms Johannson: That is right.
The Chairman: Do you think that the universal family allowance was a better deal?
Ms Johannson: That is right. Do you think that you can say to a child, "I am sorry you do not have enough to eat, you do not have winter boots, you do not have mittens -- your mom is on welfare"? Also, I should clarify that in Manitoba, if you are on a program of part work and part welfare, the welfare is clawed back then, too. Therefore, if you get any welfare whatsoever, the whole amount is clawed back. It is a disgrace.
I am so ashamed of this country. I am old enough that I remember the kind of country where we looked after our families and our children.
Senator Butts: Who changed it?
Ms Johannson: Do you really want me to say?
Senator Butts: Yes, say it. Put it on the record.
Ms Johannson: The federal Liberal and Conservative governments.
Senator Butts: I should like to get back to something more theoretical. You said that cohesion is possible only if you have common beliefs, common values, common resources. How far do you want to go with making resources common?
Ms Johannson: I want there to be a guaranteed annual income. I have a paper here in which I have documented the background of that program.
I do not know if people know the background. When the Schreyer government was in power in Manitoba, we had a three-year Mincome experiment. That joint federal-provincial project made sure that no Canadian fell below a reasonable floor and that everybody had enough for the basic necessities of life.
Senator Butts: In other words, there are common minimum resources, not common resources?
Ms Johannson: It depends on what you mean by minimum. I would say that you need enough resources to live and to be a part of society. You need enough resources to have a telephone and to have bus fare, so that you do not sit in one room by yourself with no way to access the community around you.
The Chairman: What federal and provincial programs would the guaranteed annual income replace?
Ms Johannson: It would replace all of the income security programs. In Manitoba there is a mishmash of everything. Not only is there basic welfare, there is the child benefit program, a housing program called Safer, and 55 Plus for people aged 55. They are all miniscule and they all use an incredible amount of bureaucracy to fill in forms to qualify for getting a pittance. There is a hodgepodge of all kinds of income security programs.
The Chairman: Would it replace the whole present network of federal-provincial income support programs?
Ms Johannson: That is right. Not only would it replace the programs by giving people a decent amount of money, but they would not have to go cap in hand to somebody -- it used to be a social worker, now it is usually a clerk -- and say, "Please, sir, may I have money to buy winter boots?" and prove that in Winnipeg you need new boots.
We have people in CANE having to fight to get a bed and being lied to about what they are entitled to. That is endemic in welfare systems. You have to beg and plead and fight for the most basic things. If you had a negative income tax, the money would come in the mail and you would make the decision as to what you needed, whether you needed a new coat or you needed bedding or whatever. You would not have to be humiliated and degraded and treated in a way that boggles the mind.
The Chairman: How would you fix the income?
Ms Johannson: Do you mean what amount?
The Chairman: Yes.
Ms Johannson: There is a lot of discussion about where the poverty line should be. People say the LICO, the low-income cut-off, is too high. A group in Winnipeg went to the province to talk about the LICO poverty line. The provincial politicians said that it was way too high and would not work. With the help of the social planning council, the group developed ALL, the adequate living allowance. They went to the store and priced every single item from toilet paper to a tin of tuna to determine what it would cost just to live at a bare minimum. What they came up with for a mom and two kids was very close to the LICO level. There was a difference of a couple of hundred dollars.
I personally believe that using that kind of market-basket approach is the best way to determine the level. People need enough to have basic food, soap, toilet paper and things like that. They need enough for bus tickets and a phone. They need an amount for the emergencies in life. It is not that difficult. It is not something that we cannot figure out. It is not that hard to figure out.
Senator Butts: You indicate that the non-employed includes unpaid workers. Does that mean that the millions of people who volunteer for all kind of things should be paid?
Ms Johannson: If they need it, if they do not have any other income. That is what a guaranteed annual income is. Then if you get some work, the money that you receive is reduced. We have a guaranteed income supplement for elderly people in this country. The principle is known; the technology is there. We have computers; we have an income tax system. None of those things is difficult to do. The first questions are these: Do we want to have a healthy population? Do we want our kids to have enough to eat? If the answer is yes, we ask the next questions: How are we going to do it? What will we do to make sure that that happens? With the technology that we have, it is not difficult.
Senator Butts: If you begin to pay the volunteers, you are going to undermine the volunteer system, which is a beautiful system that we have.
Ms Johannson: I am a volunteer, and I should like some money to live.
Senator Butts: Then you do not volunteer. You get a job.
Ms Johannson: That is exactly the attitude that we fight every day of our lives: "Go and get a job." Do you know how hurtful and painful it is for people to have to deal with that every day of their lives from their friends and their relatives? As a society, we know that there are fewer and fewer and fewer jobs. Jeremy Rifkin has written a book called The End of Work. Bruce O'Hara, a Canadian, has written a book about shorter work time that shows how the technology we have means that we only need about half the number of people now to produce the same goods and services that we did in the fifties.
The Chairman: What is the unemployment rate in Winnipeg? I do not know the answer to that question. Do you?
Ms Johannson: That is very interesting. You run into trouble if you take one figure. At the moment, Winnipeg has a low unemployment rate in relation to the national average. Should I tell you how the unemployment rate is calculated, or do you know that?
The Chairman: I think we know that.
Ms Johannson: I heard a stat the other day that last year 3,000 people had left Winnipeg. Those are young people that are no longer counted in the unemployment rate because they have gone to Calgary or Edmonton or somewhere. My daughter has gone to Edmonton to look for work. Just taking the unemployment rate does not give you a true picture. You have to look at the work force and how many people have left. You have to add in all the discouraged workers who are not looking for work. You have to add in all the treaty Indians who are not counted in the unemployment rate. You can never say that that one statistic gives a total picture because it does not.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: You seem to have put much of the responsibility for this state of affairs or for this situation on the globalization of the markets. You said that we should have fought it and then we would not have run into this grave problem. You are a social worker, as am I. Not that many years ago we would not have heard about globalization. That concept has come out in the last two or three years. We were facing problems similar to the ones we have today. I remember when I was young, kids would come to school with us but their parents had no jobs.
You say that globalization is largely responsible for the situation that we are in. Could you expand on that? That is the way that the markets have developed and that the world works today. Before the concept of globalization, there was a lot of poverty in this country. Poverty does not go back ten years. It was even worse when we grew up, although you are much younger than I am. Nevertheless, the people lived through it.
I should like you to expand on how you understand globalization and how it works to create those very negative social conditions.
Ms Johannson: It is true that people in this country were very poor many years ago. We went through a depression. However, many groups within the country said that that was wrong. They were going to fight so that people would have a decent standard of living in this country, which has a vast amount of wealth. People fought for every one of the social programs that we had. Those programs did not appear out of magic.
I myself was involved in Winnipeg when we fought to bring Medicare into Manitoba. The Conservative government did not want it. Thousands and thousands of people marched on the legislature and demanded that we bring in a social program called Medicare. That is what happened in our country. Groups such as unions, churches and civil society said that we want a country where people can have a decent standard of living, can have enough money to raise their children, and they fought for it. By the end of the sixties we had a pretty decent country.
It didn't just happen by magic. In the last 20 years those social programs have been devastated. The government came in and took away CAP, the Canada Assistance Plan. They brought in the CHST, the Canada Health and Social Transfer, and took $7 billion out of the money it gave to the provinces. The federal government just did that without consulting me or anyone else, which has meant all the devastation that has happened since. Another interesting point is that not only did they take out the money when they destroyed the CAP program, but they took out the rights. Under the Canada Assistance Plan, we had a right to an adequate income. When they brought in the CHST, bang! That right was gone. No longer have we in law the right to an adequate income.
All the groups that fought for those programs over the years were caught off guard. That is why I am saying that only now people are beginning to realize what is happening. We are going downhill at a tremendous rate. There is tremendous suffering and poverty in the country. You know that. You know there are food banks. The people in our group depend on the food banks. I am afraid to say anything against the food banks because the last time I did I was told that I had better not if our group wanted to continue to receive food from them. But it is a disgrace that a country like this feeds people that way. That is the history. Yes, we were a great country. Now we are not.
The problem is not globalization, but global capitalism. There has always been globalization. The British Empire traded throughout the whole world. When I was growing up half the map was red. That was the empire. There has always been trading between states. That is not what is different.
Now we are entering into deals. I could go on about that, but you must have experts talking about the trade deals. You know what has happened with free trade and NAFTA. The MAI, which would have been even more devastating, was stopped because a worldwide network of people protested. It is a combination of the trade deals with no health and safety standards or environmental standards.
You probably all know about the maquiladoras in Mexico and the horrible state that people there have to live in. Combined with the technology, it means trillions of dollars floating around, and some people are becoming millionaires and billionaires by betting that a currency rate will go half a cent up or down. That is the technology part, the new part, and all of the money is being sucked into that. Add to that the amalgamation of more and more businesses into bigger and bigger corporations. We know that there are more layoffs every time they amalgamate. Again, that is not new or difficult to understand. We all read the news. We all know what is happening.
The other day Levi said that they are shutting down their North American plants and going to the third world because they can get cheaper labour. I forget which companies are merging -- I read in the paper the other day -- and laying off so many thousand workers. Where are those workers going to go? There is no place for them to go.
Senator Gill: When you were talking about your background and your organization, you said that your present situation is a gift. You were talking about your current work, I think, compared to your previous work. Why do you say that?
Ms Johannson: I did not know before what it meant to be marginalized. Perhaps in my head I knew that all of those people were living in a desperate situation, but I did not know in my heart. They are my friends. We are on the same level. I am part of that community because I do not have the money to go for a cup of coffee or whatever either. I understand in my heart what it means to have nothing, to not have the money to buy a paper or a cup of coffee. They are the courageous ones of our society carrying on day after day after day.
A large number of them are receiving medication. They get so depressed that they go to the doctor and the doctor's response is to put them on tranquilizers or anti-depressant pills. But they still keep going. The courage of those thousands of people trying to raise their children under incredible circumstances is amazing. At least my children are over 21 and are able to look after themselves. I remember one mom saying, "All I say to my kids is, "No, you cannot have that; no, you cannot have that; no, you cannot have that.""
Senator Gill: You showed us a paper entitled, "How Do You Create a Job?" Did you do that paper yourself?
Ms Johannson: It came out of a conference that we had.
Senator Gill: This is your belief. What is the recipe for creating jobs?
Ms Johannson: There is not one thing, but a number of things that we can do. One is shorter work time. For years we gradually reduced the number of hours that was the standard workweek. People used to work 12 hours a day. Then it got to be fewer and fewer hours. The 1919 general strike in Winnipeg was to get an eight-hour day. For some strange reason, we got stuck at 40 hours as though it were a dictate from heaven or something that 40 hours be the amount of time that people should work for a standard workweek.
All across Europe workers are marching and fighting for reduced work time. Across Canada the Work Well Network is fighting for a standard workweek of 32 hours. Something like a million jobs will be created if we do that. There is a lot of literature on how that can be implemented in the same way that we went from 12 to 10 to eight hours. That is one simple thing.
Another thing is to redefine work. In some European countries, a mom with a preschooler would be considered a worker and would be getting maternity benefits for two or three years while she stayed home at that crucial time and raised her preschooler until that child was able to go to school. That is a redefinition of what we do. If you gave people enough money they could do that.
There is so much work that society as a whole needs to have done, including environmental work. In Winnipeg our sewers are a disgrace. The whole system is going to blow up one day unless it is redone. The city of Winnipeg could hire thousands of people to redo that sewer system, but they are putting it off and putting it off. There is a lot of work in the community that we as a society could do. It would require changing how we would finance it.
We could go back to a fair tax system. I do not know if you want to get into that, but our tax system is a disgrace. We could easily tax the people who are making the money a small percentage of what they have got and put that back into doing public works, whether fixing sewers or environmental work.
Senator Gill: There are many positive aspects to finding ways to help people, and I am not saying that you are looking for the weak points. If I understand, you are trying to help people find jobs or create their own jobs. Is that correct?
Ms Johannson: No. There are hundreds of job-finding clubs out there. A whole industry has grown up. We are not interested in being another job-finding club.
The focus of our group is threefold. Number one is support. Every week I have to reassure somebody that they are a valuable human being, that they are not some no-good lazy bum, that they have gifts and that they are here in this life for a purpose and can work with other people for that purpose. I arrange retreats so that we can talk about that. We acknowledge people that the rest of society spits on.
Number two is education. We have a conference every year. I brought this report from our conference on how to create a job. I will leave these here so that you can make copies to look at. There is a lot of material that you can read to understand what is happening in our society. That information is not in The Globe and Mail or in the Winnipeg Free Press, but in magazines like Briar Patch or Canadian Forum and material from the Council of Canadians. You have to do the work to understand what is happening.
Number three is advocacy. That is what I am doing when I come and speak to you here. Other people speak to whatever government committee is sitting to tell them about our lives. You are the respected leaders of our society. The average person still feels that. I do not know how many times I have listened to people say, "If we could only explain to the leaders of our society, they would not do this to us." I do not feel that I should say, "Oh yes, they would." I say, "Maybe that is true." But people have this feeling that if they could only show other people how desperate they are, if they could only tell them that this is all they have, then the leaders of our society would do something.
Senator Gill: Do you agree with them when they say that?
Ms Johannson: I say, "Let us try it." We write letters and ask to see people. Mostly we get no response from politicians. But I say that we are not going to give up. There are more and more of us.
One day that force will be renewed. Will it come from the political leaders? I do not know. Will it come from the churches? Will they once again take some responsibility for society, saying that this is right or this is wrong? I do not know. But somebody in our society will join with us and say that this is wrong.
Senator LeBreton: On the issue of volunteers, perhaps you were misunderstood. When we are talking about volunteers, we need to distinguish that there are people who have the resources to volunteer their time for nothing. However, you are talking about people who are volunteering their time but who are really unpaid workers. Perhaps we are misunderstanding what you are saying when you say that all volunteers want to be paid. You are saying that volunteers like you really fall into the class of unpaid workers rather than the class of people who have resources to volunteer their time and who do not really want to be paid.
Ms Johannson: People need to have some source of income. They might volunteer or they might not, but that income is not dependent on whether or not you are a volunteer. If you are a mom with young kids, you do not have much time to volunteer but you still do some. I am amazed at how much volunteering people do. Even though people have very few resources, they do go out and volunteer at all kinds of things. People in my group go out and volunteer at variety clubs, the Aviation Museum, all these little community groups.
Senator LeBreton: Would it be for self worth that they do this?
Ms Johannson: It is because that is what people do. People want to be a part of and to contribute to their community. It does make you feel good if you feel you are a part and you are contributing
Senator LeBreton: Absolutely. You talked about your role being one of support, education and advocacy. With respect to the conference you hold every year, what do you do in relation to education? What is the follow-up from one year to another on the education side?
Ms Johannson: That is a very good question. We have been thinking about what else we want to do. Because we are new at this, we are getting our position straight. If we go to government, what would we say? Most of the people have never thought of this before. So we are looking at all the different options and deciding what we would like to say to the government. It is getting to the point where we have this figured out. We are not sure of the next step we are going to take.
The conference is a good outreach to the community. Usually, people who have not had anything to do with CANE come to the conference to see what we are about. We make good community contacts that way and that is good for people, too. I know that parliamentarians participate in conferences, so you also know that there are good things about getting together with people and looking at the issues and eating together and being together.
Senator LeBreton: In your organization have you involved service clubs such as the Kiwanis? Is there any way you could get them involved in trying to expand the awareness into a larger community?
Ms Johannson: Are you talking about the issue of fundraising?
Senator LeBreton: I am not talking about the issue of fundraising. I am talking about education and getting people in the community to realize. You are right: there is a growing gap. We have only to drive around the streets of Ottawa to see homeless people and it is certainly not a nice sight.
I am talking about educating people in the community, not just government and politicians. Perhaps they could get the attention of government and politicians. Have you thought about that or have you tried to do that?
Ms Johannson: We do as much as we can. I talk to church groups and whatever. You really need a connection. If you write a letter to the Kiwanis, you are not likely to get any response unless you know a Kiwanis member and you talk to them and they put forward the fact that this group has something interesting to say.
Grassroots organizing is a slow process that gradually you build up. You get more and more contacts and you talk to more and more people.
Senator LeBreton: One thing you could consider on the education side is to get people like yourself speaking to service clubs.
The Chairman: Ms Johannson, I should like to thank you for your presentation.
Our next witness has arrived. Monsieur Ross.
[Translation]
We were expecting two witnesses this afternoon. Mr. Denis Ross, President of the Réseau des travailleurs autonomes du Grand-plateau centre sud. He is presently en route from Montreal to Ottawa. He has informed us that he might be a few minutes late.
Mr. Ross, you were almost a victim of today's snowstorm, but welcome anyway. Mr. Denis Ross is President of the Réseau des travailleurs autonomes du Grand-plateau centre sud. These self-employed workers are people who work for themselves. Without further ado, you have the floor, Mr. Ross.
Mr. Denis Ross, President, Réseau des travailleurs autonomes, Grand-plateau centre sud: We're a small organisation located on the Plateau Mont-Royal in Montreal. We represent self-employed workers who are trying to integrate and who are presently working in different sectors.
On the Plateau Mont-Royal you will find people in the arts, humanities, translation and so forth.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: And also some restaurateurs.
Mr. Ross: Absolutely. I would like to talk to you with a view to better define self-employed workers and show you what kind of problems they come up against with the different employment aid programs. I would like to discuss social protection measures for independent workers and have a look at their taxation regime. All this is more in the nature of questions and questioning. If I have understood correctly, I am to make a brief presentation and I hope the members of the committee will have questions for me after that.
You know what the new job hunting context is with globalization and the development of contracting out. We have a pyramid system where you have a small core of individuals within a business who have permanent jobs. These people have some job security even though it's not what it used to be. The permanent positions are still there, but there are more and more people gravitating around the workers in those businesses. We will talk about contracting out.
This contracting out system is developing more and more and what you meet in networks like ours are people who work on contract. What is a bit more difficult is that the people contracting themselves out will often subcontract. That leads to a downwards rather than upwards escalation. Depending on the different sectors, of course, employees working in those businesses enjoy much higher income than those contracting out at the first level whereas the second and third tier subcontractors enjoy less income than those above them.
So you wind up with conditions where people with a higher education, university and many years' experience, will be working for rather low salaries. These people work on a specific contract. They are assigned a task. It's hard to evaluate the number of hours necessary to accomplish this given task.
So you wind up with self-employed workers who, if you do an hourly wage average, often earn less than minimum wage. There are a lot of those people in our network. We have studied the case of these self-employed workers and we found the average annual salary is $20,000 a year. These people have 15 years experience and well-established university training.
That really causes a problem. Most of the programs for self-employed workers are made for entrepreneurs. Those entrepreneurs have an entrepreneurial profile. It is a means of passage, if you will. They become consultants. Some will get together with others and develop their own business. You meet a lot of self-employed workers who are dependent rather than independent. These self-employed workers do not necessarily have the necessary energy -- and the term "energy" maybe is not appropriate -- or the profile that leads one to developing one's own business. These self-employed workers backslide. They are not developing up to the entrepreneurial status we usually think of.
This is a very real problem. For example, the federal programs encourage self-employed work. Perhaps these programs are not well-adapted to this new kind of worker who depends on precarious jobs and does not necessarily have the entrepreneurial spirit. On one hand, the job programs we have focus more on searching for jobs rather than contracts. Those programs do not reflect the reality of the self-employed worker. There is a perhaps something missing at that level.
As for social protection, we know that self-employed workers do not have a right to employment insurance and do not have access to the employer's pension plan. There are problems with the pharmacare plan. The same goes for taxation. There are some things for which a self-employed worker can take some tax deductions. It is not always possible to deduct all of the expenses involved.
For example, self-employed workers often have to work out of their home. They have to move around a lot to meet clients because they do not necessarily meet them at home. They have to go to a restaurant. The government has decreased the amounts eligible for tax deductions for meals taken outside the home. This can penalize self-employed workers.
Those small tax and social protection items mean that the regimes are perhaps not adapted to this new reality on the job market.
[English]
Senator Butts: How is your group financed?
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: I must admit we have very little funding. We are an association that does not work directly for jobs. We do not work directly in developing entrepreneurship. Our funding comes from the Quebec government. We had a program, "Concertation pour l'emploi," that allowed us to hire someone to find funding from businesses to get sponsorships to help us to work properly and increase our membership.
[English]
Senator Butts: Do you work only in the Province of Quebec?
Mr. Ross: Yes.
Senator Butts: You work specifically in the city of Montreal.
Mr. Ross: Yes.
Senator Butts: I am interested in your statistics that say that one-half of these new businesses fail in the first five years. In that statistic, is there a difference between female entrepreneurs and male entrepreneurs?
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: According to our statistics, on the one hand, in Quebec there are more self-employed men than women. Out in the field, according to our research, it is about the same thing in terms of the number of people. Income is harder to evaluate. Maybe the women earn less. Is it because they are working less? Some people prefer to work fewer hours and take care of their families. We have no information on that. Maybe we should push a bit more to find out a bit more.
[English]
Senator Butts: Since so many of them fail, does your group have any way of following the ones who begin or of helping them out? We have found that if you get the problem at the beginning, you can save the system, you can save that business and you can make it at least better than 50 per cent.
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: When you say at the outset, do you mean tackling the problem at the outset?
[English]
Senator Butts: Yes. If you can help the people overcome the problem as soon as it begins to show, then you can save the business.
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: I more or less agree with you. There are a lot of programs to help people start up a business. After that, there is nothing left when, in actual fact, they might need more long-term help. Those people who get a business going are not always entrepreneurs or do not always have an entrepreneurial profile. Whatever gets these people to thinking that there might be a way to tackle the job market by becoming self-employed workers has more to do with the new order on the labour market than anything else. You may have support at the outset but once you get your business going, it might be a bit more difficult.
[English]
Senator Johnstone: I have some sympathy for what you have to say about people who consider themselves self-employed. I consider that I have been self-employed since I was 20 years old, when I came home from overseas and got out of uniform. I was surprised today to hear that self-employed people are considered to be non-employed people.
How do you feel about a guaranteed annual income? During all those years that we struggled to put our businesses together with bank loans that had to be repaid and so on should we have had some kind of income? We did without it. I know, too, what it is like to be retired without a pension. I have been trying to persuade the people around this room to share theirs with me, but so far no takers.
If you were in favour of a guaranteed annual income, would you consider it to be a disincentive to certain persons trying to find jobs?
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: That is an important question. If we are talking about self-employed workers, there are two categories. That also plays on the question you put to me. Some self-employed workers find that the State should withdraw as much as possible from granting any help to self-employed workers and let free enterprise develop on its own. That is where you find most self-employed workers who really have the entrepreneurial profile. In the ranks of self-employed workers, you have another category of individuals who consider they are the victims of the new dynamics on the job market. This may be an exaggeration because maybe reality is not quite as harsh, but we are creating a new sub-proletariat that makes available to businesses a pool of potential workers who earn a living from job to job. These workers are isolated and do not enjoy the status of association you get through a union. The way work is now organized makes alliances difficult. This means that a lot of workers do not consider themselves as either self-employed or entrepreneurs. For these people, there should be income support together with a guaranteed minimum income. That does exist and is part of those possibilities for those workers. Self-employed workers are divided on this matter, if you want my opinion.
[English]
Senator Johnstone: You have suggested that there are two types of self-employed workers. I am thinking about the entrepreneur. Are you suggesting that the entrepreneur, as opposed to the other type of self-employed worker, should not receive any external or supplementary income from the state?
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: You have to make a distinction between entrepreneur and self-employed worker. I think that is very important. The self-employed worker who depends on precarious jobs certainly needs state support. On the other hand, people who want to incorporate and get a business going and increase billings need state support to get their business going and maintain their rate of growth. Whether it is big business or medium-sized business, they need some state support.
The message is that we tend to confuse self-employed workers. When the state steps in to help them, they are too often offered business development plans while what they probably need are job development plans. That does not mean that it is exactly the same thing as present programs. Something else has to be developed. We need innovation. We need new programs that will allow this new category of workers to be able to offer their services and not necessarily make their qualifications known to potential employers or clients. There is work to be done.
We have to teach people to find what niche they could fill in an enterprise to be able to put in a relevant request. In terms of programs, if you look at both the provincial and federal government levels, present measures are perhaps ill-adapted. There is work to be done by the State and by the professionals. I do not know if I am answering your question fully.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: I am from Montreal and I know the Plateau Mont-Royal well. It is the first time I have heard about your association and I am sorry. What kind of work do self-employed workers do?
Mr. Ross: I do not know if you were given the document. I sent the results of some research.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Yes, the 1998-99 development paper; is that it?
Mr. Ross: No. There has some perhaps more voluminous research that may not have been translated. What you have in our association are mainly people from the arts, literature, humanities, informatics and multimedia. You find a lot of those people in those job categories.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Amongst other activities for them, you have meetings, happy hours and lunches and things like that. How faithful are these people to your organisation? Do they just go once or twice? Is there some continuity between your organisation and those people?
Mr. Ross: There is a core of people who come, and others who do not necessarily come back. Some people go on to salaried jobs, others go to other things. Their businesses are working well so they are less interested in maintaining social relations. One of the missions we set for ourselves is to break the isolation surrounding self-employed workers. There is a social dimension. There is another thing called networking, what we call "résautage" in French.
This is done to encourage business relations between self-employed workers. There are activities and meetings. At the outset, those who are starting up a business are more interested and those whose businesses are doing well are perhaps less inclined to participate.
Finally, our association is also involved in defending the rights of self-employed workers.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: As compared to other workers who draw a salary or who work for an employer, those self-employed workers have no kind of protection?
Mr. Ross: No.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: And for employment insurance purposes, they have no employer?
Mr. Ross: That is the problem. You have hit the nail on the head.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Through your organisation, couldn't you include them so they could receive compensation in case of a job loss as long as they also contribute something?
Mr. Ross: We might be able to work on that. In France, some things are being done. Basically, they set up organisations that are not just shell companies but whose membership is made up of people who do not have any specific mission. In those organisations, you will be asking for premiums through the employer. At that point, those people accept to become salaried workers for that kind of business. They do not necessarily have indeterminate-length contracts, but they have periodical contracts. We could look at that. In Quebec, the FTQ is trying to organise self-employed workers. The chambers of commerce are trying to organise self-employed workers in their ranks. Something can, in fact, be done but we have to see if it is possible, legally speaking, in terms of employment insurance.
Senator Lavoie-Roux: Compared to the other provinces that have organisations similar to yours for self-employed workers?
Mr. Ross: I must admit I am interested in developing ties with the other provinces. We already had an association for self-employed workers for the province of Quebec. It is very hard because there is a lot of volunteering involved. As these are not institutions with very old structures, funding is hard to find. It is hard to set up.
[English]
Senator LeBreton: Mr. Ross, is your problem not compounded today by the fact that, because of technology, people are working out of their homes and are more isolated? Does that not make your organization's task even more difficult?
[Translation]
Mr. Ross: In effect, self-employed workers tend to work at home a lot. As they work alone at their work site, organising is rather difficult. That is a problem. I must admit that with our association it is not always easy to organise self-employed workers. Those people often prefer working at home without necessarily having any kind of ongoing relationships with other workers. We have more problems reaching those people. This has a negative effect on demands for self-employed workers' rights. Those people are harder to organize.
The Chairman: Mr. Ross, I am sorry we do not have more time to look into this matter. We really appreciate your coming here today.
The meeting stands adjourned.