Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 19 - Evidence - Meeting of March 6, 2007
LETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA, Tuesday, March 6, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 6:20 p.m. to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here with my colleagues from the Senate in my hometown of Lethbridge. I will introduce my colleagues.
My deputy chair is Len Gustafson from Macoun, Saskatchewan. I do not have to introduce the next guy, Frank Mahovlich. He was a big hit in Warner today. He grew up in Timmins in Northern Ontario. Terry Mercer is from Nova Scotia. I can never remember the name of the community.
Senator Mercer: It is a little village called Mount Uniacke.
The Chairman: Senator Bob Peterson is from Regina, Saskatchewan. Senator Tommy Banks is from Edmonton.
For many people from outside this province, it is easy to assume that Alberta, and particularly rural Alberta, is doing just fine, thank you very much. Surely, they say, the seemingly endless supply of paying jobs in the oil and gas sector has wiped out the poverty problem, both urban and rural, if there was one here in Alberta.
It will surprise people to learn that this situation is not necessarily the case. People forget that Alberta is a big and diverse province and that not everyone has shared in the province's strong economic growth.
Even in Fort McMurray, prosperity has been something of a double-edged sword. We know that food bank use more than doubled last year. We know Alberta is the province with the highest percentage of unemployed clients visiting a food bank.
Alberta is also famous for its entrepreneurial drive and can-do attitude. The province is honoured for that attitude in other parts of Canada.
It will come as less of a surprise to learn Albertans have not forgotten or abandoned their rural communities. If anything moves this committee from the Senate of Canada, it is to make sure that rural Canada remains a foundation of this country, which it has always been.
Our first witness this evening is Ken Nicol, director of Rural Alberta's Development Fund. I understand Mr. Nicol is relatively new. The fund was created precisely because there is a pressing need to revitalize rural Alberta and help Alberta's poor.
We welcome you. It is good to see you.
Ken Nicol, Director, Rural Alberta's Development Fund: Thank you very much. I want to talk about the mandate and background of Rural Alberta's Development Fund. After the 2001 election, a lot of issues were raised about the things you talked about in your introduction. What is going on in rural Alberta? What needs to be done, if anything? What is the vision that rural Alberta sees for itself?
The provincial government began a consultation that ended up with a document being produced called, A Place to Grow. That document is available on the Government of Alberta website.
In that document, the group participating made recommendations to the government that it was the government's responsibility to partner with rural Alberta in creating its future and to help it achieve where it wanted to go.
The government approved $100 million in last spring's budget to help this transition into the future for rural Alberta.
As a clarification, rural Alberta, under the mandate of our fund, was defined as any place in Alberta other than Edmonton or Calgary.
The government wanted also to make this activity non-partisan. They created a not-for-profit organization called the Rural Alberta's Development Fund, with a 12-member board. The co-chairs were Bob Clark and Fred Estlin, and there were 10 other members, of which I am one.
We were given the mandate to solicit from Alberta communities, Alberta organizations and Alberta partners, proposals that would help them move to a vision they saw for their community. We did not tell them where we thought they should go. In their proposals, they told us where they thought they should go.
One of the main focuses of A Place to Grow was that rural Albertans felt there were inequities in the opportunities for them in things such as community capacity, quality of life, health delivery, learning, skill development, training to keep their youth in the community, and opportunities for seniors to stay in the community. These things came out in A Place to Grow.
That document created, in a sense, the basis of our mandate: Look for visionary projects and proposals from the communities to address those types of concerns.
All of them were tied to economic issues as well — equity and opportunity — because the economic foundation creates support structures for all the community-based components.
We organized our board. We started late last summer. We received our first proposals in December, in a two-stage effort. The first stage was only an idea and solicitation. What were they thinking about for their community?
If we thought the idea had merit, then we asked for full proposals. The board is only getting to the point where it is considering full proposals. In the next few months, we will, in a sense, begin our partnership with rural Alberta.
We were looking for ways to build community capacity in the areas of people, health and support for First Nation communities. Those issues were expressed in the consultation and became part of our true mandate. We wanted to make sure that the community was looking for and asking for support.
As part of our proposal, we asked for solicitations of partnership where a number of community organizations came together and said they were developing these kinds of coordinated efforts to move their community forward in the areas I talked about. We did not want individual initiatives. They had to be broad-based in the community. We are looking for things that reflect the broad needs of a community.
We are looking for ideas that, as these communities make these applications, business can be a partner, but we did not want to support one business over another. If the community says, this is where we want to go but we have a business that will partner with us, that is okay. We will not give money to grow a new business in the community. The money must be in support of a community initiative.
Rural Albertans have responded positively. For the first round, we have been asking for ideas for about two and a half months. Exciting proposals are coming in. A lot of them deal with linkages. How do the proposals communicate health care issues, education issues, learning issues and opportunities for seniors? How do communities find out what is going on in other rural communities so they can adopt the practices in their communities?
These linkage activities seem to be an area where communities are giving us ideas. How they will come back in the full proposals, time will tell. We are recently into that stage. I cannot make comment on those proposals at this point.
The idea is that we will operate for three years. We want to phase our expenditures or partnerships in over that three-year period and work it out so it is not a first-come, first-funded opportunity. As we see real projects that reflect what the community wants and needs, then we will provide support.
Madam Chairman, that is our fund. It is a great opportunity to participate with rural Alberta. Albertans seem to be excited about this initiative. I hope in two and a half years or three years I can come back and tell you it was a great success.
The Chairman: I think all of us are impressed to hear that this fund has been created in Alberta. It is something that would influence people in the same situation in other provinces. We will stay in touch so we can share what you are learning. When we start the questioning, my colleagues will want to know more.
I will turn to Lynn Jacobson, the President of the Alberta Soft Wheat Producers Commission.
Lynn Jacobson, President, Alberta Soft Wheat Producers Commission: Thank you, Madam Chairman, and the rest of the committee. It is a pleasure to be here tonight and to make a presentation to you. Our organization has talked to the senators and the Agriculture Committee over a period of time. We have gotten to know some members well. We view this appearance as more of a friendly discussion tonight.
Rural poverty takes many forms in the rural communities. We need to separate what we talk about and how we talk in different perspectives. I want to talk from the perspective of the farming community that does not have off-farm jobs. We are making our living from our farms. We do not have that off-farm employment. That lack is a factor in many rural communities.
The Alberta Soft Wheat Producers Commission was formed by producers in 1972 under the Societies Act for Alberta. It became the Alberta Soft Wheat Producers Commission in 1990 under the Marketing Act for Alberta.The commission supports producers in the mandate areas of research, production, and marketing.
The issue of rural poverty is linked directly to the farm income crisis and has resulted in rural depopulation, loss of market power, loss or inability to build new infrastructure and lack of ability to maintain existing infrastructures such as roads, water and sewer systems. In addition, we sometimes do not have reasonable access to adequate health care in our communities. All those things are needed to support a small community.
With the low farm income and the inadequate safety net programs we have faced over the past few years, the average farm debt in Canada is $200,000. You have heard that figure before. The last three years have generated some of the lowest farm income that producers have experienced in Canada. The 2007 income figures are not much better.
In contrast, farmers in the United States are coming off three of the best years of farm income and that situation has resulted in an average debt per farm of $80,000. You can see a big difference in what our safety nets have delivered to producers on both sides of the border.
Agriculture producers in Alberta have done well compared to agriculture producers in other regions of Canada. I think we will freely admit that living in Alberta is an advantage at times.
Rural poverty in Alberta is not as evident as it is in other regions. This situation could be explained by the fact that Alberta has a major gas and oil sector and a majority of the irrigation in Canada. Those two sectors have resulted in a booming economy.
This wealth has allowed the Government of Alberta to spend more on companion crop insurance and safety net programs, and has directly increased producer incomes. We freely admit that this situation has been a boon to us.
Producers who make their living off the farm have reacted in several ways to counter low farm incomes. Some producers have increased the size of their farms to decrease their unit cost of production. Other producers have not increased their land base but have attempted to increase efficiency by changing their farming methods, such as raising more livestock, changing to cow-calf operations, developing a feedlot or switching to more specialty crops on irrigated land. Other producers have sold a portion of their land to counter low income and still others have rented land to other producers and taken off-farm jobs. That situation is a fact in all our rural communities.
Access to capital has always been important to primary production. Farm Credit Canada, FCC, has been a lender of last resort in the past. Today, FCC is in direct competition with banks and credit unions to lend capital to producers.
This estimate comes from some of the major banks, or bank loan officers from local banks that I have talked to — FCC carries between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of agriculture debt in Canada. In some cases, FCC has lent 80 per cent to 100 per cent of the capital needs to invest in land. FCC has done that because they feel land is a good investment. They have been willing to step ahead of major banks and make that commitment to the farming community. That has helped producers to stay on the land to some degree, and expand.
Because of the lending policies of FCC, and the interest from individuals in the urban population to own property for a different lifestyle, land prices, especially in Alberta, have remained static or even risen. We need only to look at the statistics on land and that proves our point.
Is this sustainable or good for agriculture producers? We are uncertain. The answer may differ depending on who you ask. We all have different opinions. What is known is that land is overpriced based on its productive capacity and cannot be paid for as well as earn a living from producing a crop. Producers must subsidize the operation in some other manner.
If the interest rate and inflation suddenly increase, or if the world suddenly produces a bumper crop, resulting in overproduction and a reduction in commodity prices, agriculture producers would be in serious trouble. Agriculture producers have no latitude in sustaining the type of economic shock that occurred to our industry in the late 1980s.
At that time, I was thankful I was on a family farm. A number of people in our area went broke. We had the land auctions. Land that sold for $2,000 an acre in the 1980s was selling for $250 an acre in our area. That type of shock can happen. If it does, agriculture will be in great difficulty.
Another factor that will have a large impact on the future of agriculture producers' incomes, and the type of agriculture we will see in Canada, is a potential loss of marketing power.
In the past, agriculture producers joined together to form cooperatives to work collectively toward a common goal of more market power. Today, some producers think that a fax machine, access to the Internet, and the telephone gives market power. I disagree.
Around the world, businesses are consolidating and forming alliances to give them more market power. We ask the question: Why do some agriculture producers and governments in Canada ignore what other businesses around the world are doing to consolidate their market power? Why are agriculture producers being influenced to give up what market power they now have? We need answers for those questions.
Western Canada is dependent on trading with the world. We know that. We export 80 per cent of our agriculture production. The United States exports only 20 per cent of their annual agriculture production. We feel trade at any cost is not an option for Canada. Trading off agricultural programs and institutions to satisfy other countries limits not only our ability to decide what we presently do in Canada, but what we do in the future for our industry and for Canada as a sovereign nation.
Rural poverty may not be as visible in Alberta as it is in other regions of Canada. However, it is there in many rural communities and it is a fact. The Alberta Soft Wheat Producers Commission wants to recommend to the Senate committee that we need an adequately funded safety net program. We need safety net and insurance program development with active producer input. We are the third party in many crop insurance programs and the safety net programs. We seem to have the provincial and federal levels of government making decisions for us. They take our input, but we feel it is largely ignored.
If we ever have a chance at getting some of these programs right, we need to sit down to the table and develop some of the principles that these programs operate under. We send them away, bring them back, and we get to peek. If we do not like it, maybe we have a voice in changing it.
Another recommendation is to research and develop assistance in value-added opportunities in rural communities. Mr. Nicol talked about the fund that would apply to that. A fund like that needs to go all across Canada. We need to have that opportunity.
We need to encourage and promote the benefits and development of cooperative businesses where possible.
Trade agreements must be free and fair to all parties. We do not need agreements in the world that are fair to only one side, or we sign an agreement and people use other means to deliver programs that we cannot compete with. We want policies that encourage development of not only agribusiness in rural communities, but also other forms of business. Why are all the oil companies in Calgary? A lot of infrastructure could be moved to rural communities. People could settle in rural communities and that would help our rural communities.
Those are some of the recommendations we want to bring forward to the Senate.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. They will be looked at closely. I am sure there will be questions. The things said in these public hearings can be useful in other parts of the country as well.
Our third speaker is Everett Tanis. Mr. Tanis represents the National Farmers Union. We know Mr. Tanis is forever representing his own points of view. We look forward to hearing them.
Everett Tanis, Member, National Farmers Union: Thank you, Madam Chairman, honourable members of the committee, and ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to represent the National Farmers Union at this hearing this evening.
The NFU is a nationwide, direct-membership, family-farm organization. While the National Farmers Union members produce a wide range of commodities, we believe the problems facing farmers are common problems. Our producers of various commodities must work together to advance effective solutions. The issue of rural property cannot be looked at in isolation from the farm income crisis, nor can the farm income crisis be divorced from a larger issue of corporate concentration, the economy and the resulting reduction in farmers' market power.
In a market economy, economic well-being is a function of market power. Those individuals and corporations with the most market power capture the most wealth. Cooperative, orderly marketing of farm products is a proven method for increasing farmers' market power and raising net incomes at the farm gate. The Canadian Wheat Board and supply management are two examples of this type of orderly marketing. They must be protected and strengthened.
Government agriculture policy-makers over the decades have based their initiative on the assumption that increased production and increased exports will eventually lead to increased net incomes. However, this situation has not happened. Despite production and export increases, realized net farm incomes have declined to unprecedented levels.
Evidence shows that agribusiness corporations — including import suppliers, processors and exporters — are capturing more than their fair share of wealth produced by the food system, while the farmers' share is declining.
Farmers are relying more and more on off-farm income, higher debt loads and drawing down accumulated equity to make ends meet. Far from being an indication of the health of the rural economy, the wide-scale dependence on off- farm jobs is a clear signal that the food production system in Canada is in serious trouble.
The problem of poverty in rural communities is not due to a lack of resources or efficiency on the part of the residents of rural Canada. It is because the resources and wealth are unfairly expropriated by those who exercise undue control over the marketplace.
The NFU strongly recommends that the Standing Committee on Agriculture endorses the principle of orderly marketing for farm commodities as a fundamental requirement for increasing farmers' net income and for the reduction of rural poverty.
It has been a pleasure to have you as my audience. I am open to questions.
Senator Mercer: Thank you to the witnesses for appearing. We appreciate you taking your time to come this evening.
Mr. Nicol, can you expand on the criteria for financial support? We had a little lesson this afternoon in Warner, Alberta. They talked about a program they had applied for that was a federal, provincial, and municipal, third, third and third program to help expand what that community has come together to do. The program is a great example of a community coming together and emphasizing the positive aspects of their community. They did not qualify. I want to see the criteria for your program.
Mr. Nicol: One thing that we were given as part of our mandate is no capital. If a community wants a new facility — a curling rink, library, seniors' centre or whatever — that is beyond our jurisdiction. The provincial government feels that it has allocated enough money in this year's budget to deal with infrastructure. That need was taken out of our purview by mandate.
We are looking for communities that come together and say, these programs will help our target audiences. I talked about seniors, youth, Aboriginal communities, new initiatives like tourism and small businesses transitioning into larger, more competitive businesses and that type of activity. We are looking for those things. The funds are program funds. We are not funding something already taking place. The program must be new and visionary, and where we want to go in the next 10 years, 15 years, or 20 years. We have decided not to fund activities that are more of the same.
Senator Mercer: One thing we have found in our studies so far is a great lack of capital available in rural Canada. I appreciate the Government of Alberta's generous $100-million commitment, but a lot of the applications will have a capital component that will disqualify them right off the top.
Mr. Nicol: That is what we are experiencing.
Senator Mercer: You indicated a three-year time limit. Is that time limit legislated or is it a program time limit announced by the government when they announced the program?
Mr. Nicol: We received our programming up front. We have, by government mandate, three years to disburse the funds, and we have five years to close out the projects.
In the last two years, we will monitor and deal with closing out the last funded projects. No project, by mandate from the government, can be more than three years. We are working under those criteria.
The idea, and the hope of rural Alberta, is that if this fund proves to be a real success, we can go back to the government and say, why not fund a good thing even more?
Senator Mercer: I hope we are setting the groundwork tonight.
Mr. Tanis, you hit the nail on the head. Your statement about the wide-scale dependence on off-farm jobs is a clear signal that the food production system in Canada is in serious trouble.
Do you recommend we expand supply management into areas beyond where supply management is now?
Mr. Tanis: I do not understand the question on supply management. We recommend continuing to strengthen and keep the supply management. I have friends that have a dairy farm, and the wife works in a store in a small town. She knows the prices for dairy products. When they go the United States, they always check on the price of dairy products. When they are not on sale, when they are regular price, they are always higher than in Canada. Supply management benefits the producer and it benefits the consumer. It is somewhere in the middle that too much stays behind.
On the off-farm income, I want to look at the freefall. In 1973, farmers were allowed to keep 50 per cent of their gross income for expansion and living expenses. By 2003, that income had totally disappeared. It disappeared beyond 2003. There is nothing left anymore unless it is from government programs or some other source. This is on average.
When I was at the Agricultural Policy Framework II session, I had the impression the government has no vision for sustainable agriculture. It seems they have accepted as a fact that farmers should work off-farm to produce food for their families and continue to produce food for the nation on weekends and after midnight. I do not know how long the people of Canada will farm this way. The next generation will not. The present generation might soon quit too.
How do we compete with oil in Alberta? It is almost a curse having it, or not knowing what to do with it. My neighbour receives a raise, January 1. He is a heavy-duty mechanic in the oil field. He receives a raise of $8, not per day, but per hour. How can we compete?
I do not know if I answered your question. I am trying to illustrate what we are seeing.
Senator Mercer: I agree. The men and women on the assembly line in Oshawa at General Motors do not work at Loblaws at night so General Motors can sell cars at a lower rate. That situation is a reality.
Only certain products come under the supply management system. Do you think we should have more products under supply management? Should we expand supply management to cover more commodities?
Mr. Tanis: If possible, we should. Supply management would benefit the farming community, the agricultural primary producer. Too much stays with the processors and the people in between.
The agricultural primary producer business is not competitive, because there are too many forces. Primary producers cannot compete. Too many forces dominate and control the market. We can do little about it.
Senator Mahovlich: I want to thank the witnesses for taking time to come before us. Mr. Jacobson, comparing the exports of the United States to our exports, do we overproduce for the amount of people that we have in Canada?
Mr. Jacobson: The simple answer for Western Canadians is yes, we do overproduce. We produce 80 per cent more than we need to use in Canada. To survive in Western Canada, or anywhere agriculture products are produced, we need to export those products to a certain degree but not all under supply management, which is controlled.
We talked about that a bit. However, for grains, oil seeds and the pulse crops, the classic example is beans — we grow beans in southern Alberta — how many beans do you eat per day? What you eat per year might be a pound. It is not like other countries the Spanish rule.
Senator Mahovlich: And I like beans.
Mr. Jacobson: We could say they give you go power. We produce foods for the world and that is the way it has always been.
Senator Mahovlich: We were on the East Coast. We were talking about apples. Nova Scotia has great apples. Consumers cannot buy one at a store, in Loblaws or somewhere on the East Coast. Producers export them all. Consumers have to buy an apple from Peru or somewhere.
What is happening here? Who controls this situation?
Mr. Jacobson: We have talked about that at the Canadian Federation of Agriculture, CFA. We are part of the CFA. We have fruit growers in B.C. Last year, I was talking to the representative of the B.C. Fruit Growers' Association. He said the supplier was paying him 5 cents a pound for B.C. apples. We come back to Alberta. They are $1.35 in Safeway. We are not assured they are B.C. apples. Lots of times, they come from Washington.
We have a product and we can produce a product. We do not support our domestic products, to a large degree. Rules around branding Canada would help Canadian consumers identify Canadian products and would increase demand for those products to a certain degree.
Senator Mahovlich: The government could step up to the plate and say, ``Buy Canadian.''
Mr. Jacobson: There is a controversy. I know a honey producer. Honey is brought in from China. Last year, honey producers almost had the federal government ready to say that a product of Canada means a product of Canada, and Canada No. 1 grade is a product of Canada.
Right now, Canada No. 1 honey can be a mixture of honey from a whole different part of the world that meets only the grade standard.
Producers thought Canada No. 1 honey was to be a Canadian product. One of the big importers and suppliers of honey in Canada stepped in at the last minute and shut the Canadian producers down. They did not get the Canadian product standard.
That is what is happening to us. We bring in products. We identify them as Canada No. 1. The standard is only a great standard: It is not Canadian product.
As an organization, we would promote that Canadian products must be distinctively labelled so consumers have a choice. The food we bring in from Mexico, Ecuador or wherever, does it meet the same food safety standards we must comply with on our farms? The answer is no. We are regulated on food safety to a large degree. The whole package of food safety is borne basically by Canadian producers. It is not borne by the public. Products can be imported from wherever the price is cheaper.
Senator Mahovlich: People can depend on them. A company such as Loblaws can buy huge amounts.
Mr. Jacobson: Talking about the apple situation last year, before B.C. apples came to market, Washington, which is a couple of weeks ahead of the B.C. crop because of the climate and the different latitude, dumped their apples at a cut- rate price into Canada. Before we can react, all their apples are in the stores, they have lowered the price to that of Canadian producers and cleaned out their excess supply. We are left to deal with the problem with our own producers.
Senator Mahovlich: With the $200,000 farm debt compared to the United States, what is the main reason we are so far behind? Is it the policy of the governments?
Mr. Jacobson: It is the way the safety net programs have been designed.
You have probably heard this before. Our safety net program is a margin-based program. The U.S. safety net program is a set-price program.
Taking corn as an example, they were guaranteed $2 and some cents a bushel. Their price could not go below that.
Senator Mahovlich: By the government? Guaranteed?
Mr. Jacobson: Yes, they had a guaranteed price. If the market paid $1.50, they collected the rest from the government.
Their safety-net program is based on production. The more they produce, the more they receive.
Our program is completely different. Sometimes the more we produce, the less we receive in our country.
Senator Mahovlich: We overproduce.
Mr. Jacobson: Yes: The $200,000 comes not only from our safety-net program, it also comes from low farm income. People borrow money for new machinery and they capitalize themselves. They find themselves with a huge debt. Some lenders are understanding. The reason the debt review board was put in place in Canada was to handle that situation. If things continue, the debt review boards will be overloaded again.
Senator Mahovlich: Mr. Nicol, you are making all kinds of rules and regulations. You sound more like the federal government. We visited people today, and they had a great game plan. Sure, they started a few years ago, but I recommend the provincial government and the federal government support these people. If they follow your rules, they would not be allowed to approach you. Do you feel it is a good idea to make all these rules and regulations, if they are doing a good thing and trying to help the public?
They had a great idea. They started a hockey school for girls. These girls are graduating. They are going to the U.S., and they will come back to Canada. They will be a great help to Canadians.
Mr. Nicol: As a board, we must operate within the constraints given to us in the authorization of our money.
Senator Mahovlich: The federal government says the same thing to me all the time.
Mr. Nicol: On a number of occasions, many of us on the board encouraged communities to make sure the government hears that this program is not doing what communities want it to do. The government needs to change the mandate of our board, especially if we want to think of a second or third round of funding.
If we do not behave ourselves, what precedent are we setting for the next round? In the next round, if communities talk enough about the shortcomings of this three-year funding initiative, hopefully governments will listen.
That is all I can say, Senator Mahovlich. We must operate within our constraints.
Senator Mahovlich: I guess you have to follow the rules.
Mr. Tanis, what can the government do to have orderly marketing?
Mr. Tanis: They can support our initiative and stop interfering with us and taking away the decisions and organizations we have set up for an orderly market. That is what we need from the government. Maybe that is brief.
I also have something to say on overproduction. As long as there is hunger on the planet, we are not overproducing. We do not distribute it fairly.
I want to go back to the period between 1973 and 2003 when there was nothing left. That is where overproduction comes in. Research and development has been passed down to the farming community, to the primary producers, and since the consumer seems to be the only one that benefits, research and development should be publicly funded. The government can implement that measure provincially and federally.
If food inspection benefits consumers more than producers, food inspection should be publicly funded also. It was asked for at the first go-around of the Agricultural Policy Framework, but because farmers were denied being part of the final solution when the document was written up, that measure was eliminated. Whatever was publicly funded was called a farm subsidy. That situation could be changed immediately.
Senator Mahovlich: You are right. Certain people in this world are starving and need the food.
Senator Banks: Mr. Tanis, I need confirmation. You talked about food inspection not being publicly funded. I did not know that food inspection was not publicly funded. Can you explain that comment?
Mr. Tanis: As far as I know, whatever is publicly funded is called a subsidy to the farm community. It becomes a subsidy in other nations. We could talk about the World Trade Organization for hours. We have been running ahead of the pack since the Uruguay round of talks started, and tariffs and trade restrictions were cut. However, we have been overrun by other stuff and other people.
When the U.S. says we are cutting 75 per cent of our allowable subsidy, they use only 20 per cent and nothing changes. It looks nice for the world.
When the Alberta government told us at a meeting the day after the federal election that we should cut tariffs and trade restrictions because the U.S. is changing, I asked the question, ``Are you talking about Canadians or other people?'' The man went back to his own speech for five minutes until he was tired of talking and I was tired of listening. That is how much farmers are listened to in Alberta. Thank you for listening.
Senator Banks: He had to swallow what he said before. We know the Big Guys do not always abide by agreements.
What do you think of the argument made in respect of subsidies? This argument has been made by successive governments over many years. We cannot afford the level of subsidies that the Europeans and Americans pay. Using Americans as an example, per capita, every dime they spend on subsidies would cost us a dollar. What is your answer to that argument?
Mr. Tanis: Thank you for the question. I have an answer. I do not know if people will like what I say, but I will say it anyway.
When we put $1 into agriculture, we receive a $7 spin-off. We live in a country where we pay less than 15 per cent tax. Seven times 15 per cent makes $1.05 so the government receives $1.05. It is an investment.
The argument is thinking backwards. They should think of it as an investment, not a handout.
Senator Banks: That is an answer.
Mr. Nicol, you have three years to spend $100 million. I gather the money must be spent or it reverts back to government funds at the end of three years.
You said you wanted to spend it on visions for 10 years, 15 years or 20 years. I presume the money falls into the category of seed money, to kick-start something. At the end of that time, the idea is expected to stand on its own feet. In the next round, will you deal with new applications for new programs or would you continue to assist a program that began but is not on its feet?
Mr. Nicol: Your questions are on how we operate. We are looking at projects which, at the end of the three years, essentially can be self-supported within the community. The projects form the foundation of where the community wants to be 10 years, 15 years or 20 years in the future.
Hopefully, if we receive second-round or third-round funding, component parts that are add-ons can be supported, but there will not be refunding, not more of the same.
The idea is building from where we are, as opposed to redoing what we have already done.
Senator Banks: I am worried about a sharp-knife cut-off date. The best laid plans: something might not be working completely in three years.
Mr. Nicol: All projects need some type of a timeline. If we wanted, we could have given away the $100 million already, and we are only three months into the program.
Senator Banks: You will not give any money back.
Mr. Nicol: We will not give money back.
Senator Banks: That is good. Mr. Jacobson, the word ``commission'' usually implies authority. The one organization you represent today is a producer's organization. Does it exert authority?
Mr. Jacobson: No, it is more of a title. You will see that practice in Alberta, because we do have a lot of commodity commissions or commodity organizations. We do not make a lot of rules. We are not the cattlemen. They can make the rules. Somehow we missed out on that one.
Senator Banks: Parts of what you said sounded like a commercial for the wheat board. Do I gather the commission is in favour of a single-desk marketing system, as opposed to something else?
Mr. Jacobson: Yes: Our commission passed a resolution at our annual meeting to support single-desk marketing. We think that system is best for producers.
I will give you an example of what one farm organization in Canada is doing about marketing and collective marketing for producers. It is in the developing world. The organization is a farm organization. You will know it well enough. It is Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture, UPA, a general farm organization in Quebec.
That organization is working overseas with some countries. We talked to Laurent Pellerin about the one in Malta. Malta did not have any food security. The country went through periods of starvation.
UPA showed people how to hold on to some of their money and collectively work together. Through collective action, they lowered the interest rate from 25 per cent or 30 per cent for farm loans down to 10 per cent.
UPA built storehouses for foods. They store their food and market it in the country. In many regions, the people do not face periods of starvation.
Collective action can do that in Third World countries. I do not think it is any different in what we call the First World.
Farmers and organizations working together have a lot more power than me standing out there saying, ``I have this for sale,'' and my neighbour down the road saying, ``I have this for sale.'' We know what happens when 76,000 farmers stand out there saying they have this product and this product for sale, and six or seven people are dealing to buy that product. That is what we are faced with. There is a consolidation effort on the large business side with multinationals, especially within the grain industry.
We have seen that consolidation. Only four multinational companies control 80 per cent of the world's trade in grain. As an individual farmer, if I cannot work with my neighbours, and I lose those type of systems, I take what I am given.
They may call it a free market but it is more what they are willing to give up to keep me in business.
Senator Banks: Mr. Tanis, do I gather that the NFU is in favour of a single-desk marketing system?
Mr. Tanis: Yes: You have listened well.
Senator Gustafson: What percentage of Alberta farmers are members of the farmers' union?
Mr. Tanis: I have no idea how many are members of the National Farmers Union. We have different farmers' unions. The agricultural producers is another organization. I have no record of the members.
Senator Gustafson: Our Senate agricultural committee recommended in an interim report that a Canada farm bill would be important to this country. What is your thinking on that subject?
Mr. Tanis: A good start may be more equitable safety-net funding than we have presently, because the U.S. also has a farm bill. CFA also promotes this view. I have read part of your interim report. I find it interesting. I have not gotten to the end yet.
The report has so many numbers. We need to realize we are dealing with people, live souls. I hope that fact comes out in the end of the report. I would be in favour of a farm bill if it protects the farm community more than it is protected now. We have nothing.
Senator Gustafson: The marketing boards in Canada face no problem with American sales, because we do not sell anything into the international market.
Some would argue the boards are immoral in the sense that there is a hungry world out there, and we produce only what we eat. There is some suggestion we could feed the world with grains and oil seeds. That would be ludicrous and impossible.
One of the biggest problems we face is a global market in the grains and cattle industry. Is there any representative from the cattle people here, or a representative of the producers and grain across the board? Until Canada recognizes we have a problem, it will not be solved.
Mr. Tanis: I agree. The U.S. would love to do away with the marketing board. If they could bring marketing under WTO, they would love to do that. They would control the market.
Senator Gustafson: Did they control canola?
Mr. Tanis: Who knows who controls what. It does not look like they control it. If they are the biggest buyer, they control it.
Sugar is controlled by who knows who. Cargill ships juice to the U.S. A couple of years ago, the sugar factory people told us in the spring we would have fewer contracts. I am also a wheat producer. I said, ``Do you not know how to sell the sugar? Cargill ships more every year. We have to cut back because you lose sales here. Are you looking at Cargill to buy all of it and take over the company?''
Who is in control? There are market forces you cannot pinpoint.
Senator Gustafson: The wheat board sells a major part of its wheat directly to Cargill. That was made clear at the agricultural Senate committee when the wheat board appeared.
Getting back to oil seeds, and especially canola, we live right on the border. We are able to make 10 cents more a bushel, and Archer Daniels Midland in North Dakota will pick it up.
That was an advantage to our farmers. The same thing is true of mustard, peas and so on. The Americans have sold our cattle for a hundred years. We have come to the conclusion that as soon as that border closes, cattle prices plummet. Prices are down now because of threats of a closed border. Who is to say the Americans could not market our wheat as well?
Mr. Tanis: That is a good question. We are only producing half the land we are consuming in Canada. Eighty per cent of the potatoes eaten in Alberta are imported. Who is controlling what?
If we do not have the processing plant that processes and markets them because the population is too small, we want multi-million-dollar operations to control everything.
Senator Gustafson: We know what we have now is not working. The farmers cannot carry more problems than they will have this spring in putting in a crop. Saskatchewan is probably in worse shape than what I hear from you in Alberta.
Saskatchewan land prices are not holding. They are plummeting. At least, in Alberta they can sell their land and retire.
In Saskatchewan, they cannot do that now, in most cases. It is serious business.
We must find a way out of this situation, so that we do not follow an ideology or a theory. We need to find something that will work.
The only way out of this situation is if commodity prices go up or the federal government puts money into the system. To go to something else, we are talking a political talk in terms of whatever commodity we are handling.
Senator Peterson: Mr. Jacobson, in your recommendations, you talk about adequately funded safety-net programs, insurance, et cetera.
It seems to me the nub of the problem is that farming has negative revenue right now. This recommendation would appear to be a band-aid solution at a critical time to solve this problem. Producers now are farming their equity. They cannot do that much longer.
We are talking one or two years. Would the methodology be to obtain a fair price for our product? At the end of the year, we need to be revenue positive, face that situation and say that is where we need to be.
Mr. Jacobson: We have brought that message to the federal and provincial governments for the last 20 years. We have said that what we receive for our labour, and what we put into our farms, is disappearing.
In our area, the expression is, ``We are eating our equity.'' That is why farm debt in Canada is going higher and higher.
Not so much in southern Alberta but in other parts of Alberta as well as in Saskatchewan and Manitoba, people have gotten to the point — and Senator Gustafson mentioned that — where they have to sell out, their costs have gone up. Who do they sell to? I know producers in Saskatchewan that are renting land for the taxes.
I talked to one guy who said his agreement with his older neighbour — he cannot rent his land — is to pay the taxes on the land to farm it.
With the safety-net programs, because of the way they have been developed on a five-year average, they take the best three out of the five. That is fine for an industry that has spikes and goes down, because the average will level out over time.
Over the past 15 years in the grain and oil seed industry, our margin has been on a slow decline. Canola is an anomaly this year because prices have gone up, in fact, grain prices have gone up but there are extenuating circumstances. Our safety net has kicked in and paid money to producers. We wonder who will receive money and who will not. I could talk to one neighbour who received a payment, and he does not understand why he did. I talk to another neighbour who thought he would receive a payment and he does not know why he did not get one.
Because of the slow decline, our production margins are gradually falling. If we receive a payment, we have lost. Production margin is still falling.
We have said, there must be some way to address the cost of production. If we can address the cost of production through a program, whether to set a price as the U.S. does — and we argue that a program such as that would cost the governments in Canada little more than the cost of the Canadian Agricultural Income Stabilization, CAIS, Program now — if that industry could be stabilized, that is where we would come from. That has been a problem with safety net programs.
When they created the Agricultural Policy Framework I — the farm bill — we had big meetings across Canada. We attended two meetings in Calgary on that subject.
At the first meeting, 500 producers were there. They broke up into little groups. They did the thing on the blackboard. They said they would come back and tell us what they said the next time. We came back the next time. They had the little groups and told us the recommendations. We consolidated them.
At that point, we had the feeling they had already written the safety-net program. They were only paying lip service to what farmers were saying.
We told them, as farm organizations: This will not work and this will not work, and they will run into problems. Guess what? The government said, that is no problem, you do not know what you are talking about.
We have a mess in the CAIS Program now. The areas we said would not work did not work. They would not listen to us. I think we are in danger of the same thing happening with this second consultation.
I talked about that in one of our recommendations. We need to be involved actively in those types of programs in bringing the recommendations forward and helping to develop the programs.
Without that involvement, two parties are dictating to the third. We do not have a say. We will come back in a year and say, this is where you fell down, and guess what? It will be true. We will probably go through the same process again as the APF I was involved with.
Senator Peterson: One item in your recommendations was that freight agreements must be free and fair to all parties of a trade agreement. That agreement is almost a joke in terms of what we have had to date. It is not working. Cattle are stopped at the border when they want to stop them. Softwood lumber is taxed horrendously when they feel like it. It did not take them long to put $5 billion in the bank to help their people.
I read in the paper today where the United States wants to end their dependency on Middle East oil and they want oil from Canada: 200 million barrels, 300 million barrels and up to 500 million barrels a year. Is it time for Canada to play hardball and put on an export tax for our producers?
Mr. Jacobson: For our producers, yes. We do not want to bite the hand that feeds us. As Canadians, we always feel like second-class citizens to Americans. I think our governments have felt that too. I forget who said, ``When you go to bed with an elephant, you do not wake him up,'' or something like that.
At this point, we have natural advantages that other parts of the country or North America need. Those advantages give us an opportunity to set conditions. We do not need to be the hewers of wood and drawers of water anymore in this country.
We have an ability, if people will stand up for us, to make trade agreements, especially in agriculture. We do not need to give these things away. We found from our past experience, if we give something away, they come back for more. That was what we said in reference to free trade.
Under the WTO so far, we have agreed to something, but they have completely ignored the rules. We follow the rules. Even if they did follow the rules, they have found different ways to deliver their programs, or actually take action against us.
Whether to put on a tariff is a hard question for me to answer. On dumping products into Canada, we need immediate tariffs on some of that stuff. That example I quoted from the fruit growers in B.C. happened last year over a two-month period. When they bring the matter to the federal trade lawyers and their own lawyers, the lawyers tell us to ignore it, because by the time everything is done and the rules are applied, exporters are not dumping the product anymore, so what is the use? We need quick results to stop people from harming our industries in this country.
Senator Peterson: I think you do, yes. We have been complacent, because we are nice people. Maybe the time for that is over. It is time to rattle the cage a bit: just a thought.
The Chairman: Over the last several months when we have had our hearings in Ottawa and we have talked about this crisis as people see it, we always talk about the farm families. If the farm families give up, we think about how that will affect our wonderful towns in this area.
We are constantly hearing that the young people in the farm families are increasingly reluctant or negative about trying to continue what their family has done, having watched the difficulties of recent years. This situation is troubling.
I popped into an event the other night in Ottawa put on by the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. They were having their big annual meeting. The room was filled with young farmers who were organizing things together, as young people do. They were having a great time. They were looking forward. They pounced on me because they heard of these hearings. They thought the hearings were cool. They said they were prepared to go into farming for the long haul. It was a nice thing to hear.
From the reality of the difficulties in this area over the last several years, what is your call on the view of our young people about picking up the reins when the time comes to keep their farm alive and their family working?
Mr. Jacobson: The group of young farmers you are talking about is the Young Farmers of Canada. Young farmers from all over Canada have come together through CFA: We sponsor that group. It is very good.
You are seeing probably the keeners in agriculture. We need those people, and more of them.
I will relate the question back to my own community, and the surrounding communities where we live. I started farming at 22 years of age, after I had gone through college, and things like this. I thought farming was a good thing. As I mentioned to the newspaper, I was headed to be a teacher for a while. I thought farming was a little better. Maybe I made a mistake.
When I started farming, a lot of my friends started farming. Within our community, probably 20 or 25 people my own age, within a couple of years, had started to farm. We have grown up on the farm, we have taken over our fathers' farms or we have bought farms. Some people my age, depending on their debt load — and they really loaded up in the 1980s — even if they had a family farm, they went broke. Some of those people have disappeared from our community and their family and kids have gone from our community.
Those kids would have been in the 30-year-old to 40-year-old range of farmers. More and more of that age have disappeared from farming.
My son, when he was growing up, liked the farm. Now he works as a surveyor in Saskatchewan. He finds that work more lucrative. His wife is a school teacher. She grew up on a farm. They say they like farming but it is not for them. They like the 9 to 5 work. They do not do 9 to 5 all the time. They like the security of a well-paid job. They receive vacation. They can plan their lives. Any farmers out there, their free time is in the winter. They have to head south. If they cannot afford to go south, they have to stay.
In our community, when we talk young farmers, only a handful of the kids in the 20-year-old to 30-year-old range are staying. The kids you talked to at the Young Farmers of Canada are in the 20-year-old to 30-year-old range. They are the keeners. They come mostly from well-established farms. If they have to buy land in Alberta — and it changes in every province, but Alberta especially — with the pressure not only from the urban population, but even the rural population and the large farmers trying to expand, they cannot make it work out unless commodity prices go up. They pay exorbitant prices for their land, and they do not really know.
We have talked about it all night. We need a farm income program, incomes where people can make a sustainable living and have a lifestyle. It does not have to be fancy. They need to work hard. The work must be sustainable. They must make a profit. They must be able to put money away and plan for their futures and their kids' futures like anybody in the city. If they have a job, they are planning for their future and retirement. We need that opportunity in the rural communities.
Until that happens, we will still lose the young farmers. When the young farmers are gone, then, as an older farmer, who will I sell to? Nobody is there anymore.
The Chairman: They were a decent gang of enthusiasts. It was nice to hear after all this.
I want to thank our panel. You have given us a lot of new thoughts and we will watch Mr. Nicol's new effort. We will now hear from the second panel. The first presenter is Stasha Donahue.
Stasha Donahue, Co-chair, South West Alberta Coalition on Poverty: I have worked in public health for the last 17 years. Before that, I worked in acute care in rural Alberta for five years. I come from a health background.
Our function as a coalition is to bring together organizations, groups and individuals who are committed to positive action on poverty in Southwest Alberta.
From a health perspective, we are interested in this subject. We know from current research findings that what we once thought made people healthy — things such as lifestyle, eating well and exercising — while important, do not weigh in as heavily as those factors that we refer to as the social determinants of health. Those things are poverty, income adequacy, housing, education, employment and all that kind of thing.
I am giving you a background because you might wonder why health is concerned with poverty, or rural poverty in particular.
With my presentation is a highlight sheet. It is the bright yellow, sunny southern Alberta paper in front of you. With that highlight sheet is a document, which I do not expect you to use as bedtime reading material because it is thick. We produced the document two years ago entitled, The Reality of Child and Family Poverty in Southwest Alberta.
We created a document that gave a regional perspective on the prevalence of poverty and related factors, and mapped it out in a geographical area in southern Alberta.
We used that document as a tool, and presented the information to a variety of town and city councils, school boards, child and family service agencies and reserves, in an effort to increase their awareness of the fact that there is poverty in southern Alberta. Poverty is a concern, and it affects our children and youth.
That being said, I am explaining why I gave that document to you. I do not want to go into it in depth because it could take all evening. I am conscious of the fact that you have been on a long dog-and-pony show across the country.
The Chairman: We are perky, though.
Ms. Donahue: You look perky, I must say. It must be the hockey practice today.
We have identified predominant themes in southern Alberta. Because it did not occur to me until later, I did not include one issue unique to our region: two large First Nations Aboriginal reserves in the Chinook Region.
The Blood, or Kainai, reserve is the largest reserve in Canada with a population of over 8,000 people. That reserve significantly impacts our poverty rates in this region because, as we know, Aboriginal First Nations people, single- parent, female-led families and immigrants, are more likely than others to be affected by poverty.
A lot of families are moving off-reserve to rural small towns in the region. The reason is lack of access to affordable housing on the reserve. They go to small communities searching for opportunities. In a sense, it is a benefit, once we get over the whole exclusion issue, because they have a high birth rate and growing population, and provide potential for a future workforce in the region.
I read thoroughly through your document, Interim Report: Understanding Freefall, and saw that a lot of our identified issues were issues you identified as well.
One major issue is transportation. I live in a rural community, actually outside a rural community. Many families are faced with the lack and challenge of transportation.
Given my health care background, I have noticed this problem more since the regionalization of services. We have anecdotes that say, with regionalization of services, centralization has occurred of a lot of the services that used to be distributed through the region.
For example, my older parents require access and transportation to the regional facility to access services and the care they need, due to a declining rate of physicians and medical treatment in their small community.
I am lucky. I can take a day off and do that for them. I know many families where that is not possible. If I was working at the 7-Eleven and asked for a day off to take my grandfather to a medical appointment, I am sure that request would not be looked at in the most positive light.
That situation is something the older population talks about, particularly those who do not drive outside their small town anymore. The same is true for those who require specialized children's services. A lot of our regional child services have been distributed back to Lethbridge.
To access specialized care for vulnerable children, who typically tend to come from high-needs, vulnerable backgrounds, families need transportation to travel into the city to access services for their young children, which can be a problem.
The same can be said of access to government services. A lot of federal services — unemployment, welfare and all that kind of thing — have been relocated to cities. In some cases, those living in small rural communities do not have access to a Greyhound bus service.
I have worked on poverty in the community for the last seven years and I have been to communities and had discussions. Some communities lack bus service, and at the same time, families are moving to these small rural communities for affordable housing, or they are placed there by their case worker because of access to affordable housing, yet no services exist. Even a food bank does not exist in that community. Families are placed there without social support mechanisms and services.
One thing we propose is creative solutions to delivery of services. Some things we proposed in the past have met with resistance. A lot of that resistance has to do with ``silo funding'' and insurance issues: Who is responsible at the end of the day? We tried to come up with transportation solutions. Nobody wants to take that issue on: It is their client, not mine, or our insurance covers this and that. There must be a way around that problem, realistically.
Even things such as a community school bus: A lot of children are bused to larger rural centres because there are no school facilities in the smaller areas. Maybe we could collaborate to ensure that other members of that community have access to transportation.
Another area we are concerned with is post-secondary education. Rural communities in our region, like others in Canada, tend to have lower levels of aggregate educational attainment than their urban counterparts. This lack of education limits their employment opportunities. As we know, over the past few years, the costs associated with university or post-secondary education have skyrocketed.
At the same time — I know this, as I am currently working as a distance education student — the ability to deliver education services has improved with advances in technology. Utilizing communication technology in a way we can deliver post-secondary education opportunities to small rural communities is something I hope will be given much more consideration in the future.
This service is particularly important when a lot of our youth are leaving their small rural communities for the North to chase the almighty dollar associated with the oil patch. We predict in the future that we will run into a great shortage of skilled workers and service providers in small rural communities. Right now, a lot of our youth, particularly young men, head up north for the oil patch.
Access to recreation might seem like a fluffy, nice-to-have component. In the grand scheme of things, particularly from a health perspective, access to recreation is important to ensure healthy growth and development for children. In light of our current growing obesity epidemic, so to speak, in Canada, we in the public health sector have looked at this access with great interest.
In Alberta during the early 1990s, recreation planning for communities was cut with regards to both facilities and programs.
A lot of families now have children who are unable to participate in community recreation programs or school recreation programs. I know, as a mother as well as a public health worker, in older years, as kids become older and the school trips, ski trips and things like that come about, a lot of kids do not participate. That growing divide of not participating isolates them on a social basis: That exclusion divide begins. A lot of low-income people will tell you they experience that divide on a day-to-day basis.
One thing we want decision-makers to consider is reinvesting in recreation facilities and programs, and looking at how to ensure facilities exist in rural Alberta.
There was some discussion about tax refunds for active living for children at one time. For low-income families, the tax refund is not enough. They do not have the money up-front for Bobby to participate in hockey. This issue has been spoken about previously.
I read through the document and saw this item: employment opportunities. With advances in technology and communication, it must be possible to disperse some of the employment opportunities associated with public services across the province rather than locate them in large urban centres.
I am working on a provincial project. The staff member is located in Edmonton. I am one of the management team members. I work and live outside Fort Macleod. In working with the federal government — which I have for a long time with regards to population health — I have always appreciated working with them but I have to chuckle when the rural health coordinator is located in Calgary.
Thank you for the opportunity. It is great to see you have taken an interest in coming to southern Alberta.
Senator Banks: I am from Edmonton, and Calgary is rural.
Ms. Donahue: They would argue on that point.
The Chairman: Thank you. We would not want to miss this important part of Canada. We get the messages. I am glad you spoke out about the ones you are concerned about. These issues are deeply ingrained all across the country. People are often uncomfortable talking about them.
Lisa Lambert, Project Coordinator, Womanspace Resource Centre: Speaking of uncomfortable to talk about, I am the feminist in the organization here. I work for a women's-based resource centre.
We have been in existence in Lethbridge for over 20 years. We are a community-based women's organization. We aim to respect and reflect the diversity of women. We provide services and initiate policy changes at the local and provincial level to improve the status of women and further their political, social and economic equality.
We are a board-run collective with one part-time employee and two contract employees, one of which is me.
Of the many research projects we have conducted, I will bring two to your attention and draw from the reports. You have my report in front of you. I will not read the entire thing. I will refer to a three-year project on women in non- standard employment. The second project we completed a few years back, which explored the barriers for rural women in attempting to exit provincial welfare programs.
I will start with women in non-standard work. Approximately 30 per cent of women work in non-standard employment: essentially anything that is not full time with benefits. It includes workers that are part-time, contract, on call, temporary, self-employed and multi-tracker like me, which is someone who has more than one job.
Almost all the women we interviewed indicated they were non-standard workers to provide care for their children or their elders.
We conducted focus groups with 127 women in Southwestern Alberta. They all worked in non-standard employment. One-third of those women were rural.
Rural women face slightly different things. I will highlight the results from the rural women's focus groups. They highlighted a lack of choice about their work hours and conditions. They highlighted child care. Their long-term prospects, including retirement, were very much affected.
For starters, lack of choice: Rural women were more likely to note they worked in part-time or contract work because there was not enough employment in their area. They would work more hours if they could.
This finding meant that rural women in non-standard employment, more than their urban counterparts, were forced into non-standard employment and wished to work more. They would have taken full-time jobs, had they been available. Their incomes were frequently not adequate for their needs.
The lack of adequate child care was a prominent concern among women in rural Albertan communities. Many women interviewed had to rely on family or friends to care for their children, leaving them ineligible for child care subsidies.
Access to care outside 9 to 5 hours was troublesome. This lack of access impacted the ability of rural women to secure many jobs that were available. It meant rural farmers were unable to access child care. When they need it, they often need it for 16 hours or 18 hours a day, not from 9 to 5.
Long-term prospects: Many women interviewed were so busy and preoccupied with getting by that concern for the future was not as pronounced as one might expect. This finding was true for women whose children were young. Retirement was something few of them could look forward to.
I will quote from one woman, a retired nurse, who continued to work on an on-call basis because she could not make ends meet on her nursing pension, as a divorced woman with children. She said:
It's very sad that you work all your life and you still haven't got enough to live on. If I had a husband with a second income and we both had pensions, then it would be very nice. But as long as I am healthy, I continue to work. I will probably work until I am ninety.
Townson noted this feature when she warned that elder female poverty may increase in the coming years as a result of non-standard work. She said:
Patterns of paid and unpaid work are changing. A high percentage of women in the paid work force are employed in part-time and non-standard jobs, including self-employment, where low earnings may be accompanied by little or no job security. Women must still interrupt their paid employment because of family responsibilities. And the unpaid work of women may increase as government cutbacks reduce public sector provision of social services, in the expectation that these can be provided at ``no cost'' by families, and an aging population increases the demand for elder care. Coverage of workplace pension plans is declining, and women's lower earnings still make it difficult for them to set aside private savings for their old age.
We know from other studies that approximately one in four women do not expect to retire at all. They expect to work until they die.
Conclusions of this report: Based upon the qualitative narratives, non-standard work appears to be a double-edged sword for rural women. On the one hand, it promises to offer flexibility, a humane workweek, and a measure of autonomy. Employers seem to capitalize on the desire for women to accommodate others' needs, and these women are generally exploited. They are often offered little security, low income and no benefits.
I will not mention the provincial things that are needed. Federal policy changes are needed to address the ills of this new workplace. We recommend for the Canada Pension Plan, as women enter into the duty of care for elderly parents at growing numbers, provisions should be made at a public policy level to allow such women to lessen their working commitments without long-term financial penalty.
We recommend that federal, provincial and territorial governments responsible for administering CPP consider expanding the child-rearing drop-out to cover other caregiving responsibilities such as elder care.
Regarding child care funding: Adequate child care was an issue for many women. While the provincial government has decreased spending on early childhood education, it has increased standards for the licensing of day homes and child care centres over the past 10 years. The government has made it difficult financially to start up adequate child care centres that meet a provincial standard of legislation.
Within rural areas, access to licensed day homes is difficult. Parents can only use subsidies within such settings.
Child care is not a commodity that can be provided for within a market. It is not something a parent can choose to purchase or not, without significant repercussions.
We urge the Government of Canada not to cancel the provincial agreements on child care funding and to continue, with the provinces, to find solutions for delivering child care services to the many families who need them.
We do not see the provision of a national child care program as being in opposition to the provision of the family allowances of $100 a month introduced by the Harper government. We see the two as complementary.
The second report I wish to draw from is our report, Barriers to Exiting Welfare. This study also utilized qualitative research to interview 20 rural Southern Alberta women about the barriers they incurred while receiving welfare. Half the women were Caucasian and half were Aboriginal.
Our findings were that poverty is a social violence capable of disabling individuals by destroying self-esteem, damaging health and annihilating hope. Individuals whose circumstances necessitate their reliance on welfare are intimately acquainted with poverty and its effects. Poverty intersects all ages, races and both genders. Women are overrepresented in the ranks of the poor.
The group we interviewed identified a number of barriers to exiting welfare in rural areas. I will comment on three: transportation, education, and child care.
Ninety per cent of the women stated that transportation was a barrier. Public transportation is largely unavailable, as Ms. Donahue has said. Owning a vehicle becomes the only alternative.
We heard from a number of women who owned cars that broke down, so they lost their jobs. Women drove without insurance because the cost was prohibitive. Women had to rely on unsafe alternatives like hitchhiking to go to work. If rural women do not have access to safe and reliable transportation, stable employment becomes unavailable to these women.
The second issue was education. I will echo much of what Ms. Donahue has said. The lack of sufficient or appropriate education was an area of concern for 18 out of 20 participants. Fourteen of these 20 women we interviewed did not have high school diplomas. The cost of upgrading or further education was an obstacle for most of the women. I will quote one of the women that we called Liana. To protect her, we have changed her name. She said:
Getting the necessary education to get a good job is a huge financial burden. I already have huge loans and I'm supposed to take out more to get the education I need. I'll be dead before I ever get out of debt.
Third, the issue of child care: For women with extended family in their community, there were fewer concerns about child care. For women without extended family, the cost of accessing child care proved to be a huge barrier. Few rural communities have regulated day care spots, and these daycare centres are the ones that are available for subsidy.
While some women in our study found that rural communities provided ready access to extended family willing to provide care, many women found that they were isolated and lacked access to affordable child care.
All the women interviewed believed the location of their homes affected their ability to become self-sufficient because of lack of employment or education available. The women were opposed to moving to a larger centre as they viewed their support system in the rural setting as essential to their well-being and the well-being of their children.
Ninety per cent of the women stated that there was not suitable local employment. Transportation proved to be a barrier to many in accessing employment, health care, education and child care.
Overall conclusions: In both our studies, the gendered nature of employment and poverty was evident. The value of women's caring labour to their families and their communities was frequently undervalued. Women took on the caring labour that was required and they personally lost out.
Too often, the face of poverty in this country is a woman's face. We urge you to recognize the gendered nature of the issue of rural poverty and to seek solutions that provide enough flexibility to accommodate the choices women make. Rural and urban communities depend on women's caring labour. Women must not face lives of poverty to provide caring labour.
To encourage people to continue to live in rural communities, we urge the federal government to reinstate the child care agreements with provinces; to maintain family allowance cheques for families with children under age 6 and to broaden eligibility to children under age 18; to pursue guaranteed annual incomes, which I know you have heard from other witnesses in the past, and to implement financial supplements; and to broaden the Canadian Pension Plan child rearing drop-out to include other forms of care-giving besides child rearing.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. This is helpful. We have been hearing bits and pieces as we go along. We have not had a concerted effort as we have had tonight. It is important to do so.
Darlene Wicks, President Elect, Alberta Women's Institutes: I am taking a little different approach. We have divided Alberta into five districts. There are 15 constituencies, 69 branches, and about 800 members. In the brief, I have listed the objectives of our organization. Our mission is: ``An organization for women of all ages who achieve change through personal growth, communication, and education.'' We have different educational convenorships that are listed in the brief.
Some things I will talk about are in the brief. I am doing a summary.
My belief is rural poverty is not well known in the rural areas. Everybody knows everybody. It is a stigma to say, ``I am poor.'' Some people are proud. They do not want to admit it. Being poor in a rural area creates numerous obstacles.
Imagine living in a small village close to the U.S. border. You are a single mother of two small children and barely surviving. You do not have a vehicle. You are not able to travel, and you have to depend on someone to take you. There is no Greyhound bus or taxi service, so your travel is limited.
To take the children or yourself to the clinic, hospital or dentist, you have to go at least 15 kilometres. Any specialists are in the larger cities. That means one hour to Lethbridge or three and a half hours to Calgary. If you are lucky, you have a fire department close by that can assist you in emergency situations.
If you buy groceries at the convenience store, the items are limited, and the price is twice as much as they are in the next town, 15 kilometres away.
If someone takes you to the next town, you have two grocery stores, a hardware store, a drugstore, adult clothing, two banks and a fabric store.
When you look for employment in the village, you first have to find a baby-sitter. In this village, it is hard to find a baby-sitter. You end up finding a retired person to baby sit, while you check out the village for a job. If you are lucky enough to find a job, you learn that your wages will not cover the cost of a baby-sitter. You cannot afford to work.
To apply for unemployment or social services, you need to go to Lethbridge. That is 100 kilometres away. You wonder how you will survive.
When I first moved to the village, almost everyone worked and lived in that area. Later on, more people working at customs lived from 15 kilometres to 100 kilometres away from the village, and then only a few lived in the village itself, because more people commuted.
People in Ottawa decided the village was not a fit place to live, and an allowance for commuting was paid to people who traveled about 15 kilometres or more. For the people that chose to live and work in the village, it was considered unfair that others were paid to commute.
Customs has built a larger building that might help the village with the loss of tax revenue because of the businesses that were lost.
Most of the employees have 30 minutes for lunch. Because it takes 10 minutes to get out of the building and into the parking lot, it makes it hard for employees to attend any luncheon or fund-raising event held in the village. The village has noticed a decline in this area.
This allowance has been paid and not paid over the years. Teachers have come from over 15 kilometres away. Some people who work in the hospital are not always local. They travel 100 kilometres to work.
Our village lost businesses when the highway changed to a four-lane highway. The gas station was sold and the owner did not want to continue. We travel 15 kilometres for gas, or we can clear customs and travel across the line to the U.S. to fill our vehicles, which is about one kilometre, not counting the line-ups.
We have lost one of our churches. Another church is struggling to keep operating. Organizations that assist others in the community are dying out. For the volunteers that help, the reality is that the only way they stop volunteering is to move or die. The same people belong to two or more organizations in the small town or village. The help in small towns is becoming less.
Our organization has members doing everything they can to help locally. They volunteer by donating to the food bank and women's shelters, giving clothing to charity and helping families in times of need and disasters.
As an Alberta Women's Institutes project, we have partnered with On Eagles Wings to help isolated people in the Far North of Alberta. The communities in need are Wabasca and Fort Chipewyan, which are fly-in only, except for a couple of months in the winter. We have donated baby layettes, small children's' clothing, blankets, quilts and afghans. Reverend Lesley Hand, Pastor of Northern Alberta and Saskatchewan, runs a summer Bible school, and at present we are making book bags for the children. Our members have donated so much that Rev. Hand is looking at sending some of the clothing to Northern Saskatchewan.
Alberta Women's Institute will look at the training or workshops needed to improve the community. We have invited AnnE Zimmerman from On Eagles Wings to come to our convention in May to speak on this project.
Our organization also belongs to the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada. The federation had a project, ``Into the North,'' for Hopedale and Sheshatshui in Labrador, which are both fly-in communities. We were asked to provide baby blankets, clothing for babies and small children, and books. More than $13,000 and 73 boxes of clothing were collected. The money will be used to provide workshops and training for the area.
This year, Canada has been divided into six different regions by the Federated Women's Institutes of Canada. Each region is to decide where help is needed in the areas or communities of the region. The regions are also looking at schools.
Our organization belongs to Associated Country Women of the World. Their head office is in London, England. Canada has an area representative who attends meetings in London with other members from other countries around the world.
In three years, Canada donated $7,000 to help the Lorgot Farmers Group in Kenya with a fruit and vegetable project that gave people a building to store their produce and helped produce jobs.
With the extra money, we helped women in India by teaching women stone-breaking, gravel-making and selling. It gives them a small income.
We helped in Uganda at the Gweocca Water Sanitation project. We drilled a borehole, to help women with a better quality of water and less distance to go.
In the next three years, we will raise $7,000 for a nutrition and catering project in Tanzania. The project is to train women in nutrition and catering skills. The profits will be used to expand the business and improve the quality of life for the family. The whole community will benefit because part of the profits are used to promote health and education for child survival.
You can see there is a need for women, children and communities, where poverty can be caused by substance abuse, unemployment, violence, loss of farm and disability.
These are only a few causes of poverty in our province and around the world.
The Chairman: Thank you all of you. This is the first time we have had this kind of a presentation to this extent. You are doing extraordinary work.
Of the organizations you are involved in, how many women do you speak for?
Ms. Wicks: In my organization, there are at least 800. In Federated Women's Institutes of Canada, there are a lot more. The organization covers all 10 provinces of Canada. They meet every three years.
I have included in my brief a copy of the Associated Country Women of the World project report on some of the things that happen in the world. I included one of the Alberta Women's Institute magazines as well, and I have given you websites.
Ms. Lambert: Our organization is complicated. We have a list of over 400 members. I could not tell you an exact number. I know membership is over 400 at this point.
Ms. Donahue: I cannot say we represent only women. We are a coalition. Our members are public sector health, education, social services and non-profit, as well as members of the community affected by poverty. I cannot give you a number.
The Chairman: You certainly have an outreach. Thank you.
Senator Mercer: I want to thank all three of you for your presentations. The chair is right. This is the first time we have heard the women's angle from three different organizations doing similar work.
Ms. Lambert, I hope you are not the only feminist in the room. I like to count myself as one.
You talked about a grant of $100 a month from the new government. You are not in opposition to the grant, but has the grant helped? We heard a presentation in one province, in particular, that when the $100 started to come in, day care fees miraculously went up by $100.
Ms. Lambert: We are not opposed to the $100 a month if it were called a family allowance, which is what it is. We are opposed to it being called a national child care program. It is not a national child care program. It is a family allowance. We think family allowances are wonderful.
I am conducting new focus groups for a new report we are preparing. The experience was interesting. I was running a focus group with a number of young women under 20 with young children. They all were very, very poor.
I asked them what $100 meant to them. For some of them living on $600 a month raising children, $100 was a significant amount of money. What surprised me is what they said. One of them said that the government could keep the $100 a month if she could only have some child care. She recognized it was nice to have that money, but she wanted her government to provide services.
Senator Mercer: If she pays taxes, she will find out this money will be taxed.
Ms. Lambert: I am sure you know that the people who need the money the most will find the taxes are significant.
Ms. Donahue: I will comment on that issue as well. I recently, thank goodness, finished with the child care thing. I think the money would have bought me two and a half days of child care per month for my two children who were in child care at that time. That is for unregulated day care. That is not a heck of a lot.
With regard to the child care issue itself, in the context of poverty, that issue is even more compelling. We need to make sure there is a national child care program in effect.
That two-year-old document I gave you is all ``yea'' about the national child care program. The recent research we have on early childhood development is that this period is incredibly important for development, brain pathway development and all that stuff. The population of low-income children are those children most likely to be at risk for growth and health delays, yet those people are the ones that are often denied early child care and preschool benefits.
Senator Mercer: Ms. Lambert, you used the words ``guaranteed annual income'' in your presentation. I am interested if the other two have an opinion. Is guaranteed annual income a common theme you have heard across the country?
Ms. Donahue: I cannot say we would not support that, as long as there was not the extra taxation and clawback at the provincial level that there has been with other programs.
Senator Mercer: Right on.
Ms. Wicks: It has always been the case that the housewife who works in the house is never paid. It would be nice if she was paid. She does a lot of work.
Ms. Lambert: There are countries in the world that pay their home care providers, who are most often women, but not always, and Venezuela would be one to look at.
Senator Mahovlich: Ms. Lambert, you mentioned broadening the Canada Pension Plan child-rearing drop-out to include other forms of caregiving.
Ms. Lambert: I am sure you have heard about the sandwich generation. Those people have elder family members who require care, as well as younger ones. I would like to broaden that requirement to the ``clubhouse sandwich generation,'' of which I am one of. I have two generations above me requiring care and one below. I provide care for four adults older than me and two children. Everyone eats. That is amazing. We are sandwiched into this clubhouse generation.
I have done that now since my second child was born six years ago. When we take that employment, it means that I have not paid into a government pension plan, nor have I had a workplace pension plan for more than six years. I am approaching 40. It is beginning to be an issue for me.
With Canada pension, I would be allowed to have a child-rearing drop-out. There is no provision at this point to allow me to take care of elders, whether they are in need of long-term care or not.
More than two-thirds of that care is provided by women. That care needs to be recognized and valued. That is the major reason why more than 50 per cent of single women over 65 live in poverty. They have been providing care.
We cannot expect women to provide care and take a personal hit for it. That care needs to be valued.
I hope I answered your question.
Senator Mahovlich: Yes, explain that. I never heard it that way.
You mentioned people who need to work until they are 80. There are few jobs for people that age. They will have a difficult time.
Ms. Lambert: A number of people leave their first career and take on a second career. They work in the service industry or stores and things like that. Wal-Mart is a good example. Greeters at Wal-Mart are rarely young.
Senator Mahovlich: You mentioned Tanzania and helping them out. Has there been any success in Tanzania? I visited there a number of years ago.
Ms. Wicks: For the projects we have, a committee gives us the project. Also, the area president has gone over to these different projects to make sure. We receive a report at the end of our three years.
When I go to Turku, Finland, they will give us a report on where our money is going. Sometimes they bring people from South Africa, who have workshops, to the convention, and we learn a lot of different things, and meet people from other countries.
Senator Mahovlich: Progress is being made?
Ms. Wicks: Yes.
Senator Banks: I do not know if we will have time to go to a town hall meeting. If we do but not now, I want to put forward a rude, obstreperous and unpopular question. I will point out the non-standard employment phenomenon is not peculiar to rural Canada. It is a problem everywhere. It is a problem with respect to poverty. It is a problem in the workforce. It is the way things are going. Nobody likes that. All kinds of people find they do not have access to pensions, not only in the rural community.
I will make one observation and ask each of you to comment. We hear that rural women are disadvantaged in respect to employment opportunities and access to education, transportation, social services and child care. That has always been true. None of those things are new.
By comparison with critical masses of people in urban areas, rural people have always been disadvantaged, if that is the way to put it, in respect to access to those things.
In the view of most governments, there is a practical point to where you can afford, if that is the right word, to establish those things without a critical mass. You cannot have a public transportation system 100 miles outside of Saskatoon.
Despite those disadvantages, those women — and not only women, those people — do not want to move. They do not want to lose their support network, as you put it. How can we reconcile those things? What can anybody do about that?
Ms. Donahue: I will speak to that question first.
One thing we look at when we work with communities to address poverty is building the capacity of communities to identify and develop their own solutions. Sometimes those solutions are innovative.
There are barriers such as insurance and who is responsible. Sometimes governments, for which I have worked for 25 years, pose more of an obstacle than a help.
There is not enough capital in small communities to fund these solutions. We have the whole Robert Putnam Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital with the decimation of social capital.
We do not have social clubs. We do not have fund-raising opportunities. There needs to be funding opportunities and start-up capital for these things.
Often the federal partners I have worked with on rural, poverty and community development initiatives offer funding over a one-year period. That funding does not cut it. By the time they mobilize their community, build their skills, and work around the schedule, be it farming or the school schedule, the funding is finished and that is it.
That is something we definitely have recommended to the Public Health Agency of Canada.
To be sustainable, apart from policy-driven solutions, the solutions must come from the community. They have a lot of good ideas. They need to overcome the barriers, such as insurance. Ms. Lambert and I were talking about the idea of the school bus being the transportation system and how to encourage the education system to buy into that.
Ms. Lambert: My grandmother grew up here in Southern Alberta. She is 98 years old. She travelled by train. That is not something I can do anymore. I live in a rural community. The train goes right by my house. I cannot travel by train.
Some things are more recent changes. It has not necessarily always been that way. We may have done it better in the past. We may need to look back at some of those solutions, as Ms. Donahue says, and look at innovative ways of working.
My grandmother had access to a local doctor. I do not have that access. I need to travel for that.
Many things available in small communities in the past are no longer available.
Ms. Wicks: The other difference is that baby boomers, as we are called, are getting older but we are still going. It is our parents, or grandparents, in some of these small towns that cause problems. They have done everything. They do not want to do any more.
New people do not last in a small town. If they do, they receive a promotion, or we have brokers that amalgamated in our area: One company took over two other brokerage firms. That means for a year, they are fine. Now, people are starting to leave and the company is not filling those positions. Some people are going to the oil patch, because there is more money there.
We have members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, LDS, in our society. They have their own relief society. They support their own members. We do not know much about those people except that they are funded by the church.
Senator Banks: That leads to my obstreperous question, which I will ask later if there is time.
Senator Mercer: Nobody is going to leave now.
The Chairman: You really want to hang on to it, do you, Senator Banks? You can do it now.
Senator Banks: It would take a few minutes.
The Chairman: I will ask a quick question myself. Then you can ask your whatever-it-is question.
With a panel such as this, I cannot let you out of the room without raising the issue of literacy. I know there was a hint of it in your presentations.
The beginning of learning is the parents. This fact is not well understood, I think, in our society. Without the ability to read, write and communicate, particularly for parents, then the child is at risk. We are having a struggle with this issue in Canada right now.
To what degree do you find a connecting link between literacy and some of the difficulties you have laid out so well in your remarks?
Ms. Wicks: We have a farmer from another country that came to Canada. He seems knowledgeable in all subjects. He can read and write. His son went to school with my younger daughter. They pushed him through school in Coutts.
To this day, he cannot write his name, is not interested in learning, signs his cheques with an ``X,'' goes to the bank and gives them a blank cheque and says, make it out for so much. He has no willingness to learn.
I do not know if the fault is with the parents or the school. I can say for Coutts for a while, a lot of people thought our school system was not that great. Some people had dual citizenship. They sent their students across the line to go to school.
When a couple of them came back, after they had a bit of university, they could not find a job for a while. There are pros and cons in literacy. That is the only individual case I know in our area.
I know Federated Women's Institutes about three years ago, and probably three years before that, had literacy programs available through the province of Alberta and through Canada, and we had tapes. It is hard to find people that will admit they cannot read and write.
The Chairman: This is something that people find difficult to believe. One used to wait until children went to kindergarten or Grade 1 before becoming concerned.
By the time they are 18 months old, all the neurological links are connected. They are ready to start the process. Without help from the people closest to them, which, at that point would be their family — the parents, mother and father — they lose a tremendous step forward in their ability, and the ability to keep up when they begin school.
Is this development something people understand in the groups you work with?
It means there is help not only for the child but — this is one thing that is so difficult in what has been happening — the adult, the parent, is the teacher. Without that early childhood part, children are at risk.
Ms. Lambert: In our one report on exiting welfare, 14 of our 20 women did not have high school diplomas. The correlation between education and poverty is very, very strong. A lack of education correlates with incidents of poverty.
We have been concerned with what you are commenting on, the idea of the new government, that people should learn their education or literacy until Grade 12, and that anyone should be able to do that.
The reality is that for many, many people other things impact learning. As a community, we need to recognize that not everyone can complete high school when they are 17 or 18 years old. A number of life circumstances require people to go back to school later. That option must remain.
Ms. Donahue: Being the health person on the panel, I can speak to this issue a little more fully. There is a correlation of poverty and literacy that is a circular, repetitive thing.
The latest health research, as you indicated, suggests that when talking about the effectiveness of early childhood development, instead of looking at the child as the unit of focus, we focus on the primary caregiver and the child. This focus is called ``the diad,'' and ``the dance,'' I am sure you have heard this in the literature.
In the province of Alberta, they had a teleconference a few months before Christmas, to talk about our request for proposals to identify early screening tools.
The approaches to literacy tend to be prescriptive. What we have seen with early childhood development, is that there is a program, and it must include X, Y, and Z.
A lot of the programs delivered are — can I say this? — not based on research but on the flavour of the month. We need to use hard data.
To roll out a program provincially, there must be data to support it. The program must be evaluated. It must support more than something that is politically comfortable and correct.
If that means guaranteed income, or stabilized income, along with literacy support, so be it.
In our region, one area that was cut back was dental health services. The area was viewed as something fluffy and extraneous. Unfortunately, the importance of public health has been devalued over the last decade or so.
We are seeing, hypothetically but we are conducting research, an increase in caries, rotten teeth, with young school children. I can attest to that situation as a mom volunteer in schools. The response was that the Alberta government has a child health benefit: Why do they not use that? If they are illiterate, they will not fill out that form, and complete all that paperwork. They go without. That is a concrete example of what happens.
The Chairman: This is a different step on the path you have described so eloquently and obviously, with your background to support it.
You have made a contribution. I thank you very much for coming tonight.
Paula Shimp, as an individual: Senator Fairbairn and committee members, I am a fourth generation rural Southern Albertan.
I have been concerned about recent trends in terms of the way our rural communities are going, the way they are composed, the opportunities they can no longer present to their children, and some of the increasing challenges members of rural communities face.
I will present to you a rural solution to a rural problem.
As I was walking in, I realized I have a bit of mud on my pants, and I realized I brought a little bit of the fields in with me so I hope you are okay with that.
The Chairman: Absolutely.
Ms. Shimp: In Alberta, there exists a gross funding inequity in rural charitable initiatives. You heard Stasha Donahue allude to the funding crises we have in our rural communities with our programming. I am interested in the charitable networks that service charitable activities for families and children in our rural communities.
Most of our rural areas lack an active, large-scale charitable funding presence. You might want to consider establishing a rural foundation for Western Canada.
There are 11 United Way foundations in Alberta. They all have their own United Way funding districts. A good friend of mine, who chaired the United Way in Calgary, was under the assumption all geographic areas of the province were covered by United Way. That is a fallacy. Only about 40 per cent of the geographic area of the province of Alberta — actually across the whole country, it varies from province to province — is serviced by United Way.
In 2004, Alberta had a population of three million. Two million urban, one million rural. One hundred per cent of urban Albertans were eligible to receive services from a United Way program. Only 18 per cent of rural Albertans were eligible to receive funding from a United Way service or program.
In 2004, the United Way foundations in Alberta raised $52 million. Since the boom, United Way foundations are raising over $1 million.
This gets a little dicey because Southern Alberta sits on the largest pot of sweet gas outside of Saudi Arabia.
I am a fund-raising consultant. We submit grant proposals to all the big oil companies. Because they need to support their shareholders' interests, they provide funding only for programs or capital initiatives in areas where they have operations.
The large oil and gas companies send their men from Calgary down here to extract the resources, and then they submit $500,000, $700,000 and $1 million to programming opportunities in the Calgary United Way but not in the rural areas.
In the rural areas, we are seeing an influx of immigrant families and Sudanese refugees. We have 14,000 in Alberta. We have 14,000 or 15,000 Mexican Mennonites. I think Ms. Donahue knows the exact figures. We have many Mennonite colonies and many First Nations communities. We cannot raise $14,000 to fund in-school programs for three schools to help our Aboriginal students, but I can raise $250,000 for Fort Whoop-Up, which I did two years ago.
We might want to look at establishing a large rural foundation. It would require a significant influx of capital. A friend of mine, Murray Edwards, suggested we would need $500,000 to $1 million. He said I would need a recommendation around some of the royalties legislation but that comes from the Province of Alberta, and I would require support from the federal government, as well as support from rural MLAs.
I am not sure if you understand the need we have. Our children in rural Alberta, my kids, athletically gifted children in rural Alberta, they can go anywhere, because there is an urban network that reaches into all the rural areas that allows them to patch in and succeed.
For our students who are academically excellent, there is a network, educationally, for them to go on and succeed, if they can get through public education.
Last year, my public education fees for two children were $1,500. That does not include any out-of-province trips.
Four years ago I was ill, and I was living below the poverty line, and I was still required to pay those high school fees in this province.
If our children in the rural areas are gifted in music, gifted vocalists — we have a gal who has been recognized by Barbara Sinatra. Barbara Sinatra had her flown down to the States to sing at her polo event. She has fronted for Ian Tyson when she was 8 years old, 9 years old. She is an amazing vocalist.
I am trying to help her get started. We are meeting block after block. It is our charitable programs that help nurture the talent in the performing arts. In the rural areas, it is not there. We have many gifted children in these areas.
I am not going to bother you with the details, but I have a comprehensive funding proposal developed. I am delighted to send it to you in the coming weeks if you are interested in receiving such a proposal.
If you believe rural people know how to solve our rural problems and provide solutions, if we can get the start-up costs and some of the infrastructure supports, we will be able to put small investments of cash and make big changes to some of our families dealing with health crises, or with particular gifts and seeking out opportunities.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms. Shimp. It is good to see you. If you have advisers and an old friend like Murray Edwards, you will get good advice. I would hang on to him.
Ms. Shimp: I will not toss him out the door yet.
Senator Mercer: I would love to see your proposal.
I have been a professional fund-raiser since 1978. I am a former chairman of the Association of Fundraising Professionals Foundation.
Ms. Shimp: That is a wonderful organization.
Senator Mercer: Thank you. I think you have hit on something we have not talked about that is true in rural Canada, and probably rural America as well, and that is the fact that United Way does not cover the geographic areas.
There is the Halifax-Dartmouth United Way. People who live outside that area are not covered and their needs are just as great.
When we were in Ottawa, we received a briefing from a group called Coastal Communities Network. We heard from them again in Nova Scotia. Out of Coastal Communities Network has come another organization — and I may have the name wrong; we will check the notes — the Rural Communities Foundation of Nova Scotia, which came from funds left over from a couple of little programs, and some donated dollars. That foundation is now in existence.
Their purpose is to donate funds only to projects in rural areas. Their mandate is determined every year. They may want to fund health care one year and literacy another year. They give grants all across the province of Nova Scotia, but exclusively in rural areas. There is a precedent for this rural foundation.
Ms. Shimp: I understand that.
Senator Mercer: Some of the money came through the equivalent of the Western Canada Diversity Fund. It was left over in a program that was there, and rather than let it go they put it in the foundation.
Ms. Shimp: There is a way we can start small and build upward. I know there are millions out there waiting for me if I can only get start-up support. To start a rural foundation for Western Canada, I need guaranteed three-year funding.
I can tell you what I need. I want to add more clarity. Not only the United Ways, but in this province, a Calgary foundation has over $300 million in assets, and the Edmonton Community Foundation has similar assets, not quite so high, and they represent about two million people.
Murray Edwards recommended, if at all possible, two special tax incentives for persons donating to the foundation during its first three years of operation. He wanted to see a special 50 per cent — unfortunately it would be Alberta — Alberta charitable tax deduction. Sponsoring oil companies would receive a deduction in Alberta royalties. We are looking at royalties equivalent to 50 cents for every dollar donated.
Mr. Edwards said if we can do that, he will guarantee we will have a huge pot in a short order. He suggested we not look only at Alberta, because Albertans would donate to these investments knowing they will help rural communities in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and our neighbours in B.C.
We have so much in common. People from Saskatchewan and Manitoba come into this province to sustain our oil market right now. We have a window of opportunity to build one massive foundation. I want to present it to you for you to reflect on.
Senator Mercer: Thank you. I think the idea is interesting. If rural Canada falls through the cracks, from the government's point of view, it has also fallen through the cracks from the charitable point of view. The United Way does not service all of rural Canada.
We all think we are helping everybody if we donate to the United Way. We are not.
Ms. Shimp: No, we are not.
Senator Banks: You should pursue it. It is worth pursuing.
Ms. Shimp: It is worth supporting, senator, with dollars.
Senator Banks: I think you are more likely to have success at the provincial level.
With respect to that young lady singer, have you applied for assistance from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts?
Ms. Shimp: We are in the process of doing that.
Senator Banks: The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, unlike other things you mentioned, is pan-Alberta. It has provided a lot of assistance disproportionately to artists who do not reside in Edmonton and Calgary.
Ms. Shimp: That is right. I spoke with a director only last week.
Senator Banks: Good.
Ms. Shimp: He suggested that because Ms. Sinatra thought she had a good voice does not mean she would have it all together.
Senator Banks: It does not. You have to apply. You have to buy a ticket for a lottery.
Ms. Shimp: You absolutely do. Thank you so much, Senator Banks. I appreciate that.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Ms. Shimp. I am glad you had a chance to attend here.
I thank all of you, especially those who have sat loyally all night listening to what has been one of our, from start to finish, best hearings we have had along the way. I know it takes time to do these things. It takes courage to come forward and say these things.
I thank you all. You have given us a lot to think about. Your thoughts will be revealed in our final report, which will take some months to go through. We are glad you took the time to come. We are glad we are here. On that note, we wish you safe driving and good luck with all your efforts to make our society better.
The committee adjourned.