Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 23 - Evidence - May 17, 2007
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 17, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:48 a.m. to continue its study on the impact of the multiple factors and conditions that contribute to the health of Canada's population — known collectively as the social determinants of health; and to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: I call the meeting to order.
Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. Today, we will be examining poverty, homelessness and housing.
[English]
As we continue our study on these issues, I want to point out that this is work that is completed by the entire committee but relates to work being done by two subcommittees. Our first subcommittee, under Senator Keon's chairmanship, deals with population health, looking at the social determinants of health. The second subcommittee, which I chair, deals with the challenges facing the major cities of the country. Poverty, housing and homelessness are issues common to the studies of both subcommittees.
We are also building upon previous work done in the Senate in the matter of poverty. The report headed by Senator Kroll comes to mind. It was a particularly significant report. There was also another by Senator Cohen, who wrote a book in 1997 called Sounding the Alarm: Poverty in Canada.
We are building on the work done by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, chaired by Senator Fairbairn, who is also a member of this committee. That committee is studying rural poverty in particular. That study was initiated in the Senate by Senator Segal.
A great deal good work has been done and is being done. We are building upon this foundation when dealing with these critical issues facing Canadians.
Today we will do something different. Normally we would have two panels but we have consolidated into one panel. We have a logistics challenge. The first challenge is that I must leave for an unavoidable appointment at 11:30; Senator Fairbairn will take the chair at that point. Another challenge comes at 12:30 with another meeting that will take a number of senators away. We will try to do as much as we can in a consolidated time frame.
I will introduce the witnesses we have here today. We have Professor Jino Distasio from the Institute for Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg. His research interests include housing market dynamics, factors in neighbourhood change, urban planning, and inner city revitalization. In addition to teaching at the universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg, he also has worked for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC.
Our second witness is Molly McCracken, Manitoba Board Member for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The centre is an independent, non-partisan institute that supports community-based policy research. For the past two years the centre has produced The State of the Inner City Report. It also has an ongoing research project that examines community economic development as a tool for community and neighbourhood revitalization. Ms. McCracken sent us a lot of material on that subject.
We have also Professor Barbara Wake Carroll from the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. Her research interests include comparative politics, public policy and administration and housing. She is the author of many scholarly articles including Homelessness in Canada and the United States.
Finally, we have Aisling Gogan, Director of Poverty Reduction Strategy, Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment. She is responsible for the implementation of this major policy initiative, which we have already been talking about. Two provinces, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, have major initiatives. We will hear from her about the strategy that has been described favourably by other witnesses.
Jino Distasio, Director and Professor, Institute of Urban Studies, University of Winnipeg: I would like to thank the committee for the privilege to present to you today. While it is no doubt an honour to be here, in many ways it is unfortunate that we have to convene again to discuss issues that we have neither independently nor collectively resolved to any great extent over the last few years. We continue to face these significant challenges.
The Institute of Urban Studies, of which I am the director, is a research unit of the University of Winnipeg. I have been there for seven years. During that time I have worked with rooming house tenants, owners and caretakers. I have worked with hotel owners who rent ramshackle suites to people on Winnipeg's notorious Main Street strip. I have worked with Aboriginal persons arriving in the city of Winnipeg to find on day one that they have no place to live and face substantive poverty issues. The degree to which lack of adequate housing, homelessness and poverty intersect the lives of people remains a national disaster. In places like Winnipeg, significant numbers of people face life challenges on a daily basis.
I will concentrate my comments on Winnipeg, which in many ways has become what I will call an urban laboratory for all that is good and bad about responses, policies and programs, a place in which hundreds of millions of dollars have been expended but in which significant turnaround has not been experienced.
Winnipeg remains Canada's ninth largest city. It is a place of slow economic growth; it has been a place in which prosperity has occurred, but like many other places, that prosperity has not been equally spread. Winnipeg has another, more silent growth industry, and that is the industry of poverty, an industry that grips the city and that has seen tremendous growth. An estimated 6,000 people live in near squalor in inner city rooming houses and hotel rooms that are barely bigger than the space between us here. It is also within the boundaries of Winnipeg's inner city where we face many significant challenges. It is an area that has visible manifestations of poverty, and poverty that has been sustained for three to four decades with little or no change.
The inner city remains a disproportionate place of poverty, although hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent there. It contains higher concentrations of Aboriginal persons, single parents, seniors and, more recently, refugees and immigrants.
The majority of the 6,000 rooming house and hotel owners live on government assistance but lack meaningful opportunity and, perhaps more important, the security of the right to housing. What is interesting and unique about the hotels in Winnipeg is that we have about 1,000 people living in hotel rooms who have no right to shelter, yet the province of Manitoba pays rents upwards of $2 million a year with little security to those places. At a whim, under what owners of hotels call zero tolerance, someone can be kicked out. They can turf someone out with no rights. I would hazard a guess that there is not a single lease on the strip of Main Street. The 5,000 people living in rooming houses I would suggest also have no leases or rights to their places and are one step from the street.
Winnipeg probably has, at the bare minimum, 10,000 people who are part of a growing shadow population, part of the hidden homeless, people who do not have right to tenure, a permanent place to live, who live on the goodwill of others, sofa-search, couch-surfing or whatever the term might be. There are 10,000 hidden homeless in a city that has some prosperity, and we offer little support to them.
I will go back to the idea of the industry of poverty, which has become so pervasive that Siloam Mission built a mega soup kitchen that serves 400 to 600 homeless persons and persons living in poverty per day. It served 170,000 meals last year. It distributed 2,800 food hampers and clothed 10,000 people. For John Mohan, executive director of the Siloam Mission, business is good — very good — and is expected to get better. We need to look for ways to put him out of business.
A second example I will give you is Winnipeg Harvest, which has quietly celebrated 25 years in business. It went from distributing 200,000 pounds of food in its first year to nearly 8.5 million pounds in 2005. That is 12.5 pounds of food for every single Winnipegger. It has 300 outlets at which people access food. It serves a staggering 40,000 people a month, almost half being children — 18,000 a month.
How do we put John Mohan and David Northcott, from Winnipeg Harvest, out of business in this industry of growth, in this industry of poverty?
Poverty is also concentrated in the inner city of Winnipeg, which faces significant challenges. I have provided some tables, which we can talk about later. I will not go into detail. I will try to keep my comments brief.
On the positive side, the University of Winnipeg and its new president, Lloyd Axworthy, have been trying to address poverty and challenges in the inner city through education. The university is right in the inner city. We have opened up the Wii Chiiwaakanak Learning Centre which provides free access to computers and skills for inner city kids. It is a place where Aboriginal elders can share learnings and teachings. It might be seen that education can be a way out for people. It is one piece of a more complex issue, but if we can break the cycle of poverty in which third-generation people are living on the Main Street strip, maybe we can prevent a fourth generation from living there.
The Chairman: Thank you for your presentation. I am glad my old friend and colleague Mr. Axworthy is helping you out.
Molly McCracken, Manitoba Board Member, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives: Thank you. I am a volunteer board member for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, CCPA. I am a community organizer and I live and work in the inner city of Winnipeg.
CCPA Manitoba produces an annual State of the Inner City Report with input from a wide variety of community- based organizations. Our research finds that community-based organizations working to address the multitude of social challenges in neighbourhoods are making slow, steady progress that could be greatly enhanced by long-term investment in social housing. If we want to fight poverty we need to start with housing to help stabilize individuals, families and communities. Then they can work on their education and we can support them for employment, but it starts with housing. Safe adequate affordable housing provides the foundation also for population health and education. It increases safety of individuals and allows for community development.
Progress on poverty alleviation is slow for us in community-based organizations because of the substantial housing crisis. The rising costs of housing force people in poverty to spend food, medication and transport budgets on rent. There are a lot of small NGOs in Winnipeg working on community renewal and this offers a great potential to be scaled up to meet the significant demands for low-income housing. Of course, we need adequate public investment.
The withdrawal of the federal government from the social housing portfolio in the 1990s left a gap in the provision of housing in Canada, as witnessed by the high level of housing needs of those living in poverty. Those vulnerable to poverty, such as Aboriginal people, single mothers, immigrants, refugees and people with disabilities bear the brunt of the effects of inadequate housing, which impacts their education and health outcomes.
Winnipeg has the highest proportion of Aboriginal people living in an urban centre in Canada and that is slated to grow because of the population distribution. There are a lot of young people and high birth rates in the Aboriginal population.
The Province the Manitoba has made a commitment of 10,000 immigrants per year. To give you an idea of what that means, we were having 3,500 immigrants per year and now 10,000 immigrants per year are slated. This will increase to 20,000 immigrants to maintain our population, and that will put pressure on the housing in our province.
There are high rates of poverty among Aboriginal people and they are disproportionately represented among people living in poverty, and this is because of the legacy of colonization and residential schools.
Those in need of housing are described in terms of core-housing needs, which Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation defines in terms of adequate condition of a housing unit, suitable in size, and affordable, which means that it costs no more than 30 per cent of before-tax income. Between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of households living in the inner city are in core-housing need.
Inner city Winnipeg is typical of other Western Canadian urban centres where urban decay has taken place as the housing stock ages and middle class people seek new housing developments on the outer edges of the city. This issue can be considered a problem of supply and demand.
On the demand side, the demand for affordable housing is high. The wait list has increased almost 100 per cent. There are almost 3,000 people on the wait list for social housing in the province. There is just not enough social housing to meet the demand. Social assistance rates are low and have hardly increased at all and the income levels of the working poor are not enough to pay for market rents.
We estimate that approximately $2.3 million of government welfare money goes to private market landlords, many of whom are slum landlords. That is money that individuals on social assistance receive to pay for rent and so on. The public system is in many ways subsidizing this inadequate housing model.
A study I worked on comparing women who were living in private, public and cooperative housing found that cooperative housing was the ideal model. Those women did not move, were stable and had access to a lot of support. Those in private market housing, on the other hand, moved frequently, which has a lot of impact on people's education of themselves and their children. Schools find that children in the inner city schools turn over many times in a school year, and they say every time a child changes schools it sets them back six months.
Cooperatives cost up to 40 per cent less to operate than public housing and other housing models because of the contributions of members and because, with the sense of ownership, not as many repairs to units are needed.
On the supply side, since the federal government ended the social housing program in 1993 there has been no new social housing construction, which has resulted in the waiting lists. Substantial public investment is required. Private developers simply do not build low-income rental units; even regular rental units are rarely built in our city. The public housing stock is old and in need of repair. The Manitoba Housing Authority estimates that $90 million over five years will be needed to repair existing stock, and the provincial auditor has found that the province does not have the funding to meet this need.
Much action is needed housing. Current government mechanisms, such as affordable housing initiatives, have been important for revitalization efforts; however, given the massive size of the problem and the detrimental effects that it has on people's lives, it is obvious that a social housing framework is essential.
There is a beacon of hope. I am happy to say that there are committed people working in inner city Winnipeg and people committed to long-term change. Non-profit community-based organizations have played a critical role in housing inner city residents. Their work is showing a way forward and it needs support.
A number of community-based organizations have mobilized funding from the affordable housing initiative to renovate or construct housing units. These are normally small houses with one or two units. However, these projects take a holistic approach to meet the multiple bottom lines of environmental, social and economic stability. This is done through a community economic development approach where projects train and hire local people. They do local purchasing as much as possible and adhere to the principles of environmental efficiency.
If we invest in housing and use this community economic development approach, we can help create jobs and meet our skills shortage in Manitoba. We can develop a community pride of ownership. The people I have talked to who are working on these small housing projects find that when local people are involved in building the housing, the units are not vandalized. They are part of the community spirit and there is pride in the community.
Given our research and experience working with residents in the inner city, CCPA Manitoba recommends long-term reinvestment in social and public housing to fight poverty; ongoing subsidies for rent or cooperative shares for low- income people; capital grants for new construction; non-profit or cooperative ownership structures to protect housing from private market pressures; meaningful government-community partnerships for planning, designing and maintaining public housing; and mixed income neighbourhoods to avoid ghettoizing those in poverty.
National housing advocates propose the 1 per cent solution — that per cent of our GDP annually be invested in housing, which is about $2 billion. This may seem like a lot of money, but it would be money well spent. It would help stimulate our local economies. Indeed, it is the only way to end the cycle of poverty.
Barbara Wake Carroll, Professor, Department of Political Science, McMaster University: Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. I care passionately about the homeless. I think we desperately under-service their needs. However, I recognize as a political scientist that programs for homeless people have to be sold to voters and taxpayers who are not themselves homeless.
My message today focuses on why comfortably housed people like myself should support programs to support the homeless. It costs more than $40,000 a year to keep someone in a minimum security prison. It costs more than that to keep someone in a secured mental institution. By contrast, community living facilities are cheap.
At the same time, it costs $4,500 more per year for medical costs for a homeless person who uses emergency services because they do not have a family doctor or permanent address. However, because we will not spend the money now, we are required to pay much higher costs downstream in the future.
The first thing I learned about the homeless was that they are not a homogeneous group. Leaving aside those very few people who are voluntarily homeless — less than .05 per cent, some 50 out of 1,000 — there are three types of homeless: the economic homeless, the social homeless and the hidden homeless, who are primarily newcomers and often illegal immigrants. To a large extent, all of their needs are different; and within different social, demographic and geographic settings, the needs within each of these groups vary widely. In addition to the obvious humanitarian issues, all of these people cost far more to us as a society than providing decent housing would cost.
There are the current costs of short-term housing — often motels for families, meal allowances, and health care in emergencies and neonatal wards, as they do not have family doctors. There are interventionist medical services, but they tend to be limited to larger centres such as Toronto and Vancouver. There are also the long-term costs of poor education for children, long-term health risks and the kinds of social instability that often lead to incarceration. The incontrovertible fact is that the impact of poor housing on health, education and violence has been well documented.
I would like to highlight the dilemmas of each type of homeless in turn, with some suggestions on how to deal with each. The economic homeless are by far the largest category, those who simply do not have the financial resources to provide themselves with housing. Many are families. Many, in cities like Calgary or Edmonton, are the working, not very, poor. They simply cannot afford housing in the current markets in which they live.
In some cases, the problem is first and last months' rent. In others, it is simply that there is no housing, as vacancy rates are low and there is continual conversion to condominiums. In other cases, there is simply no housing of a decent quality available. Many of these people sit on social housing waiting lists that are 10 years long.
The trite solution for this problem is more social housing, but social housing is expensive; and that which is income- integrated is even more expensive as we bribe middle-income people to live with the working poor. It is the Cadillac, or maybe these days the Mercedes, of housing. It has produced some lovely housing on the Toronto and Hamilton waterfronts but has done very little to solve the homelessness problem.
Other solutions are required. Some apply to some cities more than others and I would be happy to discuss these in the question and answer period.
One way would be to give subsidies for retrofitting existing housing in older areas of cities. This includes the subdivisions of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. This could be of particular advantage to newcomers, who could use their skills to upgrade the housing. The families themselves, or extended families, could qualify to buy the house through the zero down payment option for mortgages insured under National Housing Act. I used to work for CMHC and I know that newcomers have an excellent repayment record for mortgages.
I have some other options, but I will pass and perhaps come back to them.
Next we have the social homeless, who are what most people think of when they think of the homeless — those literally sleeping on the streets and in out of the cold programs in winter. They are young people who have left dysfunctional homes, the mentally ill, those with substance abuse problems and those who have fallen between the cracks of our social support system. Often they suffer from a combination of these problems.
Their needs are different. They need not only housing but also support, which can either return them to a functional society or keep them from sliding further into a dysfunctional abyss. Many of these people provide surprising levels of social support for each other. They are a community, but without enough resources. The support services they need are not just medical but also include help to find social services, to finish high school or to deal with drugs or simply to develop enough low-level skills to get a job.
Many of these services need to be low-key as in most cases this is a fragile community. Group homes, hostels and various forms of shared accommodation might be more appropriate for the social homeless, with many of the costs paid by reallocating the costs of social welfare agencies that are already spending large sums on them. My research in this area would indicate the need is not necessarily for new housing funds but for better coordination of the funds and services already available.
Just sending these people out into the street with their medicines is not a viable solution. Some of the women have children born with health problems; some have run afoul of the law due to mental health problems — not necessarily with criminal intent; but we, as a society, pay a high price for the health and social costs of these actions.
Finally, we have the hidden homeless, often newcomers. They are staying with friends, family, sometimes in abusive relationships. Newcomers are often in overcrowded accommodations, with six or seven children and three or four adults or more living in two-bedroom apartments in which the children have difficulty studying, and there are continual problems of hygiene and personal privacy. Many of the newcomers are not accustomed to living in non- ground oriented accommodation and have trouble adjusting. This may be why, increasingly, newcomers are integrating more slowly than earlier groups of immigrants, even those from similar ethnic backgrounds.
Many of these people are working, but they lack the resources to move out on their own. If single, they may not have the networks to find shared accommodation. For many, cooperative housing might be possible — the form of housing often used by university students who have networks to find roommates within houses and apartments. For the newcomers, the same solutions as for the economic homeless may be possible. Some research I have done indicated that after the first year, the need was for fewer settlement services and more housing services, larger housing units and better coordination of existing services.
In conclusion, there is a need not necessarily for national programs, but national leadership and federal money to allow for local programs meeting the needs of particular communities, both social and geographic. For example, the needs of cities with psychiatric outpatient facilities are different from the needs of cities that do not have such facilities.
Cities with old, ungentrified urban cores have other options. The option of small, specific programs is the route the United States has taken, although it is easier for them to do it due to differences in intergovernmental regimes. These various programs need stable, multi-year funding if they are to succeed, not the tap on, tap off of the current SCPI program — Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative — and they need better coordination to improve our learning from experiments that have worked.
Again, I stress that we pay the cost of a homeless person many times in additional health and social costs and lost economic benefits. As the old adage goes, spend a penny, save a pound.
The Chairman: Your analytical work is helpful for the committee in determining where we want to go on these issues.
Aisling Gogan, Director, Poverty Reduction Strategy, Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment of Newfoundland and Labrador: Thank you for giving me an opportunity to share some of the experiences and lessons learned through our experience in Newfoundland and Labrador in both developing and implementing the Poverty Reduction Strategy.
Our province has issues similar to those discussed by the other witnesses, but there are some differences as well. We had a fairly extensive consultation process, starting out at the development stage of our strategy, and we heard many similar issues raised. Housing and homelessness is a big problem and a key issue when it comes to poverty.
Homelessness in our province is a more hidden problem. It is the couch surfing that Mr. Distasio mentioned and Ms. Wake Carroll also referred to — people who do not have stable housing or adequate housing.
I will give some brief points. As Senator Eggleton mentioned, presentations have already been given before the Senate committee that is looking at rural poverty. I know the focus here is different, but I will try not to cover ground already covered because I know you have access to that information.
By way of background, tackling poverty was part of the 2003 blueprint election commitment of the current government in Newfoundland and Labrador. The promise that was made was that by 2012, Newfoundland and Labrador would be transformed from a province with the most poverty to one with the least. It is quite a commitment to have made.
In Budget 2005 and the Speech from the Throne, the government committed to developing a comprehensive, integrated poverty reduction strategy that would be government-wide. The approach is very important. All governments should try to do many things to tackle poverty. As one of the other witnesses mentioned, it can be depressing to sit here and not see much progress.
We have heard and all research points to the fact that an integrated and comprehensive approach is required. Sometimes governments develop good programs but they do not mix well with other programs or they are not maintained or they are not long term. This was be integrated, comprehensive and have a long-term objective.
The 2006 and 2007 budgets both made new ongoing annual investments to reduce poverty which total close to $90 million in new annual spending. These investments are designed to meet the vision, the goals and the objectives outlined in this document, which was released in June 2006. I brought copies with me today.
The Chairman: We have copies.
Ms. Gogan: Community groups have appreciated that the action plan outlines an overall approach and an ongoing process. This does not contain all the answers, which do not exist, but it is a guide for action. It also makes commitments around reporting, which we think is important.
As I mentioned, we had an extensive consultation process from which our goals, principles and key directions were established, based on the research and input from community groups, individuals living in poverty and our internal government partners. When we talk about poverty, we consider it broadly. We talk about social exclusion rather than simply a lack of financial resources, although that is obviously a big part of it.
We have been thinking a great deal about the ability to participate in one's community and to access education, adequate housing and essential goods and services. Health status is also an important consideration. When poverty is viewed in this way, it is essential to have an integrated response. From the beginning, this has shaped the approach that we have taken. The explicit commitment made in 2005, which has been since reiterated, was that connections would be recognized between poverty and gender, poverty and education, housing, employment, health, and so on. Therefore, that has led us to look at social and financial supports, the way in which the taxation system works and the various social programming issues.
Housing is a focus in this meeting today. Without adequate, stable housing, it is almost impossible to find a job, let alone maintain one. What contact information can one put on a resume? How are people to get in touch with someone who does not have a telephone or an address? Those are basic needs. You can have other, great initiatives designed to reduce or prevent poverty, but if people do not have adequate housing, the initiatives will not be successful. It is important to think comprehensively, and to do that, you need to involve many different partners. Our work has been done in a collaborative way and in a government-wide way. Internally, within the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, that has meant the involvement of seven key departments in the development of the strategy and its implementation. The Department of Human Resources, Labour and Employment, where I am based, leads the collaboration. As well, we have the departments of education, finance, health and community services, innovation, trade and rural development, justice, and Aboriginal affairs, and they are key to the effort. There is involvement as well by the Labour Relations Agency, the Newfoundland and Labrador Housing Corporation, the Rural Secretariat, the Women's Policy Office and the Cabinet Secretariat.
That should give senators a sense of the different players involved. It has been important that this has been driven from our committee of eight ministers who oversee the development of the strategy. There is a high level of commitment.
Anyone who has ever worked with the public service in any way will recognize that it is difficult to work horizontally within government structures. Governments are set up with departments in a vertical silo model. Even though we have been gradually breaking that down, it is challenging in many ways to work across departments, to build more bridges and to work cooperatively and collaboratively, in particular when you consider the budget process which often comes down to a competitive process.
We have been working hard, and it has been important to the ministerial committee that this be a collaborative and cooperative process within government and between our government, community-based groups and the federal government. We deem that essential to tackling such an issue.
We have had a number of different challenges, which I will review quickly, and I will tell you what we have learned. Maintaining a focus and a priority on joint ownership of the initiatives have been important. The ministerial committee has been key in that area with their level of involvement, oversight and direction. Also, having dedicated resources within the public service and a structure that supports a collaborative, internal process have been key to this effort. We have a deputy minister's committee to support the ministers and a working group, which I chair, that is mainly director-level representation from across the departments and agencies that I mentioned. That is where the work has happened.
We have worked at thinking in a comprehensive way rather than from a departmental perspective in terms of identifying the essentials and how our programs and services work together. We have heard many times from community groups that all the programs and services of the various departments are great but they do not work well together and they are complicated to access. At times when people fill out an application form, they think that they will have access to any programs they need in a particular program but the reality is that the application will access only one program in one department. Therefore, we have been working on improving that and looking at combined impacts, such as marginal effective tax rates, of how different programs are combined, particularly from the perspective of individuals and families who live in poverty.
It is important to have that level of work and ongoing dialogue with community-based groups. As I mentioned, we had extensive consultation processes. We held workshops with community-based groups. We had a toll-free number and received many calls from individuals living in poverty. We did search for our income support clients but we also advertised it. We did other community-based sessions through community groups with youth who are homeless, which is difficult for us to do as a government. We had some of our community partners meet either with us there or in some cases without us there. For example, we did not attend the session for women in transition houses but they were held by our community partners and the information was passed on to us.
We have used different means to try to get information from anyone that we felt wanted to present to us. That has helped in terms of how to make progress and see the problems to be resolved. The ongoing work of our group and the ongoing ability to receive information have been important.
Maintaining long-term focus is always a challenge within the public service and for governments in general. The political direction has been essential to success. Politicians have said that our cabinet committee wants to make a long- term difference and they have kept us focused on that. Having the document with guiding principles and key directions published has been important, as has having a mix of long- and short-term approaches.
We have always looked at this as having a policy mix because there is no one solution. We look at the various things we need to do to alleviate poverty as it exists, to reduce poverty levels and the depth of poverty, to try to prevent poverty, and to set up mechanisms to track our progress, because there is no agreement on how the measurement of poverty should be done. We have taken the approach that there are different measures and it is important to look at all of them and at any outputs along the way. We can look at how many people we have on income support, wait lists for social housing and other things to know whether we are heading in the right direction. Overall measures, such as low- income cut-offs, LICOs, and market basket measures can be monitored.
The Newfoundland & Labrador Statistics Agency has been working with Statistics Canada on a Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure that will allow us to look at poverty levels community by community. That will allow us to better reflect our own province, because there have been issues surrounding the national measure and how it worked in our province. Some of the results simply did not make sense for our province.
Accountability is an important area. I could talk more about that, but I am conscious of the time. Again, we must maintain a truly integrated approach, not doing worthwhile initiatives here and there but looking at how they are mixing together. Are we meeting all the needs, or, by leaving one piece out, are we devaluing the other things we are doing?
In terms of lessons learned, leadership is important. Having champions is important. Having dedicated resources and a collaborative process are important. Careful consideration must be given to the different partners who need to be involved and the roles that those partners play. All partners need to be involved in setting the goals, objectives and timelines as well as the priorities. A written document helps with that. Figuring out how to fit a horizontal initiative such as this into regular government processes is a challenge. Recognizing that and addressing it as you go is also important. For example, a budget process that traditionally looks at departmental allocations is not necessarily the best process for a government-wide strategy such as this.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Acting Chairman) in the chair.
The Acting Chairman: Thank you all very much. I know there are many questions swirling about here.
Senator Cochrane: Your information is indeed overwhelming because the statistics, especially from Winnipeg, are alarming.
I will start with Ms. Gogan, of course, being from her province. Can you tell me what trends you have observed over the last 10 years in our province in regard to poverty, homelessness and housing?
Ms. Gogan: Canada-wide, poverty is increasingly becoming an urban phenomenon. I am sure you are aware of that from other research. That is not the case in Newfoundland and Labrador. Urban and rural poverty are equal problems and they are equally increasing. We are different from the rest of Canada in that way. We must be conscious of that trend when we think about solutions. Often what is happening in the rest of Canada is urban-focused. That is important as well; I am not saying that urban poverty is not equally a problem.
There has been some positive news in the last several years. There has been a slight decrease. When we started our consultations, we published in 2005 a background report that outlines what we had identified as the key trends. It is available online on our website. It is a bit out of date now. The most recent LICO released just a few weeks ago was positive in terms of Newfoundland and Labrador, although there are some methodological issues that need to be considered in interpreting those results.
In terms of homelessness and housing in particular, traditionally social housing stock is geared toward large families. That is not who we have as homeless any more. Families in general are smaller, and those who need social housing and have issues with housing are no different.
We have an incredible number of single people. In terms of overall trends, single people are more likely than any other group to be living in poverty. That is surprising to many people. Many government responses to poverty, for good reasons, are focused on families and especially families with children, but single people, and in particular older single people — not seniors, but those in the 55- to 64-year-old age group — are most vulnerable to poverty because they do not yet qualify for Canada Pension Plan and Old Age Security. If you are single and in that age group, there is unfortunately a high likelihood that you will be living in poverty. That is also true if you share any of the other characteristics that make you more vulnerable to poverty, such as having a disability. Those things compound one another. If you have a disability, you are more likely to be single as well. Single disabled people have an incredibly high poverty rate.
The single people issue has been a challenge. Again, many of the programs are geared especially toward families with children. At the same time, we have seen an increase in the number of single people living in poverty, particularly in the 55- to 64-year-old age group, which is a real concern. We have much anecdotal evidence about that age group and we are committed to doing more research.
We have been looking at marginalized older workers under our labour market development group. They are just one group.
There is also the issue of single parents whose child has turned 18. Suddenly they are no longer single parents in terms of accessing government programs; they are now just single adults. If they were not already in poverty, they may find themselves plunged more deeply into poverty.
It is important to be aware of the issues of single people and poverty in terms of housing. Social housing stock does not respond well to single people because it is geared toward larger families.
Senator Cochrane: Do the people in Winnipeg follow the same trend?
Mr. Distasio: There are many parallels. Recently we have had the challenge of Aboriginal seniors, who are largely another missed group who are under-housed and not likely to have pension savings and other sources of income to bridge the gap. A second population in the city that is largely forgotten in programs is single males, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. It is not that the other needs are not great, because they are — single female-headed households face significant challenge — but again those groups in Winnipeg are some of many. Unfortunately, poverty is spread across many cohorts.
Ms. McCracken: I work at a drop-in centre for sex trade workers. They are part of the hidden homeless as well. They go to shelters but there is no place for them that provides social supports such as dealing with addictions. That is a substantial problem that is gendered in Winnipeg and is growing. As poverty becomes more entrenched, there is more activity in a residential neighbourhood. I run a program to help create safety while the children are travelling to school.
We are seeing the Aboriginal population move from reserve to urban centres because there are not many opportunities on-reserve. That has created very much an Aboriginal people's problem, and many Aboriginal groups are working on it. We just do not have enough supports.
Community groups have to apply to get money for housing. The capacity in the community and even the level of expertise to piece together a proposal on a multi-unit housing complex is just not there. Before, when it was planned by government with government expertise, at least it was built, because that expertise existed. Now community groups are scrambling to develop and mobilize where to get the land, how to finance it and how to piece it all together. We are seeing a gap that needs to be addressed.
Senator Cochrane: Ms. Wake Carroll, would you like to add something?
Ms. Wake Carroll: I know Ontario the best. There are the problems of single people and the aged without savings. In our case, the declining numbers in families is not true simply because Toronto, and spilling into Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula, has so many immigrants, and those families are very large. The problem is that the social housing we have is not big enough for them, rather than the reverse. I just finished some national research on the housing needs of immigrants. Everyone told us that they need larger units because families are cramped, or extended families want to live together so that one person can be the caregiver and the other people can go to work, and they cannot live together, because we do not have the housing stock for that.
Senator Cochrane: Mr. Distasio mentioned that we should have these people involved in trying to construct their own facilities, and that notion appealed to me. That way, they will give the community and themselves more pride in what they are doing.
Mr. Distasio: In the two projects I worked on closely with rooming house tenants and single room occupancy tenants, we tried to give them the lead voice on the project — let them direct the research and come up with ideas. One of the outcomes was a rooming house tenant-landlord cooperation program. It was a simple set of rules to make life better in a tiny, horrible environment by having things like a stronger door or a peephole, a front door that cannot be kicked in or a buzzer to let someone in to have some security.
We called the report "Beyond the Front Desk,'' because once you got beyond that front desk in these old hotels that are now home, there is no turn-down service, no one will answer the phone if you call for help, and you are on your own. It is a big challenge in the city of Winnipeg, and someone needs to step up to that.
It is a simple thing. I know we have all these great programs but a lot of people we are talking about are not captured by any means. In fact, I would hazard a guess that a lot of them were not even enumerated in the census, because no one really knows that these people exist — again, in a room no bigger than the space between us here.
Senator Munson: I have a short question for each of you. Ms. McCracken, you said that co-op housing costs 40 per cent less to operate than public housing. What are the differences between co-op housing and public housing? Do they serve different groups? Should our focus be on co-op housing for the economic homeless and for newcomers?
For Mr. Distasio, what impact have federal initiatives had on homelessness in your city? Perhaps the other two could tell me, where do the poor people go in our cities? I am curious.
I first moved to Ottawa in 1972, and I went away for a long while. We knew there was an area where poor people lived in this city; yet we create a city with rich homes, nice neat homes in different sections where they lived — for example, in Lower Town — and I am sure the same thing happens in cities across the country. These are the areas where people live below the poverty line. All of a sudden they are gone, and it is the baby boomers and niche marketing moving in. When you look around the streets you seem to see more homeless people.
Finally, do you have any statistics on people with mental health conditions that have been turfed out of mental institutions and places where there has been care and who are now on our streets?
Ms. McCracken: In my former work, I worked at the Prairie Women's Health Centre of Excellence. We did a study with the Women's Health Clinic in Winnipeg, which has a research and advocacy program called Poverty is Hazardous to Women's Health. We interviewed women who lived in co-op housing, private rental housing and social housing — social housing being defined as housing that is run by the Manitoba Housing Authority, which is part of the Manitoba Housing and Renewal Corporation, a Crown corporation. Those social housing units are rent geared to income. For people who are on social assistance, whatever they are allocated for social assistance rent is what they pay, and then they have the rest of their allocation to spend. Or if they are part of the working poor, they pay 30 per cent of their before-tax income for rent.
It is the same with the cooperatives. These two groups receive rent subsidies to help meet the gap, because it costs a certain amount to run the building and people can only afford so much. There is still some subsidy available from the provincial government to pay that amount, so they are similar in those ways.
They are different in that you apply to become a member of a co-op, so the mindset is different. You own a share; you own your unit. There is some discussion about equity versus non-equity co-ops, which you may want to look at in terms of carrying the equity on with you for the rest of your life. The co-op model of governance appealed to us when we talked to the women. For example, they said that at least if they want a chair in the waiting room, there is a mechanism for them to present that. In that way, it developed leadership and sense of ownership, and we found it useful.
In the social housing, there was no such mechanism. There was a caretaker on site and that was it; there was not necessarily a tenants' association.
Mr. Distasio: The question of where the poor go is important. Looking back, during the Pan American Games there was a strong intent to move the visible aspects of poverty off the main street of Winnipeg. They wanted to clean this up so that all the people coming into the city for the games would not be disturbed by the visions of homeless persons and persons who do not quite make the cut.
Where do they go? As I mentioned before, Winnipeg has a growing industry of poverty. We have mega soup kitchens going up in parts of our downtown to serve the needs of this growing clientele. Just the other day, I was asked to comment on the fact that one of the residential hotels has become such a blight that a downtown employer of hundreds of people is threatening to leave the downtown because they cannot deal with the sight of visible homelessness in front of their business anymore.
In the two reports we did on rooming houses and hotels, the number one thing we set out was to not simply say, "Let us blow these places up; they are no good — no good can come out of these places.'' Instead, we took the tack of saying, "What can we do as a society to make a small space — again, about as big as this — the best possible, most helpful environment for these individuals who cannot find anything better?''
We can do it better. In Winnipeg, some good work is being done on what are called "pocket apartments.'' Someone has come up with an inventive way of taking a small plot of land and putting up six to eight self-contained units that are about 300 square feet, with good quality furniture, built in stuff. That is dignified.
We have always said you can do something. In Los Angeles's Skid Row, there is the Skid Row Housing Trust, which turned 6,000 or 7,000 hotel rooms into better quality housing of 150 to 200 square feet. You can do that in a manner that is respectful of someone.
You do not give someone a mattress on a floor and have that room shared by five people. That is not how it should be done. You can do it better; and you cannot just get rid of these places because they are in many ways important. We have 6,000 people living in marginal housing. We cannot say that tomorrow we will shut down all the rooming houses and hotels. Rather, we need to find ways to get those places up to speed.
Also, we need to find a way to empower residents. When we did an evaluation of the Neighbourhoods Alive! program, which targets inner city neighbourhoods and tries to find renewal, I was startled by some residents saying, "When you target neighbourhoods and dump tens of millions of dollars into them, you need to prepare us for the changes that will take place.''
On West Broadway, where rents have gone up and the poorest of the poor or the hard-to-house people are being displaced, we never tried to help along the way to renovate, to improve or perhaps to gentrify so that they could move up the ladder of improvement. We can spend all this money on new shiny buildings and renovating older apartment building, but if we do not provide the basic core support for the ones who are turfed, then we have done nothing but move the poverty from one side of the street to the other or from one hotel to another. Those are the ways.
I look back at the University of Winnipeg's small contribution to the education of kids in the neighbourhood — a free computer. Even the parents are coming to understand the use of the Internet and email and how to empower themselves technologically.
Ms. Wake Carroll: Hamilton has a large psychiatric hospital, which is now for out patients. Because the people are not officially residents of Hamilton, there is no responsibility to house them in Hamilton, but they cannot go home because they are treated as out patients. They live on mattresses in abandoned housing in the old north end of Hamilton, often next to a crack house with three or four children in the same house.
Hamilton has many of the same issues that Winnipeg has. We tend to think of Toronto and its gentrified downtown when we think of the homeless. Many cities in Canada have core downtowns that could be renovated fairly inexpensively. I am with an organization that takes young people from the streets and teaches them building skills while rehabilitating old houses for the poor. There is no particular reason that we cannot have scaled down amenities. You do not need a second bathroom if you do not even have a house now. The private sector can make money doing this and can build housing effectively if they are encouraged. One of the most effective housing projects was the old limited dividend program, which was privately owned, managed and funded. It was a successful program.
Senator Munson: On the impact of this, I need a history lesson on social housing programs, which were eliminated in 1993. It is now 2007. I would hope that we are looking at a national strategy. Obviously, there is not enough federal funding and there is no strategy. That was the overarching question.
Mr. Distasio: I will add that social housing units built from the 1970s on came with subsidies. Many of the Aboriginal housing units in Winnipeg and social housing units across the country — 600,000 — are facing the end of their operating agreements. Over the next 20 to 30 years, some 600,000 units of subsidized housing will be unsubsidized. Currently, we are working with the Manitoba Urban Native Housing Association to develop a plan to address this. Aboriginal housing in Winnipeg is faced with the immediate challenge of telling Aboriginal families that there is no longer a subsidy attached to that unit funded by the federal government. The family will be turfed out. Kinew Housing was started in 1970 and is the oldest Aboriginal housing corporation in the country. They will have to tell families that they can no longer stay in the units. It is shameful that Kinew Housing has stock in all parts of Winnipeg that could be sold for a profit when the operating agreements end. That might be their only alternative if there is no support given for those families who are facing those issues. It is a big challenge.
Ms. Wake Carroll: I think you are being a bit unfair to the program. The subsidies are in place for 35 years because the mortgage is running for 35 years. Essentially, the subsidy stops when the mortgage is paid. There is still a need for some subsidies, which I am not denying, but it is not as critical. The people who are paying rent at the low end of market will lose their subsidies and the other subsidies will have to be renegotiated. It is not quite as dramatic because they cannot sell the units on the market but have to sell them to a charity. That is the nature of the non-profit housing program. I am not saying that you are not right, but it is not quite as critical as it sounds. We are not turfing them out on the streets tomorrow with no subsidies.
Mr. Distasio: Some will be displaced. Operating agreements in Manitoba with some of the Aboriginal agencies have expired and individuals in those units have been given notice that the rents will go up. At the lowest end of the rental scale, the lack of that subsidy and the amount that those individuals can afford to pay for rent do not match. It needs to be on the radar screen at a higher level.
Ms. Gogan: I have two quick points. Things are a bit different in St. John's than they are in the larger cities where you are focused. We have a problem with inadequate housing, and our homelessness problem is somewhat hidden, as I mentioned earlier. We have young people who move from couch to couch because they do not have stable housing. We have been talking about inadequate housing, about renters and people who have their own homes who cannot afford to maintain them or heat them. That intersects with the group of people aged 55 to 64. There are many people of all ages. Some might be single mothers whose kids are grown up and whose homes have not been maintained because they have no capacity to do that. The wind might be blowing through and the only time they turn the heat on is when the kids come home to visit. That is another issue worth raising because it is a problem in our province. The City of St. John's is financing a study of low-income housing and I can provide a copy of that to the committee. It looks at the issues and possible solutions and focuses on recommendations.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: The testimony today on poverty in Canada and its implications has been inspiring, humbling and worrying. With the exception of Newfoundland and Labrador, which I would like to hear a little more about, I did not hear much about provincial governments and certainly less about municipal governments. Therefore, I want to ask the people from Winnipeg: To what extent is your municipal government involved?
Mr. Distasio: One very interesting thing about Winnipeg is what I sometimes call the "Winnipeg model'' whereby all three levels of government have been quite successful in cost sharing many initiatives to address urban challenges. I will mention former federal minister Lloyd Axworthy and go back to 1980 when the first core initiative was struck. It was one of the largest urban renewal projects ever undertaken in North America and was equally cost-shared by the three levels of government and sustained for 12 years. After that, the Winnipeg Partnership Agreement and the Winnipeg Development Agreement have been offshoots where the three levels of government have equally committed to doing things. However, all three levels have gently waned and, while the City of Winnipeg provides certain supports for housing and other programs, it is doing a less than adequate job facing the fiscal challenges that every city faces, such as fixing potholes, which is seen as generating more votes than does fixing houses.
Winnipeg has emergency funds and is trying to do things differently, but the city government has not done as well as it could do. It is likely common in Canadian municipalities that the municipal-level direction of urban programs has not been that great.
Ms. McCracken: I used to work for the provincial government in the Cabinet Secretariat's community economic development committee. The City of Winnipeg told us that it was reallocating existing dollars because of the cash crunch they were facing. There are project-based federal funds, but ongoing support was low. The province was backfilling in some respects for both levels of government. There was quite a tight cash crunch, combined with the fact that housing is not, as Ms. Wake Carroll mentioned, necessarily something that gets a lot of votes.
I have to commend you for tackling this issue. It can be overwhelming and complex. I have tried to focus on various sub-populations or various things that you can get your teeth into, because it is overwhelming.
The provincial government is concerned and is trying to address it; however, without a planned approach, it is project-based and piecemeal. That was the challenge with these groups coming forward with their housing proposals. For example, we had $20 million to allocate for one phase of the affordable housing initiative when I worked for the province. We had over $40 million applied for and only $20 million to allocate in the entire province. Seniors' groups in rural Manitoba were competing against northern communities who were competing against inner city communities, all for this small pocket of funds. It was heart-wrenching reading these wonderful proposals and trying to allocate these dollars when I did that work.
I wanted you to know that the governments are struggling with it and are trying to address it, but having a strategy and admitting that we need to invest in this long term would be helpful.
Mr. Distasio: The other challenge in Manitoba, especially with the social housing fund and shelter allowance payments paid to persons on assistance, is that those assistance rates for shelter have not changed in over a decade. The rooming house resident, the hotel resident, or the single person gets either $236 or $284 a month to find accommodation. Most times they are stuck in the inner city in rundown places. The kicker — and this goes back to the industry of poverty — is that $236 or $284 is not the rent that is being charged. The rent is $275 or $300-plus. Someone on assistance then takes 30 per cent to 40 per cent of their $80 or so of disposable income to pay for shelter. They go see John Mohan of Siloam Mission for their food or David Northcott at the 300 burgeoning food banks. They go to the Salvation Army. They go here and there in the big cycle of poverty, fuelled by this challenge that people face on a daily basis. It is insurmountable.
Ms. Wake Carroll: Municipalities get all their money from the property tax. The property tax is regressive. The downloading of responsibility for housing onto municipalities makes little sense because when economic conditions are bad, revenues go down. It is difficult for cities to raise taxes. Dealing with the problems of the homeless should be based on an income redistribution kind of tax, not a property tax. Most municipalities in Ontario are strapped for funds. They do what they can, but they do not have much money. Housing must be seen as a senior-level problem. Municipalities can deliver some things and take some initiatives, but funding should be coming out of a redistribution tax base, not a system based on property tax.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Money is certainly a factor, but so is raising the consciousness of the citizens to do things, to try to work things out in communities on streets and neighbourhoods, not just providing food banks. This is one area where a strong municipal voice can go to the province and to the federal government. We are talking about top down from the federal government to the communities. We need that powerful voice and that strong social conscience and mobilization of individuals and community groups from the town and the city upwards. I was wondering whether that exists in Winnipeg.
Ms. Gogan: Mr. Distasio commented on housing amounts and income support rates. It is a challenge for provincial governments because whatever housing amount they set in a sense becomes the rate, or even if the rate is higher than that, it is closely correlated. We struggle with this. If you increase the rental amount that you provide, the rents all go up to that amount as the minimum rate, and then other people living in poverty, the working poor, can end up having to pay more for their rent. It is a difficult problem for provincial governments to tackle. That is not to say that it should not be tackled.
Again, it points to the need for a comprehensive approach. I know you look at it holistically. We have raised amounts in our province as part of the poverty reduction strategy, so I am not against that, but you have to be mindful of what you are doing to the rental market. You may inadvertently have a negative impact on other people living in poverty who are not on income supports. It is challenging and complex to deal with, because everything you do has other impacts.
It is the same in our province. We heard in our consultations about income-support clients having to use money that is supposed to be for their basic living to go towards their rent as well. I did not want to detract from your point, but I wanted to make the point that it is complicated.
Senator Cordy: I have many questions, but I will only ask one. The information you have given us is depressing but will be helpful to us in our report. You have all clearly given us the message of the importance of housing and that the determinants of health and education are related to housing. I was a teacher and I know of students who would move three times in one school year. How could the poor little child possibly keep up with their education? I know of the dignity that good housing provides to families and individuals and how it affects them in years to come.
Ms. Gogan spoke of the departments working together. Government being what it is, they tend to work in silos. Each government department gets a budget. If you give your budget to education from community services, you may not have enough within your department. What is making it work? Is it the individuals involved? Being from Nova Scotia, I know of Danny Williams. My guess is that if he wants something to happen, it will happen.
Is it more than the individuals involved? How do you work with municipalities? Do you work with the federal government? Do you have suggestions for other provinces?
Ms. Gogan: It has much to do with the level of priority this has been given by the government. As I mentioned, eight ministers are involved in overseeing this strategy and are giving clear direction that this is a priority. If you look at the investments that have been made, particularly for our province, $90 million a year is an incredible amount of new money to be going into this area. That is a large part of it.
Also, though, from the beginning it has been important that everyone recognized that the strategy had to be government-wide, it had to be integrated and we had to be willing to work together. A number of things have contributed to allow that to happen within the culture of the public service. As I said, anyone who has worked for any government knows that there can be challenges. The way accountabilities are, a deputy minister is responsible for ensuring that that department's mandate is met. When you get something like this that overlaps mandates, it would be easy for it not to happen. You need a high level of commitment and then a lot of public support. A lot of strong advocacy has happened in our province, and I know the other witnesses in their own provinces play that role. You cannot underestimate that.
Internally at the public service level, we try to have a consensus-building approach. In our recommendations, we tried to put our departmental mandates to one side and ask, from the point of view of people living in poverty, what are the important things to do, recognizing that we cannot do them all at one time or overnight and we have to set priorities, which can be difficult. You can feel like you are trading off one group over another.
The biggest initiatives that has been funded has been an expansion of our prescription drug coverage. We managed to all come to an agreement. The ministers very much supported that and agreed that it was a key, because so many people could not leave income support because of high drug costs. High drug costs affected all of the groups involved in poverty, because before that the expansion, only seniors receiving the Guaranteed Income Supplement and those on income support had access to prescription drugs. Obviously people with private coverage did too, but there was the whole group often called "the working poor'' who did not and who are so vulnerable.
The other part of your question concerned working with municipal and federal governments. As we move on with the strategy, that will be very important; certainly it is a priority. In our document, we have highlighted areas where we need to work with the federal government. That is an area for ongoing work.
Municipalities in our province may play different roles than those in other provinces. The City of St. John's currently has a housing committee with which we have been working. It is an ongoing process, and it can be depressing and overwhelming. Our approach has been to look at what we can do now and to see how we can keep doing things and adding on, rather than doing nothing.
The cause for optimism is that we are seeing a difference and we are hearing positive things from some of the initiatives that have already gotten under way. We are working with community partners to ensure that they are working the way they should be working in trying to track and monitor progress, while always looking to other areas where we might need to be doing more.
Senator Callbeck: Professor Wake Carroll, you made a comment about newcomers and the housing situation. Housing is often overcrowded, and you said that that might be why increasingly newcomers are integrating more slowly than did earlier groups of immigrants. Have there been any studies done to show that?
Ms. Wake Carroll: Yes. A Statistics Canada study that came out two or three weeks ago showed that basically newcomers are taking much longer to integrate and even newcomers of the same ethnic group are taking longer.
I have just finished the research on housing and immigrants. The report went in last week. We are hearing from a number of people that housing is becoming a fairly major issue with integrating groups; immigrants they keep going back to the settlement services people, partly for language issues, but it is the housing services they need.
Immigration people tend to think of short-term settlement, not long-term settlement, so they tend not to be integrating and if they are not integrating in the housing, they have trouble getting jobs. If there are problems as a result of living in poor housing conditions, they will carry on and we will see the same problems with the children. We expect immigrants' education level, after the first generation, to go up and to see them integrate well. However, that is not happening as quickly as it used to. They are living in overcrowded conditions. More newcomers are on welfare, which is very unusual. The trend in the past had been that newcomers almost never went on social welfare programs. Now they are using social security at almost the same levels. We think that some part of it is that they have this housing obstacle. That is not the only problem, but it certainly seems to be one. We have not spent a lot of time on it nor done much research.
Mr. Distasio: Parallels get drawn between the Aboriginal community and the immigrant communities. We see Aboriginal individuals coming into Winnipeg doubling and tripling up, but it is not for the same reasons. In the immigrant model, sometimes there was cooperation. My family split a house with a couple of other families and then quickly moved on to our own residence. What is happening in the Aboriginal community goes back to the question of hidden homelessness; it is growing rapidly and they are not getting that economic turnaround as fast as possible.
Interestingly, this is unique to the inner city. In Winnipeg there is a collection of 25 neighbourhoods that house the inner city Aboriginal community, newcomers and the rest. If you look at their circumstances, they are at such a disadvantage. Using LICO rates, for example, if we compare the Aboriginal population in the inner city to Aboriginal people outside of the inner city, we find that Aboriginal persons do so much better when we get them out of that environment, when we get people into a higher quality of living and into better neighbourhoods.
There is work going on to improve those neighbourhoods and we cannot take that away, but the results are there: Immigrants do much better outside the inner city, which had always been the traditional stepping stone. My family moved from one of the poorest inner city neighbourhoods now in Winnipeg to one of the more affluent ones. We are not seeing that kind of movement as fast anymore.
Senator Pépin: Mr. Distasio, you spoke about the silent industry of poverty, which to me is a new way to speak about homelessness, but I do understand the dimension of the number of people living like this.
You also mentioned that they live in hotels where there is no central office. They live by themselves, all alone. They do not have telephones. In the size of the room that you describe, there cannot be many people living there, maybe one or two. It is as though we were parking them over there.
You said in your recommendation that education is the way to break the pattern. How do you think we could organize a structure that would not oblige but would motivate young people to go to school? Do you see a way to help send those children or adolescents to school? Is there legislation? I come from a province where by law all children have to go to school until the age of 14. I do not know if that is so in your province. On the other hand, they are so poor.
You have so much experience and knowledge. Do you see how we could organize that and have different governments working together to that end?
Mr. Distasio: I think there are many opportunities to find the right answers. There is a population of 1,000 people living in hotel rooms who have no rights and no great level of service. Some people are there by choice. There are the working poor individuals looking for a small space; people with mental health issues; sex-trade workers; persons who engage in lifestyles that we do not see as traditional. We will always have individuals who do not fit the traditional, who will seek alternative lifestyles. We need to acknowledge that that will always be the case. However, for those who want a way out, who want a better life, we need at least to try to provide them with the opportunity.
I go back to Los Angeles, where in the Skid Row areas, some of the hotels have added services and supports. They have removed the liquor licence, the bar, and have put in social support services for those who want in. However, there is a challenge there too. Just like the missions, if you want to come in out of the cold, sit here and listen to a sermon, and then we will feed you; if you want to come into this hotel, sit down, listen to a sermon, and then we will give you a place to live.
There must be a balance between those types of approaches. Education is not the only way. There is so much despair and so much opportunity that we need to balance it for those who want to come into an environment.
We have Aboriginal youth who are building houses in the city of Winnipeg. A few of them said to me that it is interesting that they are given the skills to renovate and repair these homes, yet they will never have the ability to live there. That is the cycle. We need to start somewhere. We have Aboriginal youth, youth generally, and small kids. Let us reach them. Let us start somewhere and try to stem this cycle with some of our youngest and brightest. Let us not forget everyone else, by all means, but let us start somewhere.
Ms. McCracken: I would like to share with you a project that uses a community development approach for poverty alleviation on a micro level. It is run out of a women's centre in North Point Douglas that receives core funding from the province, so that is helpful. They took a community development approach where women in the neighbourhood, some of whom were living in hotels, some in social housing and some in the private market, were asked what their priorities were. One of their priorities was child care and another was education.
The province conducted a pilot program where they located the training necessary to become an early childhood educator in that neighbourhood and they provided child care for those women while they were becoming trained. At the end of that course, the women have a certificate or a diploma in early childhood education. Their next plan is to start a child care centre in that neighbourhood that would receive public funding to employ these women, which will boost their income.
This program has buy-in, because the women were involved and brought along in the process of developing their priorities, which for them was child care. For another group, the priority might be housing or something else.
The federal government should partner with provinces and municipalities in developing poverty alleviation strategies. I am impressed with the Poverty Reduction Strategy of Newfoundland and Labrador. I wish our provincial government had a similar approach. I would like to bring that idea home with us and talk to the provincial government about that.
That is just to give you some hope and inspiration that there are such initiatives happening on a micro level and they just need long-term, sustained investment to ratchet it up.
The Acting Chairman: I thank all of you. We are lucky that you are in the field doing this kind of work. The Senate is an activist chamber, and we came earlier this morning from our Agriculture Committee, which is on a country-wide tour of rural poverty. As we go along our path, we cannot extract one issue from the other. This is all very much hooked together. It is a tough problem, but it is comforting for us to know you are out there. Thank you so much for coming.
The committee adjourned.