Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Agriculture and Forestry
Issue 5 - Evidence - February 18, 2008 - Afternoon meeting
WHITEHORSE, YUKON, Monday, February 18, 2008
The Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry met this day at 1:41 p.m. to examine and report on rural poverty in Canada.
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Honourable senators, we have a number of individuals with us this afternoon. I would ask each of them to give us a presentation of what they want us to hear today and then senators will ask questions.
We will start at this end of the table.
Chris Danfa, Future Info Tech, as an individual: Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Chris Danfa. I have lived here in Whitehorse for four years now after having lived in Montreal for five years. I moved here to Whitehorse and I was working in a federal government office.
When I saw the email this morning sent by the Honourable Larry Bagnell, I decided to come here because I think that if we want to fight poverty, there are many ways to do so. In my own experience, I was working here. Poverty is what eventually people are faced with, but there are more serious concerns and some of those are hidden. If someone was working, stayed in his work place, doing his job and he had all the competencies but because of constraints he had to leave his job, I think this can bring poverty. This person can no longer get a job anywhere because he or she is harassed in one way or another. As for me, I had a very good job here. But during all the time I was there, I was harassed and harassed and I quit because I had to quit. I am quitting now.
I say that I will continue to fight because people have to stop this kind of stuff. What do people do if they are harassed all the time? They can leave their job and what do they do? They can only go to the Employment Insurance or welfare. This will bring more and more poverty here, because there are some people who suffer silently and they do not want to say anything.
I quit my job and I went to the Human Rights Commission and the process is continuing. I wanted to bring your attention to this fact. If you want to fight poverty, you also have to go to the Human Rights Commission to see what is going on there or to go to the workplace to train people, to show them how they have to act with other people.
That is what I wanted to say. It is not only poverty that people are facing all the time: there are other hidden things here in the society that can bring one to poverty.
Judi Johnny, as an individual: Hi. My name is Judi Johnny. I am also from the Kwakwala Nation. Our clan is the Wolf Clan. Poverty for me is an every day part of life. I have to rely on para transportation, which is the Handi-Bus. In order for me to come today because I wanted to, I had to pay for a hotel room overnight because I could not get the Handi-Bus at the time I wanted it in order not to miss anything. So I had to pay for room and board for tonight and also for my meals out of my own funds. Often, you have to do something different. If you can still transfer a manual chair, then you can take a regular cab if the regular cab will take you. Some cab companies do not take people with disabilities; that is a reality of life here.
Even if you say you have a disability and you use a wheelchair, they will come and then they will open the door and leave right away. We have to work with that discrimination. That keeps us poor. We have only one Handi-Bus for the whole city. We cannot get regular rides all the time.
Employment is kind of difficult to maintain because you cannot get there for the hours that you are supposed to be there. Most often, employers will accept that, but it does not make you feel any better because there are days when you cannot get in for work at all because the Handi-Bus will not pick you up that day. This is what I have been told by other people. I cannot say names because they have not given me permission. Those are the kinds of things we deal with. We get the message that we are supposed to be employed to be part of a community and to integrate, but when we want to integrate, we cannot get the transportation.
I may be wrong, but as far as I know, you cannot get home care if you are working. Home care is essential, so you have to pay for it on your own.
You cannot pursue too much. We were just talking about paid political life, not the NGO, or non-governmental organization, political life. I would have to dish out more money than it is worth. I tried to get information from the chap using the wheelchair in the Conservatives there, but he would never give me information about where and how he got funding to get all the help that he does while he is in Parliament.
The Chair: That is the gentleman from Manitoba.
Ms. Johnny: Yes. I was able to stay overnight only because I have residential school money. Other than that, I would not be able to be here. That money is only a one-time thing.
An occupational therapist told me, ``You do not need a wheelchair this year, wait until next year.'' I cannot. This chair is already broken. I have used it for five years. People from here know that I would use my chair 24/7 if I could. I had to change occupational therapists because I was getting harassed. As a result, I am getting a new chair and it is Yukon made, which is different.
I had to go to court because one of the local limousine guys decided that I ruined his car. The judge, for whatever reason, was on his side. I owe him $1,844. This was in small claims court. The judge said I could pay that $35 a month for however long it takes. Now, he is taking me to court because he wants interest added. I can barely get by and the guys who are providing me the service are the ones who are harassing me and taking my money. It does not matter. I could not get help from Native court because it was not a criminal thing. I could not get help from Legal Aid because it was not criminal. You do not get help here if you have a disability.
If you are a First Nations or of colour, it is even worse; for women, forget it, and never mind anything else that might be added. Because I speak out, I am taking more risk of losing more services that I do not have.
Brian Eaton, Resource Coordinator, Second Opinion Society, as an individual: I am the resource coordinator for Second Opinion Society or SOS. We are a non-governmental organization, centred in Whitehorse, concerned with holistic alternatives within the mental health system. It was very gratifying to hear this morning the references that people made to the link between mental health and poverty.
When poverty is being studied with regard to its causes, its prevalence and the populations that are affected by it, we need to note that one of the groups most severely affected by poverty is, of course, that segment of the population typically classified as having mental health issues.
For many years, it was widely believed that people who were categorized as suffering from mental illness often found themselves falling into poverty as the result of the stigma, the interruption of employment and the social dislocation that resulted from their illness. However, recent research demonstrates pretty solidly that poverty bears a direct relationship to mental illness. In other words, the poorer you are, the more likely it is that you will experience some form of mental illness in your lifetime.
For instance, a study released in 2005 in Massachusetts focused on a database of some 34,000 patients who had undergone two or more episodes of hospitalization for mental health issues over a six-year period from 1994 to 2000. They matched the patient records with their zip codes over the six-year period, and it was found that there was very little downward social drift to the less affluent addresses. This had a lot to say about the theory of people falling into poverty as the result of mental illness.
However, the study did find what seemed to be a direct relationship between income level and the incidence of mental illness. That is a correlation that has been borne out by various studies ever since the late 1930s. The Massachusetts study showed that mental illness was three times as prevalent in low-income communities as in the higher-income ones.
Another study conducted in 1999 in Colorado came up with similar findings. Five hundred patients of a clinic that serviced people who had no health insurance and whose incomes were below the federal poverty level, the cut-off level, filled out questionnaires relating to their emotional well-being. Their responses were compared to some 3,000 patients from general primary care settings who filled out a similar questionnaire. In other words, these were people from what you might call the income-level mainstream.
The results of this study indicated significantly higher rates of psychiatric disorders for the lower-income patients. The level was 51 per cent as compared to 28 per cent of the general care patients.
These psychiatric disorders were broken down into categories with the result that the lower-income group had a 17 per cent incidence of alcohol abuse compared to 7 per cent for the general population group. Anxiety disorders were charted and they were more than triple: 36 per cent for the lower-income group to 11 per cent for the higher-income group. Mood disorders, again, more than double: 33 per cent to 16 per cent.
The researchers claimed in their study that these were likely conservative statistics since the study did not test for disorders such as manic depression, non-alcohol substance abuse and others. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find any similar Canadian studies on this relationship, but I am reasonably certain that the statistics would bear out the same results. If anybody knows of any Canadian studies along this line, I would be interested to hear of them.
The American Psychiatric Nurses Association summed up the interplay between poverty and mental health quite well in a 2007 article in the association's journal. I quote:
Road blocks to recovery of individuals with severe mental illness include stigma, poverty, and victimization. Stigma creates barriers to accessing safe housing, employment, and community integration. Poverty decreases ability to meet needs and increases risks for victimization. Victimization occurs as direct violence, exploitation, neglect, and abuse by care providers. It results in worsening of psychiatric disorders, the increased need for care, decreased quality of life, revictimization, and perpetration of violence.
The testimony of people like Charlotte Hrenchuk from the Yukon Status of Women Council and Barb Powick from the Kaushee's transition home, whom we heard this morning, certainly bears out the relevance on the local scene of this whole dynamic taking place.
Finally, all too frequently, the results of the mesh between poverty, victimization and social disintegration come home to roost in the penal system, as we heard from Judy Pakozdy; indeed, Canada's prisons are turning into the new de facto mental institutions of the 21st century. According to the Correctional Service of Canada, psychiatric inmate populations have grown by more than 10 per cent a year since the early 1990s. It is predicted that by 2020, 75 per cent of Canadian inmates will have a mental illness diagnosis. That is quite a staggering statistic.
A Correctional Service of Canada study that was released in 1992 estimated that 10.4 per cent of the federal male inmate population suffer from some form of schizophrenia — and that is compared to only 1 per cent in the general Canadian population — while almost another 30 per cent, 29.8 per cent, one third, were classified as depressive, and an overwhelming 55.6 per cent had anxiety disorders.
Recently commenting on a report that was released earlier this month by the Vancouver Police Department that alleges that the police have become again the de facto mental health workers in the downtown core, The Vancouver Sun states:
The situation is at crisis proportions . . . created by the ``perfect storm'' of mental health institutions closing, cutbacks in government funding for social housing, inadequate welfare rates and drugs like cocaine that induce aberrant behaviour.
It is the Vancouver Police Department, not an academic study from line people, that is saying that this is the situation.
It is clear from the experience of both Canada and the U.S. that lack of affordable housing, inadequate minimal income rates, unemployment, lack of educational opportunities and social discrimination — all of them precursors for poverty that we know so well — have all increased drastically in North America in recent years and that the social outfall of this state of affairs can only result in worsening mental health outcomes for the most socially vulnerable members of our society.
Liz Walker, Director of Health Partnerships, Council of Yukon First Nations, as an individual: I am here to support Lori Duncan who will present submission, and I will be here to answer any questions I am able to.
Lori Duncan, Director of Health and Social Development, Council of Yukon First Nations, as an individual: We get 10 minutes, right? I am a member of the Ta'an Kwach'an Council. I am of the Crow Clan.
The Council of Yukon First Nations had a morning to prepare for this. We were not even aware that this was happening. I am a bit dismayed about that. We rushed and got something together to submit to you. Largely, our presentation is winging it, but it is stuff that you probably already know. I am disappointed that we did not receive a formal invitation to this committee hearing as Yukon First Nations.
As you know, Yukon First Nations and First Nations in general are the most poverty-stricken of all the Canadian populations. That is proven time and time again with all the statistics out there. My department, the Health and Social Development Department, receives a lot of input, information and direction from the First Nations Health and Social Development Commission, which comprises the health and social directors of every First Nations community. They are the front line workers, the ones who are out there trying to deal with many of these poverty, health and social issues, so they advise us very well.
As you know, as a result of colonization, the Indian Act and Indian residential schools specifically, Yukon First Nations still live in a substandard socio-economic situation and suffer the resulting burden of poverty.
We are concerned about many things. There is safe drinking water. We have had a lot of issues with our water. For instance, there are jurisdictional issues around water: the territorial government says that we have a well so they do not have anything to do with that. They also say that we are self-governing and therefore we are on our own. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, INAC, says the same sort of thing — it is not their jurisdiction and we are on our own. Yet, there is a problem with water in some areas where it is actually contaminated from when they built the highway. Maybe that is why there are such high cancer rates and so on.
In all areas, Yukon First Nations suffer a great deal of poverty. We are suffering also from inadequate housing, and there are overwhelming numbers of children in the Government of Yukon's care. We know that from working on a revision of the Children's Act. I will not mention any statistics, but there are many children in care, largely to do with poverty, low income and that type of thing.
There is a lot of despair, and that is reflected in the high rates of suicide and other social ills. Our submission contains many statistics. Many of those ills stem from residential schools and what has happened with residential schools. Much has been happening with the Common Experience Payment. You might think that when First Nations are given all this money they are not impoverished, but it depends on how it is done and what support services are available. Some of our First Nations receive the Common Experience Payment but remain in poverty. They spend it or they are taken advantage of and they do not have anything left. Some of our members perish. There are a lot of issues out there.
When Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada was formed, they created a huge department in order to facilitate this initiative's going forward. They gave First Nations nothing. They did not give any First Nations organizations anything to deal with this issue. They have resolution support workers that they have established. For all of Yukon, we had one and a half. There are people who are threatening to commit suicide. There are so many issues out there, and we have one and a half staff members who have been able to help these people going through this experience.
If you are not familiar with residential schools, many people have left it in the back of their mind. They do not want to talk about it again. All this talk about residential schools has risen up and it triggers a lot of emotions and there are no supports there for people. It is a huge, huge issue.
I understand that at least 25 per cent was given to administer this program for the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada. When the program was first established, I think it was Assistant Deputy Minister Dion at the time who came up. I said, ``What did you get when you were given this role? Did you get an office? Did you get a desk, computers and pens?'' The Council of Yukon First Nations got nothing. We had to do this at the side of our desk, and yet there are all these people out there who are suffering from Indian residential school syndrome and all the issues that come with it. We cannot deal with it. We cannot respond to it.
Along with Yukon territorial government officials, the Skookum Jim Friendship Centre and the RCMP, we established an inter-agency to try to react to some of the fraudulent behaviours that might occur when people receive their payments. That work is all done by volunteers. We were given no resources for this.
The assumption is that the Council of Yukon First Nations will then take over this role and start giving presentations everywhere to all these organizations to help people deal with residential schools. This is the same scenario that happens with every single program that is rolled out mostly by First Nations and Inuit Health Branch. Largely, the money is given to make sure that First Nations are accountable and most of it is spent for the administration of the program. The First Nations and Inuit Health Branch gets all the resourcing to have somebody employed or a whole department employed and it goes down the line. By the time it gets down to First Nations, they do not get anything except for a small amount. For example, the Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative get $8,000 per year per community. What will that do to help fight diabetes?
You wonder why poverty is the way it is. You cannot get ahead. There is no way you can get ahead if you are not given adequate resources and capacity in order to deal with this. When I say ``capacity,'' I do not mean resources of money. I am talking about human resources as well or the training to enable capacity to be developed in a community so that the community can react to these situations. The program is not done in the proper way in terms of planning and so on. If they actually paid attention to that, then those things would be taken care of.
The Aboriginal Health Transition Fund initiative is being rolled out currently. The huge initiative of the Blueprint on Aboriginal Health was sort of kiboshed by the current government so we took it upon ourselves, because that was a really good strategy, to have an broadening of priorities in the First Nations communities so that we can work together to come up with individual priorities and focus on things like poverty and how can we empower First Nations to rise above poverty and be self-sufficient. With the Aboriginal Health Transition Fund, even though we have only two years left and we have just started the initiative here in the Yukon, we are hoping to at least come up with a baseline so that we can deal with these things on our own. We want to become self-sufficient.
The submission that we are giving you has many statistics. For instance, 74 per cent of the Salvation Army's clients are First Nations people of no fixed address; and 35 per cent of the clients to whom the outreach van provides food are women. Our submission also talks about the harm reduction strategies in other services. Actually, there is a harm reduction conference on right now.
First Nations require capacity to address past injustices and harms at the community level. This will require the following: developing holistic approaches to health; respect for cultural approaches, traditional knowledge and healing powers of the land; community development and responsiveness to community needs; respect for Elders and traditional knowledge; respect for full, open and effective communication and relationship building; equity in access to health care services, health funding and healthy lives; and support for the development of Yukon First Nations self- government and capacity to monitor progress and learn as they move forward.
On another note, because we are different here in the Yukon, we have a different jurisdiction for health services, which are transferred to the territorial government. Health services are not federally run, and that has created a huge inequity. Also, the First Nations and Inuit Health Branch is separated from the northern region; as a result, we do not receive many of the services and other things that on-reserve First Nations receive because we are not on reserve here. If a policy comes out that says it is for First Nations on reserve, we have to fight like heck to try to get the money for that program.
Health Canada developed a First Nations On-reserve and Inuit in Inuit Communities Program as part of the Aboriginal Diabetes Initiative. We are not in that. Again, we are fighting to get resources so that we can deal with the diabetes initiative.
Because of jurisdiction and because we are different, we are excluded from many initiatives and programs. We do not get eHealth at all. Most of the First Nations south of 60 have entered into health transfer. Here, it is different. If we are self-governing, then we need to do health transfer right from Treasury Board to the First Nations, no more middleman. It is not administrative only, it is the whole thing. You have to make darn sure that you are ready for that. We are different and we need to be treated differently and not put in the same box as others, because we do not get resources and the First Nations communities do not get the resources that they require.
Lastly, with the self-government agreements, they have signed on that they will give their services to their citizenship base. What that means is that when they are self-governing, they are no longer part of the Indian Act bands. When you are under an Indian Act band, you are a Status Indian or you are non-Status Indian. When you have citizenship of a First Nation, then you are a citizen. You are First Nation or you are not First Nation. It has nothing to do with status or non-status. Yet, the resourcing that they receive still is under status population. Therefore, they are very inadequately resourced in First Nations self-government. Then they try to compensate and go into debt. The perception is that they receive so much money, but really they do not. If you think about it as establishing a government, how much do you need to start up a government? This has not been done very often.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Duncan. We will certainly take your comments back with us to Ottawa. We also have a very fine Aboriginal Peoples Committee in the Senate and we will make sure that its leader gets your views as well. If we could have a copy of your presentation, that would be great.
Ms. Duncan: You have a copy, but it does not contain everything I said. That was just off the top of my head.
The Chair: We will get a transcript of that from this meeting. Thank you.
Senator Peterson: Thank you, presenters. There is an awful lot of material there and they are very serious issues.
Mr. Danfa, you said that you quit your job because of harassment.
Mr. Danfa: Yes, and more. The Human Rights Commission has to be involved, and as you know, a lot of cases are going through. The Senate should investigate their work and have an enquiry to know what happens. People can fire you; if they do not have any argument to fire you, they use all the means. They can use some psychological pressure, harassment, and you have to quit. If you quit, this leads to poverty or to violence.
It is a very serious thing. Many times, I hear that there are not enough workers in Whitehorse, but I think there are a lot of workers here in Whitehorse. They have only to train people. They say there are not enough workers here, but a year ago, for example, the French association sent a delegation to Europe to find workers to come to the Yukon. Why go to France and Belgium to bring people here and train them? They could go to Quebec because they are Canadians. There are a lot of Canadians who do not get jobs here. In Quebec, there are many qualified people who do not have jobs. It would be good for them to bring people from somewhere in Canada rather than go to Europe. If they go to Europe, maybe they bring the kind of people they want.
Senator Peterson: You worked for the federal government?
Mr. Danfa: Yes, I was working on a project with the federal and Yukon governments.
Senator Peterson: You have taken your case to the Human Rights Commission.
Mr. Danfa: Yes. Many times, I complained and they tell me that I have to show that people are racist. But I know it cannot work. During a whole year, I suffered a lot and I just quit. Now, I have zero revenue. I am living with my former income and when it is finished, what will I do? I am an engineer. I am a very qualified person.
There are a lot of things happening here and people are suffering silently. Sometimes, the Human Rights Commission will investigate, but it will take two years.
Senator Peterson: I wish you well.
Ms. Johnny, you commented that you cannot get home care if you have a job. If you do not work, you can have home care and not pay for it.
Ms. Johnny: Yes. What happens is because home care works during the same hours you work as an individual, it is kind of hard. It does not make it easier to get employment. Sometimes, you cannot get the Handi-Bus service if you use a wheelchair that depends on that.
Sometimes, the Handi-Bus service can make you get to work on time, sometimes it cannot. Suppose your job starts at nine o'clock; sometimes the Handi-Bus will say it will pick you up at 7:30, but in minus 45 degree temperatures, you do not want to be picked up at 7:30 to sit there at the other end and wait for the employment doors to open. The next time the service can pick you up is 10. Either you are too early or you are too late. Up to a certain point, employers are understanding, but after that they do not want to have to bother with that. Therefore, you become disposable. It is better for the employer to employ a senior who has their own transportation or somebody who does not really need the job but who can do whatever the employer wants.
Senator Peterson: You are saying then that if we want people with disabilities to become self-reliant, we have to be a little more flexible in the support services.
Ms. Johnny: Exactly. I think that if we are able to participate in the community through employment, we should be able to say, all right, my job starts at 5 o'clock until noon, so pick me up at 4:30 as opposed to 7:30 when you miss three hours of work. Sometimes you just sit there waiting. Often, because they have an overload of people, you get picked up late. It does not matter what you say or do, or if you talk a lot like I do, you risk losing your service.
I am in the same boat as Mr. Danfa. I have been to the Human Rights Commission and I too am going to court.
Senator Peterson: Mr. Eaton, you said that mental health support is really not very good. Are you familiar with Senator Michael Kirby's extensive study on mental health, Out of the Shadows at Last: Transforming Mental Health, Mental Illness and Addiction Services in Canada?
Mr. Eaton: Yes, I am familiar with the report. I cannot pretend to have read it all. I think, by the way, that Senator Kirby's report makes a strong case for the retention of the Senate within our political system. I think that some very good research has come out of the Senate in recent years. The commission that has been the result of the report is, I think, a pre-cursor for some excellent work.
Senator Peterson: It is going in the right direction. It addresses the issues you talk about. We have a long way to go, but we are starting.
Mr. Eaton: I think so.
Senator Peterson: Ms. Duncan, you identified a bunch of issues and I agree with you totally on the water issue, the inadequate housing and the lack of funding.
When you say that most of the money goes to administration, are you referring to Indian and Northern Affairs Canada?
Ms. Duncan: INAC, Health Canada — the federal system.
Senator Peterson: I agree with you there, too. We are working on that and trying to resolve it.
You also mentioned the issue of off-reserve programs. Because they are off reserve, they do not get the same consideration; is that correct?
Ms. Duncan: Right. In the Yukon, we do not have reserves.
Senator Peterson: Do you have tribal lands then?
Ms. Duncan: We have settlement lands, traditional territory settlement lands. South of 60, you have reserves and then you have off-reserve, which is basically your urban population. Here, we still have First Nations communities, but we do not have official reserves. A lot of the funding is earmarked for on-reserve First Nations, and often we miss out on that. Because we are under a different jurisdiction, we may not have a federally run hospital or health station. Those are under the territorial government; responsibility is transferred there. We do not receive the money for the initiatives that are there, for example eHealth or maternal child health.
Senator Peterson: The issue is the same though. Because you do not have reserves per se, we will have to change the terminology a bit.
Ms. Duncan: Largely, the terminology advises policy and then policy advises Treasury Board and then we do not get the funding.
Senator Peterson: That is what has to be corrected.
Ms. Duncan: Yes, and the perception that we do not fit in the box the same as all communities and people south of 60.
Senator Peterson: That will be another challenge. There is enough to begin with, and now there is another one.
The Chair: You all made a very troubling and interesting presentation. We need to know these things, and we thank you for telling us. We will certainly spread the message around as much as we can.
Ms. Duncan: Did you say that there is a Senate Aboriginal Peoples Committee?
The Chair: Yes, there is. Senator Peterson is on that, and we have him around our table, too.
Senator Peterson: We are trying to resolve many of the issues you talked about.
The Chair: Thank you all very much and our very best to each of you.
Arthur Mitchell, Member of the Legislative Assembly of Yukon (Copperbelt), as an individual: Thank you, senators, for coming. I am the MLA for Copperbelt and I am the leader of the official opposition in Yukon. My riding is considered to be an urban riding, but it also includes some very rural areas within it. I do not think that Whitehorse generally would be considered urban by much of the rest of Canada.
Poverty, as you have heard today, is no stranger to Yukoners. In rural communities, the unemployment rate is in the double digits; generally speaking it always is, regardless of the rate that fluctuates to lower ranges in Whitehorse. Development in many of our rural communities is at a standstill. Property values have been stagnant for many years and there is a desperate need for better housing.
With the declining population in many of our rural communities, many families are unable to provide even the barest necessities based on the employment that is available to them. Escalating fuel costs, housing costs and food costs, combined with the dramatic costs in the price of new housing and new housing lots, have caused many people to be forced to survive on social assistance that does not reflect the reality of today's costs. Those who are fortunate enough to have jobs often find that the pay is so low that it is still very difficult to survive on the jobs that are available. Especially hard hit are single-parent families and women who are forced to live in abusive situations in order to survive.
You have already heard today from witnesses who are better qualified to speak to it than I am, but I would also say that in our Aboriginal communities in particular all of these issues are exacerbated. The unemployment rates are much higher. Based on the 2001 Census, the unemployment rates amongst Aboriginals in rural Yukon are 26.8 per cent versus 11.6 per cent amongst non-Aboriginal members of rural communities. There is a real disconnect between those two communities in terms of living conditions.
In my own riding of Copperbelt, the housing stock varies from some of the most expensive and newer housing in all of Yukon, selling from $500,000 to $600,000 and setting new records on a monthly basis over the last year or so, to some of the flimsiest and substandard housing in all of Yukon. I have constituents, whom I call upon, and we are talking about only a few kilometres' distance between these different areas of my riding, who are living in converted school buses, in permanently parked truck campers and in wall tents. That is year-round. There is tremendous disparity in the housing stock.
I think a very serious issue we are facing in Yukon and probably across Canada today is the definition of affordable housing. Affordable for whom? A couple of years ago, the Yukon government, through the Yukon Housing Corporation, using federal funds that had become available for affordable housing, helped to subsidize some new housing stock in an area of Copper Ridge. These were small units of some 1,300 or 1,400 square feet that were selling for around $175,000 to $180,000. Now, that was called affordable based on the fact that the average price of a house in Whitehorse is just under $300,000 as of the end of this past year. I suspect we will see that it is over $300,000 shortly.
It is not affordable to anybody on minimum wage. It is not affordable to anybody on social assistance. Again, we are forcing people into worse and worse living conditions by the lack of some form of truly affordable housing. By the way, those same houses today, both on resale and as the developer continues to build them, are selling more around $225,000 to $230,000. Yet, neither the social assistance rates nor any of the other figures such as average wage have gone up anywhere near proportionately to that change in a mere year or year and a half to what was considered to be affordable housing when it was being brought to market.
Although I represent a Whitehorse riding, I do travel around the territory as leader of a political party and leader of the official opposition. Communities such as Pelly Crossing, Ross River and Upper Liard outside of Watson Lake are largely First Nations communities. The conditions of housing are even more abhorrent than what we see here in Whitehorse. Some of these First Nations communities are self-governing, while others, such as Ross River or the Kaska people, do not yet have that self-governance ability and they are caught, as Ms. Duncan said, by the way money is transferred from the Government of Canada to the First Nations communities. It is extremely difficult.
Ms. Johnny, who is a constituent, speaks very eloquently about the issues that are faced by differently-abled people. For many of the issues she raises, I think she has found herself quite often caught between different levels of government, all of whom are well-meaning but who point at a different level as holding the ultimate responsibility. When she comes to see me as her MLA to talk about issues like the schedule for the Handi-Bus, I can speak to the mayor and council on her behalf, but it is the municipal government that runs that service. When I speak to the municipal government, they speak of funding restrictions based on how their funding comes from the territorial government as well as from their own tax base.
This is a real difficulty, and ultimately the end user, such as Ms. Johnny, does not care what level of government is responsible for the service. She just wants the service to work for her. As she said earlier, she wants to be able to be employed, to be productive and fulfilled as an employed person and not be reliant only on social programs. However, it is very difficult to hold down a job when the services upon which she is dependent are infrequent and do not fit her schedule. I speak of her today because she has addressed this committee, but I have heard this same complaint from a number of other constituents and indeed from people across Yukon.
First of all, as always, the needs are financial. We need to increase the funding that is available for social assistance and other programs and for transportation. Housing needs must be addressed. While some people are happy with the increasing equity they have because of the rising housing market, an increasing number of people are being disenfranchised, so to speak, and are falling off the other end because they cannot afford housing. That is an increasing need.
There is a need for training and retraining programs to assist people to get back to work, and the federal government can help to address that need.
Child care programs should reflect today's needs. I know that Ken Dryden will be here this week. When he was in government he was hoping to deal with a program for early childhood development. Regardless of the political stripe of the government, whether Liberal, Conservative or whatever, we have to address this. I know that the direct funding going to families is appreciated, and I am not suggesting that people do not appreciate the help they are getting, but currently the help is not sufficient. We need to look at a different model, or there have to be both the universal programs that were being looked and some transfers directly to parents.
Finally, because poverty is often intertwined with these other issues, there needs to be an emphasis on assistance with the social impacts of drug and alcohol abuse. These two things often go hand in hand. Families are tremendously affected when any family member falls into the abyss of substance abuse. My wife is a teacher who teaches learning assistance and reading recovery, which is an early reading intervention program, and I hear daily horror stories when she comes home and talks about some of the family situations that her pupils are dealing with. How can they be expected to come to school and learn when they are living in poverty and with families dealing with violence and substance abuse?
All of these are issues that I hope you can address in your role as senators. I thank you for coming here today and listening to me speak on behalf of my constituents.
Peter Becker, Member of the Board, Yukon Anti-Poverty Coalition, as an individual: Thank you, senators, for coming here. I am on the board of the Anti-Poverty Coalition. I represented the coalition on the community court development sessions here in Whitehorse, often referred to as direct treatment court planning.
Through that process I dealt with the following point, which I think affects the Yukon very much: there is a confusion between charity and social justice. There is a need for charity in many ways, whether food, shelter or other things, but there is also a need for social justice and the right to social justice, to food and shelter and to access to actual court justice as well. There is confusion in the political system, and the fundamentals are not well understood. The ideas are out there in our government about the rights of individuals. It is an understanding that needs to be countered much better.
The obligation of governments to provide social justice has been well documented by Karl Polanyi in his book The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. His work is well-respected, and there is the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy at Concordia University in Montreal. He states that in the early 16th century there was no poverty in England. There were no paupers. Poverty has arisen in society, has been created by processes such as the Highland clearings, colonialism, the commons enclosures in North America and so forth. If we understand that part a little better, we also see the actual constitutional and legal obligations for social justice much better.
I was going to take you through the actual justice system. I think the official opposition in the House of Commons, for example, does not believe in the rights of individuals. They believe in a fair and social society. Yet, at this point, and that is why I very much welcome the Senate here, they all participate in the war against crime. That is what brings poverty especially to rural areas like the Yukon. The effects were quite well studied in the direct treatment court planning.
There is crime going on, and the crime bill before the Senate now has mandatory minimum sentencing for gun crimes and intoxicated drivers and whatever else. I would urge the Senate, as a very effective measure of fighting poverty in the Yukon, to reject this flatly as unconstitutional, as it is, for the first time in 500 years, reversing a progressive trend in justice reform. We do have better standards than we had with capital punishment or further back with the Inquisition, but this is the first reactionary move that takes away the past achievements of people like Agnes Macphail from the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and other great justice pioneers. I have been corresponding mostly with the NDP caucus who have ignored me on that.
There was the Osgoode Hall Law Conference on mandatory minimum sentencing, and the Osgoode Hall Law Journal has the complete protest against all these items that are supported by 80 per cent or 90 per cent of all in the House of Commons. The Canadian Bar Association and the American Bar Association tell you unanimously that this is utter nonsense, that this is just an appeasement of misguided populous sentiments, an attempt to cash in on a few votes, and that fundamental constitutional obligations are thrown out by passing a crime bill like this that will advance mandatory minimum sentencing. It is very dangerous to take such a reactionary path.
If you want more indication that the implications of this are not understood in depth, think about the advancement of colonialism and commons enclosures pushing far into the justice system, especially against the indigenous people. This government has as a policy advisor Tom Flanagan, who wrote First Nations? Second Thoughts and a whole stack of books where he questions the history of the Metis people. That is the policy vision that guides the criminal justice reform that is happening. Essentially, it is the modern-day advocacy of manifest destiny by the leaders of such a movement, not only in Canada but throughout North America, who are guiding the policy visions.
When this became an explosive aspect in the dying days of Paul Martin's campaign, it is my understanding that he realized that all of a sudden his hands were tied in addressing this because himself he had been financially backing Tom Flanagan and Jean Chrétien in the court action and negotiations with the Metis, considering Flanagan as a useful history consultant even though one might not have agreed with him.
That tells me that the dangers are not well understood, especially with regard to these so-called justice reforms that will cause a lot of poverty. Access to justice, access to courts is a commons good. The judges in the community who balance the needs of the community, the rights of victims and the justice considerations are being sidelined by such ideological legislation. I urge you to flatly deny that.
It is an issue that appears to be at some distance, and then it might not be, because the Canadian constitution is more evolution-based, more oral-based than the European text models that you see in the United States and in many other countries. If we have a departure from our constitutional traditions, that is a real danger to out democracy. I urge you to take that into account when you go back to the House of Commons and deal with the crime bill.
Senator Mercer: Thank you both for being here.
Mr. Mitchell, it is never easy being an MLA. It is even less easy being the leader of the official opposition. Obviously, it is no fun. We certainly have not been enjoying ourselves, those of us around the table who are in opposition, which happens to be all of us today.
You raise the questions of housing costs, social housing and the need for more social housing. How amenable are the people of Whitehorse or the rest of the Yukon to social housing? We have had cases on the social housing front where people say they are really much in favour of it, but not in their backyard. Are the people willing to accept social housing here?
Mr. Mitchell: There are two issues. Prejudices or biases against social housing continue to exist, but I think they are less than they once were. People are more open to the reality of the need.
However, we should speak not only about social housing. We also need to talk about affordable housing. Given the rise of the cost of housing versus the much smaller trajectory or flatter trajectory of income levels, more and more people will find housing unaffordable in the coming years. All levels of government will have to be creative and look toward how we can resolve these issues, whether provincial and territorial governments themselves build housing or whether there will be funding programs to entice the private sector to build housing that is more affordable.
Prior to my being in public office, I spent a decade as a realtor and also several years as a partner in a real estate development corporation. We were looking at building housing and commercial and other space. In the private sector, you go where the money is. Right now, the money in Whitehorse is in building high-end condos, so that is what developers are building. Some people are very critical of them, but I cannot be critical of them because I have been there. If you are investing your own money, you are looking for a return on your investment.
Governments need to look at how they can partner with the private sector to encourage the private sector to see that there are profits to be made in housing other than the high end. If through a combination of public and private money that can be made available, then the developers will build it.
It would be unfortunate if we expected government to resolve the whole problem with government-constructed projects. Government does not always get the best value when they build buildings. Anything we can do to encourage the private sector to be involved is positive, but we cannot order the private sector to build affordable housing.
Senator Mercer: No, but we can try to make it more attractive, as we once did with incentives.
I will move on to your comments about social assistance. We heard this morning that social assistance rates had not increased significantly in the Yukon for many years, although they have been raised recently, and that the minimum wage has now been indexed, which I think is interesting. I like the idea. However, social assistance has not been indexed. When we compare the social assistance numbers and the housing costs in Whitehorse in particular, it seems to me that social assistance is not anywhere close to covering what a small one-bedroom apartment would cost either in downtown Whitehorse or in communities that have rental units.
Is there a chance that the Yukon Legislative Assembly will index the social assistance numbers? It is tough enough being poor, and it is even tougher to be getting poorer every year.
Mr. Mitchell: I agree. First of all, the social assistance rates by and large have not increased for about 15 years. They still have not increased, although the government has announced that it has been reviewing the structure of social assistance and will increase the rates shortly. However, to the best of my knowledge, the increases have not yet happened.
Second, while it is helpful to index both of these rates, if you simply index something that is currently substandard and does not allow people to live with dignity, then all you are doing is making sure that they stay in that substandard position. As inflation rises, they will be equivalently substandard, but they will not actually be able to get out of that position. I think we need something more than indexing.
When it comes to the minimum wage, first of all, as has been pointed out, the reality is that because Whitehorse — and I want to emphasize Whitehorse, not necessarily all of Yukon — has a relatively low unemployment rate right now, there are employers who are struggling to find workers and very few people are working for minimum wage, which is $8.58 an hour.
Nevertheless, if you are working in a fast-food establishment or in the service industry, where entry level and lower- paying jobs are paying $10 or $11 per hour, it is difficult to see how you can afford housing. Say you are fully employed at 40 hours per week. At $10 an hour, that amounts to $400 a week. Your gross pay is $1,600 a month and perhaps your take-home pay is $1,200 or $1,250. An average one-bedroom apartment in Whitehorse is $700. Assuming that you are a person who can live in a one-bedroom apartment — a young person or student living on your own — you might be able to survive. However, if you are a family with two or three kids, perhaps a single-parent family, and you are working these kinds of jobs, you are paying child care on top of rent, and I do not know how you can be expected, based either on the social assistance rates or on the going wage, to be able to afford housing.
We have basically structurally guaranteed that people will be living in poverty. People on social assistance are cannibalizing the food portion and the other expenses portion of their assistance in order to subsidize the housing portion because the housing portion is a fixed amount and they cannot do anything about it.
There are exceptions. The government will tell you that there is always emergency funding available if people come and ask for it. I would suggest that it is difficult enough to be on social assistance without having to demean yourself further by coming in to make your case for why you need additional emergency funding. I do not think very many people wish to be on social assistance.
Perhaps in theory there is a safety net, but from the people I have talked to, it does not work very well in practice.
Senator Mercer: Mr. Becker, you made a reference to Bill C-2, currently before the Senate, which is an amalgamation of five other bills. If it had been five bills, I do not think you would see all five passed. However, since they are all in one bill, we are in a bit of a bind, and I am not sure what will happen.
You should know though that as we are sitting here, the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Senate is meeting this week in Ottawa to review Bill C-2 and to hear witnesses. I cannot tell you what is happening because I am not there, but I wanted you to know that a review is underway.
Senator Peterson: Mr. Mitchell, you made reference to the challenges in rural Yukon, which is regressing. This committee had a teleconference recently with a chap from Australia who specializes in revitalizing rural areas and turning them around. He said that a main requisites to do that is leadership, someone with a vision of where he or she would like the community to go in the next 10 years. It sounded like this fellow has had some astounding results. He has worked throughout southeast Asia and Australia. I think the situation we are facing is similar. We could try to write out all the things we would like to happen, but who will do it? I think you need that leadership, someone in the community who has the vision. What are your thoughts on that?
Mr. Mitchell: I think that is true; we do need leadership, particularly within rural Yukon. There are leaders. Many of our rural communities are predominantly First Nation communities and there are certainly some very well spoken First Nation leaders who are trying to address these issues on behalf of their communities. However, there is an awful to overcome. They face difficulties in dealing with everything from the damage done by the residential school system, which tends to be passed on from generation to generation, to substance abuse, to the lack of decent paying work opportunities in those communities for so many years. All of this has led to a very difficult situation.
Right now, because world mineral prices have been so high for the last couple of years with the demand from South Asia and from Asia itself along with the high price of gold, there is a tremendous amount of mineral exploration. One operating mine has opened up, and those are better paying jobs. In order to make use of the better paying jobs, we need to make sure that there are training opportunities so that the people who are living in those communities can benefit from the jobs.
About a year ago, I was coming back up from attending a conference down south. I was sitting next to two young men on the airplane on our local carrier, Air North. I got chatting with them. One of them was a welder and the other had a different specialty, but they had never been to Yukon; they were hired outside. They were going to be met by a bus and taken to Carmacks and from there up to the Minto mine site. They had no idea of anything about Yukon other than that the pay sounded good. That is great and we are certainly in favour of in-migration and increasing the trades and technology people that we have in Yukon, but I, for one, would like to see everything possible being done to make sure that as many of these good paying jobs go to people who are currently underemployed in Yukon.
I think that training programs, training trust funds and anything that can be done where Canada partners with the territory toward providing funding should be done to make sure that people are able to train for those jobs. We have sort of a missing generation in mining right now; because mining was down for so long people got out of those trades and now many people do not have the expertise to take advantage of the better paying jobs that are becoming available. In other areas of Yukon, the mining activity is not yet enough again to provide those jobs.
Mining will always be cyclical. This may be a longer cycle that in the past, but it always does come to an end. There is always eventually an over-supply that drives prices down. For the long term, I would like to see other areas of employment, be it making use of our beautiful wilderness for higher-end tourism, or high tech or knowledge-based industries. All of that will take money at the territorial and federal levels to train people to be able to be better employed.
Senator Peterson: You mentioned affordable housing, which we all have talked about for years and years. It is kind of a buzz word. You were in the development business, as was I for a number of years in a previous life. We will never be able to build affordable housing to meet the needs of people. It will take a partnership effort, I think, from all three levels of government — federal, provincial and municipal. They have to come to the table and everybody has to give a bit and find a way to finance affordable housing and be innovative with something like a tax-free bond so that you can actually get this structure up, because you know that physically you cannot build housing at a low-enough cost to meet what people are able to pay.
Mr. Mitchell: I believe you have hit the nail right on the head, senator. It will take a partnership, and we will have to think along different lines than we thought in the past because of the rapid escalation in both the building costs and the retail price of the housing.
I am glad that I am in my late 50s and at a different point in the cycle. It would be very difficult to be a young person today in his 20s. Would you expect to ever be able to own a home? When I started as a realtor, down payments were set at 10 per cent, but 5 per cent CHMC-sponsored or insured for first-time buyers. Then the 5 per cent became available to all purchasers. At the time, there was a cap of $175,000 here in Yukon that varied according to the jurisdiction. Then the cap was removed, the down payment dropped to 2.5 per cent and today, people can buy housing basically with zero down; they just have to demonstrate closing costs and an ability to service the loan.
Also, we are beginning to see 30- and 40-year mortgages. I would suggest that people are no longer buying their house, they are renting it. When you are talking about 40-year mortgages, how far are we from getting into the multi- generational mortgages that we see in Japan and in England?
I left the market some two and a half years ago, but even before I left, I would see 23-year old couples buying a $250,000 starter home with nothing down. They both had Government of Yukon jobs so they could qualify for it, but if ever the interest rate went up significantly upon renewal or one of them lost that government job, they would no longer be able to service the loan.
Again, I think we have to look forward and recognize that more and more people will be struggling to own their own homes and governments will have to look at creative ways to address that issue.
Senator Peterson: Mr. Becker, I quite enjoyed your presentation. I like the way you characterized charity and social justice and differentiated the two. It has been our theory over the years that if Central Canada needs help with financial backing grants, they call that an innovative industrial strategy, but when Western, Northern and Atlantic Canada require a bit of help, they call it a welfare handout. We will have to work to change that mindset, because the differentiation is certainly there.
On the crime bill, Bill C-2, there is no question that putting all five bills together has made it a difficult bill. Unfortunately, First Nations are the ones who will be impacted most and the jails will be full of First Nations people. It was a disgrace putting it all together in one huge, omnibus bill. It is very important, in my opinion.
Mr. Becker: To the House of Commons, I would have to say that a lack of intellectual integrity is as unethical as a lack of financial integrity, to be so cheap on the reasoning and to be so fanatical about the anti-intellectualism in looking at these issues, especially the insensitivity of burdening the indigenous people. Aboriginal women are 30 times more often incarcerated than the general population and that is against the criminological knowledge that is there. To worsen a situation like that is an outrage.
I am very much disappointed that the opposition participates in that. There has to be a point of principle somewhere — especially considering the tradition of great justice pioneers like Agnes Macphail and the history of the NDP — not to move so far away from the constitutional traditions, which include progress and not regression.
Senator Mahovlich: You have probably had more experience with affordable housing than I have had. Just reading about it, a lot of people take advantage of it, people who can afford affordable housing are in this place where they can afford it, but they take advantage. Have you had that experience? How will you police that?
Mr. Mitchell: I think that that would always be a problem. I do not think the problem is as great here as it may be in others places like the city of Toronto.
I will give you some statistics. These are based on the third quarter and in some cases the fourth quarter of 2007. In December 2007, the rental vacancy rate in Whitehorse was 2.8 per cent and the median rent was $700. I would suggest that that 2.8 per cent consists largely of very undesirable housing. The rate is, in effect, nil. For sales in the third quarter of 2007, the average selling price of a house in Whitehorse was $297,400. That was a significant increase from the third quarter of 2006 when it was $255,100. The average selling price increased by $42,300 or 16.6 per cent year to year in the third quarter. From conversations with realtors, I am quite certain that when the fourth quarter figures are finalized, the average selling price will be over $300,000.
I think the single rate on social assistance for a one-bedroom unit is $390. Right away, we have a disparity between what we are paying people on social assistance and the median rent. There just is not anything available at those rates. When I was out knocking on doors last year, I spoke with a single mother who was living in a very nice neighbourhood in what is called Granger subdivision. It is certainly a middle-class or upper-middle-class neighbourhood. She was in a basement suite and she had two children. She was unemployed. She was on social assistance. She was trying to improve her skill set by taking courses at Yukon College. The courses are given in the evening. The bus service ceases before the time at which she needs to go and return from school, certainly before the return time. She could not afford to own vehicle. She was faced with taking a taxi to the college in order to take courses so that she could try to dig herself out of poverty.
These are some of the on-the-ground situations people find themselves in. Everybody says, ``Go out and get an education; there is low unemployment, and if you are not working, you should be.'' However, people are not able to support their families on those entry-level jobs. They sometimes find it impossible to gain the training to get the better jobs.
Also the child care issue is very serious, because those costs have gone through the roof here in recent years too, and that tends to trap people in poverty once they fall into it. When families dissolve and become single-parent families, which is pretty common nowadays, it becomes all the more difficult for people to manage.
Senator Mahovlich: Mr. Becker, you were talking about poverty. Was there a time in our history when there was not any poverty?
Mr. Becker: Thank you for bringing that up. The idea of the right of the individual and these kinds of ideological concepts imply that it is natural to have poverty. However, history shows otherwise.
Senator Mahovlich: Robert Service wrote a poem. He was poor.
Mr. Becker: Yes, but that was 100 years ago. You are looking already at 200 years of Russian fur trade and very heavy industrial and colonial impacts. Karl Polanyi was considered on par with John Kenneth Galbraith and maybe one or two more economists of the 20th century who pointed out that poverty was not known, the individual pauper as such was not known because it was entire regions or countries that suffered from the harvest failures and stuff like that. No, there were no poor individuals, not in the indigenous societies and not in the traditional European societies. You do not even have to go to the Middle Ages. That is the beauty of English history, which is better documented with much smaller gaps than on the continent. That is very well laid down there.
Karl Polanyi called it ``the great transformation.'' It is also quite well understood by many cultural historians. Child labour and 18-hour workdays did not exist in the early industrialization. Adam Smith he did not know about that in his day. His understanding of markets was quite different than that of today's market fundamentalists. In fact, it was Karl Polanyi who put Adam Smith back on his feet, because Adam Smith had a lot of social consciousness and recognized a lot of these things.
What you see in the late 18th century with the commons enclosures is that people lost the access to pasture at gunpoint. That is what the British government decided to do. When they had no more chickens or sheep or anything else, then extreme poverty and lack of ability to negotiate wages and these kinds of things occurred in the early and mid 19th century and not at all in the second half of the 18th century when the industrial revolution was already in full swing.
You can follow this quite closely. Poverty is not a natural thing. It did not exist at the individual level with such economic disparity between rich and poor. It did not exist.
The Chair: Thank you both. We are very glad both of you took the time to come here. It was very nice to meet you, and we wish you the very best.
The committee adjourned.