Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 2 - Evidence - May 15, 2008
OTTAWA, Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Subcommittee on Cities of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:45 a.m. to study current social issues affecting Canada's large cities today.
Senator Art Eggleton (chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: I welcome you all to this meeting of the subcommittee on large cities. Today, we will examine poverty reduction: place-based approach.
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Our subcommittee is building upon previous work done at the Senate on poverty. The 1971 report headed by Senator David Croll comes to mind as well as the 1977 report by the committee chaired by Senator Cohen, which was entitled Sounding the Alarm: Poverty in Canada. At the same time, our study is complementary to the work being done by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, chaired by Senator Fairbairn. At the request of Senator Segal, that committee is dealing with the issue of rural poverty.
Today, in our continuing examination, we have three witnesses, each of whom has been asked to give an opening statement of five to seven minutes.
Paul Born is the director and co-founder of Tamarack, which is an institute for community engagement. Vibrant Communities is Tamarack's signature work. It is active in 15 cities and has so far reduced the impact of poverty for more than 35,000 people in Canada. At a previous hearing, the committee heard from one of the participants in Vibrant Communities Saint John. Mr. Born has extensive experience in helping organizations and communities to develop new and sustained ideas that motivate people to collaborative action.
I believe that Judith Maxwell is known to everyone at this table. She was the founding president of the Canadian Policy Research Networks. She has extensive experience in both public and private sector think tanks. She is an expert in how social and economic policy choices complement each other and how they intersect with Canadian experience.
Ms. Maxwell is a writer and has been a member of the editorial board of the Financial Times of Canada and director of policy studies at the C.D. Howe Institute. In 1985, she was named chair of the Economic Council of Canada, a post she held until 1992. She is also a former associate director and fellow of the School of Policy Studies at Queen's University.
Sherri Torjman is the vice-president of the Caledon Institute. She has written in the areas of income security programs, taxation, social spending, the interaction of the welfare and tax systems, social services, disability income and supports, the social dimension of sustainable development, community-based poverty reduction, customized training and partnerships. That is a lot.
Caledon is a partner with Tamarack in the Vibrant Communities program. Ms. Torjman is the author of an article entitled "Shared Space: The Communities Agenda," which was issued by the Caledon Institute of Social Policy in September 2006, and in 2007 she expanded this article into a book with the same title.
Judith Maxwell, Past President and Senior Fellow, Canadian Policy Research Networks: It is a pleasure to participate in your hearings today. It is a pleasure to be on a panel with Ms. Torjman and Mr. Born, who have been doing path-breaking work on poverty reduction and place-based approaches, which are our topics today. My contribution can set the scene for why place-based approaches will be an important part of our policy options as we address some of the difficult and deeply rooted aspects of poverty in our country.
In Canada we have traditionally tried to address poverty through two routes. One is through the social safety net. We have an extensive and expensive panoply of policies at the federal and provincial levels that are designed to support all citizens. They are not exclusively assigned to poor people. The idea is that they create opportunity for all Canadians to participate effectively in society and provide a foundation of support for either their incomes or their personal development. I am thinking of public education and health care and of income security programs such as the Canada Pension Plan or the National Child Benefit, one of which supports the elderly and the other children.
The social safety net in Canada is still an effective and very important tool for addressing poverty issues, but it is incomplete by itself. There are some holes in the safety net that we can discuss later, if you wish. There are holes created by a lack of integration of programs and by excessive targeting so that people are not eligible for programs that one would expect them to be eligible for, especially Employment Insurance.
The other major tools we have used to address poverty are region-based approaches. In the past many decades, when we thought about geography in poverty issues we thought of provinces or regions rather than neighbourhoods or cities. The big shift now is to turn our focus to these smaller geographic spaces. We are doing that because there have been some very important changes in the nature and the root causes of poverty over time.
I will talk about why place matters. I think most Canadians have the sense that the problem of deep urban poverty, the burned-out city syndrome, is an American problem. We have been quite blind to the depth of poverty that has been accumulating in Canada in the last few decades. I am sure you have seen the mapping studies that show the poor neighbourhoods in our cities. We have come to realize that we have poverty by postal code. We have the big levers of public education, health care, income security programs and social policy programs flying at 30,000 feet, while down on the ground we have pockets of quite severe poverty. I hope we will be able to talk about that today.
People move into these poor neighbourhoods mainly because they are looking for affordable housing. We all know that is an important part of this agenda. As more people crowd into the neighbourhood, social conditions tend to deteriorate. People arrive with very little to contribute, in many cases, because they are so poor, and as poverty becomes more dense there are problems of personal safety and lack of recreation. The health and education services are so overstretched that they are not able to give the quality of support that the people in that neighbourhood need.
In earlier times in Canada we had more mixing of social groups. Many children from poor families were able to attend schools where there were many middle-class students. It can be very beneficial to the development of a child to be in a school where there is good recreation, good teaching and many good role models. It is also very beneficial for them to be able to contribute to that.
When most of the poor people are concentrated in one neighbourhood, problems become more complex. This morning I will use Vanier as an example, it being only two or three kilometres from this room. Vanier is a community of 16,000 people in a city of fewer than 1 million people. Ottawa is a very well-to-do city. The recent census placed us behind Calgary and Oshawa in terms of median income, and we have by far the highest per centage of well-educated people compared to other cities in Canada.
However, in Vanier it is a different story. Incomes are very low. Crime rates are four times the average of the whole city of Ottawa. Forty-eight per cent of the children live in poor families. In some of the volunteer work I have been doing I have seen that the poverty of those families is creating a great deal of stress on the two schools that serve the neighbourhood. The two schools rank in the ninety-ninth per centile, that is, at the very bottom, in the Ontario standardized tests for reading and math in grade three. A very high proportion of the intake in grade 1 are children not yet ready to learn and not socially ready to adapt to the classroom and who have not had the cognitive development we would like them to have to be ready to learn.
It becomes a double whammy. The school does not have the resources to respond, the children do not have the background they need to succeed, and you end up at the very bottom of the heap of Ontario schools.
We know a lot about how to help children, and we could direct a lot of resources into early childhood programs and into those schools in order to help those children catch up. However, that is only one dimension of the Vanier problem. The real challenge in place-based policies is to get to the root cause of people getting on the downward spiral so that they are forced to live in a community that does not offer advantages to children. How the family functions and how the neighbourhood functions are also important aspects of this. We will hear more about that from my colleagues.
The difficulty with place-based policies is that there is no formula for them. Each neighbourhood like Vanier will have its own assets, needs and capacity for change. These days we find that solutions are coming less from governments and more from community-based and civil society organizations across the community that try to pull the community forward.
Governments' ways of dealing with problems do not adapt well to these kinds of challenges. Governments must become more responsive to the needs articulated by the people who live in these neighbourhoods. Governments have to work together and adapt their programming so that it fits well and reinforces what others are doing, and we need to break down the silos between different government departments.
It is a challenging area of public policy, but it is one where we can make a significant difference to both the depth and the extent of poverty in this country.
Sherri Torjman, Vice-President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy: I appreciate the invitation to participate in your committee deliberations. Paul Born and I, the Tamarack Institute and our colleagues across the country have been working on place-based approaches, so it is wonderful to be able to talk about some of those initiatives. I want to clarify the notion of place-based interventions. In our view, it includes two major streams of work, one of which is investment in place, which may be government investment or a combination of government and private or voluntary sector investment. The other dimension of place-based intervention has to do with citizens coming together and creating a place where they themselves can make some decisions about their community. These two dimensions are important to discuss today.
Another essential assumption that lies beneath our work is that we do not see place-based interventions as an alternative to public sector or government invention. They are not a replacement for important programs such as Employment Insurance, the new Working Income Tax Benefit or the Child Tax Benefit. They are an essential supplement and complement to public sector programs. Because a problem like poverty is so complex, you need as many levers and tools as possible.
Those are important assumptions to make because we often see new resources coming to the table, new players and new actors in place-based initiatives, and that is fantastic. At the same time, we do not want to give a message that it is all up to communities, that they can and are doing everything, because that would be very problematic.
How can we work together? How can we ensure that public policy and place-based interventions led by citizens and communities line up to address some very tough challenges?
I would like to talk about place-based interventions from three different perspectives: the economic perspective, the social well-being aspect and citizen engagement. I will then briefly touch on what this means for you in the federal government.
From an economic perspective, the emerging literature on the importance of place and cities and communities as drivers of the economy is very interesting. We are understanding national economies as the sum total of regional and city economies. What is interesting about the knowledge economy, in particular, is that its talent and skills are the major drivers. The literature and research are showing that in order to attract talent in a knowledge economy, you have to look at more than pay and associated benefits. You have to look at your quality of life in the community — affordable housing, clean environment, the presence of cultural amenities, parks and recreation. It is all part of the package.
This is a very important development in our thinking in the sense that we often think that if you get the economy right, everything else will fall into place. You will have enough money for social spending and everyone will have a job. We are now realizing that it is the social components that serve as a foundation for healthy economies. They are intrinsically linked. One leads to the other so that a healthy social environment is actually a driver of economic health as well and speaks very clearly to those investments.
The second has to do with social well-being. Our research and our practice is now showing how a neighbourhood or community affects physical and mental well-being. The way we design communities and the amenities that are available are now becoming understood as important mediating factors in the pathways into and out of poverty. If we can identify and intervene in trajectories in which poor families feel they cannot find a way out, we can make a difference for Canadians. It is in place where we make those interventions in the mediating factors.
There are three, in particular, that are very clear in the literature — affordable housing, investment in early childhood development, and recreational and cultural opportunities. All these represent investments in social infrastructure that we make in place that can make the difference between whether you will continue on a pathway out of poverty or you will remain in poverty.
This is not to underestimate the importance of an adequate living wage or benefits like a child benefit, for example, that are crucial and critical investments. We are talking about the ways in which we can pinpoint some of the levers and make a difference.
For example, I think this is very clear in regard to affordable housing. We all understand the need for affordable housing in addressing poverty-related issues. I want to point out to you today and it is important to flag that the federal-provincial-territorial agreements on affordable housing are due to expire at end of March 2009. That is a serious concern in communities and also for investment in the Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, which provides money for seniors, for example, to be able to modify their homes and stay at home. It is not only poverty but also an aging population with which we have concern.
Reams of literature and a burgeoning evidence base also support the importance of investment in early childhood development. You know that very well yourselves. That means investing in a range of supports: community and neighbourhood centres; parenting centres; child care; and home visiting and early visiting for parents. These all ensure that families and children are on the right track and get a good start in life.
Again, that is infrastructure support, not only offsetting the cost of services but also investing in communities. When you do that, you are also creating public spaces for people to come together and to do other things. We know that is important with the diverse and mixed population we have in many cities.
Third is citizen engagement. Paul Born will be addressing this and will talk about the work we have been doing in Vibrant Communities. As the chair mentioned, it is a major poverty reduction initiative under way in the country in which 15 cities are joined together to find local solutions to reduce poverty. At the heart is a learning community, where all the members learn from each other. Every single centre has a group of citizens at the table: people living in poverty, government representatives, business and the voluntary sector. They are all developing plans for how to address poverty.
Some are working on policy issues as well. The work is not only a question of setting up training programs or education. Some are making profound changes in community policy that is affecting thousands of people — for example, recreational subsidies and making sure people have access to "fair fares" in which transportation fares are reduced to allow people to get around. Joining together brings disparate components like training, education, transportation and child care to ensure the various parts work around people. As they say in the Niagara region, they "wrap around people."
We have a tremendous amount of activity in the country. Vibrant Communities is only one of many initiatives under way that are achieving amazing results. They need support in terms of an enabling environment, and that is where you can help.
These are not easy processes. They take support; they take patience; they take time; and they require changes within governments and other funders to make them happen.
What is a federal role? I think there are three major things.
First is an investment in social infrastructure where you invest in those mediators that make a difference in poverty: affordable housing, recreation and early childhood development.
Second is the financing of cities to ensure that they too can make those investments. That is area we may not want to discuss today, but it is important in this picture.
Third is creating an enabling environment that supports the incredible citizen engagement we are seeing across the country. It enables that activity to take place, permitting citizens to come together to find constructive and innovate solutions to reducing poverty.
Paul Born, President, Tamarack: It is great to be here today. My son was disappointed when he heard I was coming here. He is 11 years old. I told him when we were taking him to soccer yesterday. I said, "Michael, what should I tell the senators tomorrow?" He looked at me. He is a real Ottawa Senators fan. I said, "No, not those Senators." He thought for a moment and he said, "What do they want you to talk about?" I said, "It is about how we make better communities, places where people can live and have a good quality of life where there is less poverty and less crime and there is a sense of togetherness." He was quiet. He is quite a thoughtful young man, and he said: "Bring them to our street, dad."
I am pleased to be here with Ms. Maxwell and Ms. Torjman. They are two of my heroes and I have learned everything I know from them. Therefore, it is wonderful to be here.
I am a practitioner. I do the work on the ground and have all my life. I want to share with you three stories about how this work happens in communities and what some of the critical core elements are. One is at a neighbourhood level, one at a regional or city level, and one at a national level.
My wife and I were married and had children in a neighbourhood that became very close. We spent 11 years there. Often, we did not know if our children would be home for dinner or whose children we would have for dinner. It was a place where we cared for each other. When my wife was appointed to the University of Waterloo, we decided to move closer to work and moved to a neighbourhood that felt very much like the one our children grew up in. When we arrived there, we were not greeted.
After a month, I did what every good Mennonite farm boy would do and threw a wine and cheese party for all the neighbours. One neighbour had lived there 14 years, and another had lived there 12 years. One was in the house already, and when the other entered, she looked at him and introduced herself. They lived four houses apart.
As a community developer, I was thinking this would be the biggest challenge of my life to figure out how this neighbourhood, this street, was going to care for each other and enjoy being together. I wanted to create a place where my children felt that they belonged and felt safe.
It actually did not take that much work. We had more wine and cheese parties. We had barbecues. We had them over for swims. Five years later, our most recent gathering was right after Ramadan. We have a number of Muslim families on our street. At 11:30 p.m., I finally had to ask people to leave because I was tired and wanted to go to bed.
One of our neighbours is quite ill and we bring him food. We do not know him in any context. Some of us may not even like him, but we bring food. We get to know and we support that family.
A lot on our street is being redeveloped in a very difficult way. We have all bound together in the spirit of joy and fun. I do not think city council knows what will hit them when we all appear there next Tuesday in a wonderful spirit of joy and togetherness.
I can summarize this story in this way: New people moved into our neighbourhood, and after this Christmas gathering, there was a huge snowstorm outside. We were all blocked in. We all went outside and did not only clear each other's driveways, we cleared the street because we knew it would be several days before anyone would come.
This new neighbour went for a walk with her friends that evening and as they were walking they told her they were envious she lived in a neighbourhood where people know each other and, more importantly, where they care about each other enough to do things for each other. Remember, five years earlier, we were not greeted.
We assumed when we moved to that neighbourhood that there was a sense of place. We assumed that people would care for each other. From a policy perspective, it is very important when we enter into place-based work that those assumptions are not made, that we do not assume that our communities are still communities, that people are still connected, that they will work together in informal ways to advance the issues and to reduce poverty in our communities.
My second story is at the regional level. For many years I ran an organization called the Community Opportunities Development Association, CODA. It was an economic development organization that helped people go back to work. We were very good at what we did. Ten years into our work, the United Nations declared us to be one of the 40 best practices in the world. At this big community celebration where they flew in from Nairobi to give us this award, I was asked to come forward and accept the award. I did all the right things. I had been the executive director for a while, but then I said something that is still controversial.
I said I found it very interesting that we were being recognized. In many ways, we were worthy of the recognition. We had helped over 5,500 people get back to work. We had helped over 1,200 people on social assistance and unemployment start small businesses, of which 80 per cent had survived more than five years. We had created all kinds of housing and children's initiatives to support those living in poverty. On that level we were worthy.
The reality was that poverty had increased in our region by 5 per cent over the last decade. The reality was that working in a new way called Opportunities 2000, we had worked closely with private sector partners trying to understand their role, particularly as employers, in reducing poverty in our cities. They had told me that when you lose shareholder wealth, you were fired, not recognized. You can understand why that did not go over well.
What we came to understand is that even though CODA was a widely recognized organization — one of the largest community economic development organizations in the country doing this work of poverty reduction — we could not reduce poverty. Poverty continued because it was more of a systemic problem. It was a community problem. It was not only an individual problem.
We had no idea what we were doing when we started this process through Opportunities 2000. It was a millennium campaign to make the Waterloo region have the lowest level of poverty in Canada by the year 2000. In the Waterloo region, those kinds of dreams are embraced even though they may seem insane.
The reality was that we already had the second lowest level of poverty, and we wanted to be the lowest. We wanted to figure out how to do that. The only concept we had was to run a rally — like the United Way campaign — that lasted for four years. It would bring everyone in the community together, have everyone see how poverty was their issue and that they had something to do about it.
We brought a whole team of private sector leaders together. We wrote a booklet on best labour practices for reducing poverty. We got employers to become poverty-friendly employers. We looked at things like promotion from within, different labour practices and human resources policies they could incorporate.
We asked city governments if they had anyone living in poverty working for them and what kind of policies they would put in place. Ms. Torjman wrote a paper called "The Social Role of Local Government." We used it as a campaign strategy. We went to each of our seven municipalities and asked them to review the document to see how well they were doing. They would write reports in response and start to make those kinds of changes.
How do you know when you become the area with the lowest level of poverty in Canada? At the end of the day, the Waterloo region, in the next statistical period, became known as the only city in the country that had eliminated place-based poverty. There were no longer statistically relevant numbers of people living in pockets of poverty. We have 19 pockets of low income in our region, but they were no longer relevant statistically. Therefore, we were named the city that had eliminated place-based poverty.
My third story is on a national level. I am often asked whether what happened in the Waterloo region can happen elsewhere. Can you scale place-based solutions? In 2002, Alan Broadbent, who is also the co-founder of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, approached me and asked whether I would set up an institute to explore these questions. Could we bring about a process — or as he called it a technology — that would allow communities across the country to embrace this new way of working, that would embrace and look at the sense of place to harness the assets in that community? Could those particular assets be brought to bear on the unique challenges that every place has?
The challenges may seem the same. It may be poverty, but poverty is different in Hamilton than in Toronto. It is different in Whitehorse than in Vancouver. Yet, they are very close to each other. Often, when we do this type of work, we somehow assume we are talking about poverty. What we are really talking about are people who are poor and living in places. The solutions for those people often relate to the mix of circumstances in their environment. The solution to enabling or helping those people lies within the people in those communities and neighbourhoods, which we call the assets.
To that end, we founded Vibrant Communities. That was our signature work. We started out by identifying five very clear learning themes on which we wanted to work.
First, we wanted to explore the difference between poverty alleviation and poverty reduction. We wanted communities to envision the difference between reducing and alleviating poverty.
Second, we wanted communities to start thinking comprehensively. Poverty is not about giving someone a better home, a job, their health or even more money. It is about all of those factors and more. You cannot correct one part of the problem of poverty and expect the others to take care of themselves. That has been an important learning for us. Someone is poor and there are many factors to that. They all need to be addressed simultaneously.
Third was to consider the assets in a community and to think positively about this work. How do we bring to bear everything a community has going for it? In Canada, most of our cities are not poor, but maybe 20 per cent of our populations are. That means we have 80 per cent of the population that we can bring to bear on the problem. The question is how we mobilize that.
That brought us to the fourth item, multi-sector interventions. All sectors must be working at this. All sectors must be mobilizing and working in collaboration around this issue.
Fifth is learning and change. We would have to learn together. Through learning we would come to the specific understanding of poverty and how to reduce it in our place.
I could go on about this work. I will share more about the results to date and specific stories of how communities have done this work, how they are organized and how organizing to do this work is becoming a way of working, not only something that happens. I have brought some literature that you may want to hand out. It shows how we have begun to systematize this approach.
Every year we bring together 100 people who are working this way from cities right across the country. We invite them to come and spend five days together to work at the technique of place-based interventions, most often to do with poverty. I truly believe that this can be scaled and is already happening in communities, and our role at the federal level is to help it to happen more often. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you very much for three very interesting presentations. I normally start off with a question, but I note that Senator Trenholme Counsell has to go to another meeting, so she will ask her question first. She has a substantial interest in child care and early learning. She is also from New Brunswick.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate that. I am co-chair of the Library of Parliament Committee, which has an important meeting shortly.
Those were marvellous and inspiring presentations. I thank you for speaking about early childhood development, Ms. Torjman, but I will not ask that question.
We are talking this morning about place-based intervention, and two central thoughts came to my mind. One was the role of schools, particularly elementary schools, and the other was that of community health centres. I am from a little village of 275 people, but I now live in the town of Sackville, which has all of 6,000. I lived in Toronto for 19 years, and it is totally different. It is hard to make comparisons in this land. You told a lovely story about your street. Not all streets are that fortunate. It seems that families do connect in many ways. I often hear about new Canadians and how they connect. I ask taxi drivers how they connect and get to feel at home, and they have lovely stories about their communities.
I would like to hear your reactions to the concept espoused by my good friend Dr. Fraser Mustard, among others, about the school becoming a centre for so many programs around children and families because it is a common place where most families go. I am a physician as well, and I have often spoken as a family doctor about the need across the land for community health centres involving nurse practitioners and others as well as family doctors. In this Canada of ours, I see developing these two concepts in the broadest possible way, but not putting more work onto teachers, because they are terribly overworked. I wonder if you could expand on these ideas.
Ms. Torjman: Thank you very much for raising that issue. It is a crucial component of social infrastructure in communities. In chapter 5, I write extensively about the concept of school as hub and using the school as a base to bring communities together. Often we find that young children who are not doing well in school do much better when they have parents involved, when the schools see themselves as reaching out to parents and bringing them in as well in terms of literacy programs and supporting what the school is trying to achieve. It is through the notion of school as hub that you can help make this happen. We see this in a number of communities across the country. There are at least 40 or 50 parenting and learning centres in Ontario that are affiliated with schools. It is a notion that is taking root in many parts of Canada and seeing positive results.
Another dimension to the school as hub notion is allowing communities to use the schools on weekends or after school or in the evenings to provide a place for young people to go. We have to understand the importance of recreation in this whole picture, even related to poverty. I know it seems that there might be a link that is not immediately obvious, but many studies are showing the importance of having good recreational and community programming to ensure self-esteem, to provide leadership opportunities and to give a good break to parents. In one study out of McMaster University, there was a clear link between recreation and people moving off social assistance. You would not immediately imagine that that would be the case. That was a study by Dr. Gina Brown, and it had very powerful results.
The role of the school is to provide that space that often communities do not have or the groups cannot afford. In some areas, we found that schools are charging community groups excessive amounts because they have insurance and costs related to cleanup and administration. In Ontario, in particular, $40 million a year is given to schools to help offset the use of schools for recreational and after-school purposes. I know other provinces are looking at this as well.
Other centres can play that role as well. In some Aboriginal communities, the community centres, the friendship centres and the parenting centres play a very important role in providing those community supports. Again, that is our notion of social infrastructure and ensuring that there are places where you can make the important interventions in these mediating factors.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: Do you have any comments about community health centres?
Ms. Torjman: The community health centres play an equally important role but obviously focus more on health per se. It is interesting that community health centres look not just at physical health but are also concerned about mental health, emotional health and social well-being, and many of them see their roles more broadly, too. A number of them are involved in poverty reduction initiatives and place-based interventions, seeing that they have a role to contribute in education. Many of them are actively involved in parenting supports and early childhood interventions where they play the key role in communities in providing that assistance to parents. In many places, they are the core for that kind of early childhood development and intervention.
Mr. Born: It is an important issue. Several years ago, I was asked to go to England and speak to the community schools movement there. I found that there was a very well-financed, national institute that was building capacities of schools to become community schools.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: That is a term that I failed to use.
Mr. Born: There is a large movement in the U.S. In Canada, we are trying, but it often relies so much on the individual principal to overcome great barriers. My personal belief, which is somewhat controversial but I have spoken about this broadly, is that schools should become municipal properties, owned by the municipalities and rented back to the school between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. All the lands that are developed within it should be a community centre that opens at 6 a.m. and closes at 10 p.m. and is open on weekends and all through the summer. I truly believe that the most high-impact investment we could make in this country would be to give our schools the opportunity to have a huge impact, particularly our elementary schools, because they are so critical to neighbourhoods. That is my take on that.
Ms. Maxwell: I think what Mr. Born and Ms. Torjman have talked about is important in terms of creating the spaces where families of widely varying backgrounds and income levels can come together and children can mix. That is very important. It is important for their sense of belonging as citizens and also for their well-being because of access to services.
I do see governance as being a critical barrier to moving in this direction. As Mr. Born was speaking about this transformative idea of making local government the owner, I was thinking about the ideas that have been put forward in the public domain about not only expanding child care spaces and kindergartens but also having early childhood educators working in those kindergartens. There has been a backlash by the teacher's union, who do not feel that people who do not have their kind of training should have that responsibility. Such reactions within institutions prevent the kind of innovation that needs to take place in order to arrive at effective place-based policies.
We understand turf wars; they happen not only in unionized environments but also all over the place. The real challenge is to get that community to be so mobilized about being the best they can be for their children that the question of who owns what and what kind of job can be mixed with what other job would not surface.
The Chair: I think Ontario was trying to come to grips with the whole matter of early childhood educators being in the same facilities. We will hear the results soon in Ontario.
Senator Trenholme Counsell: On the debate between early childhood education and kindergarten teachers, I think we will come to a seamless continuum. We see that in New Zealand, and I think it will happen here.
I want to tell a story that I think represents the problem that we have been highlighting about schools. I am not sure whether it is pan-Canadian. It might be, but I do not have the authority to say that.
School libraries are absolutely wonderful, generally, especially the elementary school libraries. They have many books for different age groups and many of them have community support, such the IODE, helping to supply books. However, if you go to your local library in a town, there are far fewer books. They are doing their best, but resources are limited for our community libraries, and they do not have nearly as many books as the schools have in their libraries.
In the many schools that I know, parents cannot borrow books from the local school's library. There are exceptions where they have managed to make this happen, for example, in Moncton; maybe there are more. This is a good example of unnecessary duplication — not that we do not want children's books in our libraries, but in smaller communities this coming together would be very beneficial. I wanted to mention that. Do you know more about that subject?
Ms. Torjman: Partly you are talking also about municipal financing, which is a related issue. There are some interesting models that communities are using around reading with children and coming together around literacy. For example, there was a school in Oshawa that was not doing very well. When the principal was first assigned to go there, she said that this was the school from hell and she wondered why her. However, she literally turned it around to be one of the top performing schools in the province.
One of the innovations she introduced was to bring the whole community around that school together to read. There were police officers and fire fighters and people from small businesses coming into that school to read with the children. They also had reading circles in all parts of the community so that reading became something that everyone did together and it was seen as a community approach that you should be doing. It should not be that this organization owns these books and no one else can use them. It should be a question of how you share those resources, how you bring the people together around those resources. Often it is a question of ensuring that parents are able to read with children. Sometimes there is a barrier there. Having everyone reading together was a wonderful community activity. That is fundamental, both for poverty reduction and in knowing that levels of literacy are one of the levers that we look to change for pathways out of poverty.
The Chair: I will move from one doctor to another. Senator Keon is from Ontario. He has a subcommittee just like this one on population health. We both chair subcommittees of the main committee and we have our hands in a number of related areas. Much of what we discuss here at the Subcommittee on Cities is relevant to the work that Senator Keon is doing. I am sure he will want to explore this subject from that perspective as well.
Senator Keon: Listening to all of you is fascinating. As Senator Eggleton and I have agreed right from the very beginning, there is so much common ground here that we must avoid using the same witnesses twice. They can come before one or the other committee, and there is crossover of the information to the other study. Both studies need each other to be successful.
I want to bring you back to the community. We have released our four preliminary reports and we are down to the issues and options document, which tries to focus on what kind of organization we will recommend to the federal government and, in particular, the design of community that can embrace the 12 or more factors that affect health, one of which is the health care delivery system. That preoccupies everyone, but it is only one factor. I am on the record as saying that the health care delivery system in Canada has become a major risk to our nation's health because it is depleting society of funds that are necessary for the other 11 or more determinants of health. Education, of course, is one of them.
It is fascinating to listen to you talking about place-based intervention. Although I spent most of my life, as you may know, in a high-powered specialty institute, I have realized for a long time that if we are to affect the health of our nation, it will be done at the community level. It is a question of how we can organize communities. From what I see, communities thus far have occurred by serendipity. Mr. Born told us a great success story, but there are not many other communities that have the great privilege of having someone like Mr. Born.
When you are trying to design communities, where do you go? I am sorry for making the question long, but I want your help. The old saying is that it takes a village to raise a child. Well, we have run out of villages, but there is no reason that we cannot have villages or communities within cities.
In my previous career, I found it useful to use postal codes to look at population health as it relates to cardiovascular disease in Ontario. We knew where the bad pockets of disease were from the postal codes. In the large geographic area served by the Ottawa Heart Institute, of which I was the head, we could focus on those communities because we had that information. The information continues to be there in Statistics Canada. It is useful information, but let me try to tease all three of you into this situation.
How can we be helpful to all levels of government, to society in general, to non-governmental organizations, and to business, in particular, with whom we met last night? How can we be helpful in trying to design communities or give them a model that they can work with — because every community will be different — that can embrace the dozen or so determinants of health and get them round the table, get them working the way Mr. Born is working? How can we go about that? Have we any ideas?
Mr. Born: That is a very important question. It was really the question that Alan Broadbent posed to me when we started this institute. One wants to approach that traditionally. Is it a policy issue? Is it an infrastructure issue? We decided in the end that it was a people issue. We came to understand that every place wants to address the issues, the 11 or 12 determinants, differently. That is what is unique. Some of them do not want to approach all of them. They might want to do some of them now and others later. However, there is an energy that we find everywhere we go. That energy is often articulated by a few people who feel it, see it, have wisdom or energy around it, or feel called to it. They begin to construct a vision together.
That vision is unique to every place. Around poverty in Hamilton it might be about children. In Saint John, New Brunswick, they just want to be average. They have 28 per cent; they want to be at 14 per cent. In Victoria, it is the quality-of-life challenge because they are so arrogant thinking they already have the best quality of life, but when it is pointed out that not everyone does, they take up the battle cry and try to do something about it.
My first notion is that vision has a way of shaping itself, but it only shapes itself at that next level when a broad-based engagement process occurs. In a community it takes a long time. I have a book coming out in June called Community Conversations, and it is about this. It is about the length of time and how to host great community conversations. We are finding it takes 12 to 18 months of well-planned, well-thought-through community conversations like this that engage people from all sectors. Not only does conversation engage them, but it is somehow a way of spreading that vision. At some point, people go from that engagement strategy to coming up with a community plan. The community has to come up with their own plan, and often it is when people get frustrated, thinking that they have talked too long and they want to do something, and they do not recognize they have already done so much. Hamilton had reduced poverty for almost 15,000 people before they launched, just through the engagement process. That conversation changes things.
The next stage is an implementation phase. So many of these are dynamic and they keep going.
There are many approaches now for how people organize around issues that matter to them. My feeling is that on a federal level it is important for us to be broad in terms of what we desire. If we desire for people to work on determinants of health, that is probably narrow enough. Then give them the instruments with which they can implement the work and the passion at their local level around that issue, and recognize that it will not look the same everywhere. It will not feel the same everywhere. It will not be named the same thing everywhere, but the one thing in common is that they are all working at the determinants of health and working at them their way. The results they achieve are unique to the mix of assets and the unique way that the problem lives out in their community.
Coming up with a program that has fairly narrow boundaries does not enable this type of place-based response. Maybe that answer was too long.
Ms. Torjman: Thank you for that very thoughtful and challenging question. I am glad you raised it, because it is so important to this conversation. There are a number of responses. The first would be for someone like you, in particular, to talk about the results that you are finding, the research, the literature and the links that you are seeing. For example, you were talking about the links between cardiovascular health and certain neighbourhoods. There are some clear relationships there that we know from research, but most Canadians do not use the terminology of social determinants of health. We know it when we break it down. We know it when we talk about good work conditions, stress, early childhood development and poverty, but that concept needs to be discussed publicly. It takes people like you who have credibility and who can speak to this to get that idea out there.
At the level of communities, it is important that we begin to translate that notion into practice and allow for communities, as Paul Born was saying, to choose where they will start in this process. Even though all the factors are linked together — the 12 determinants are clearly linked — it is often difficult to work on all of them together at the community level.
If you help people get a broader understanding of the links but say now we are working here, we are starting here because this is what we can do and then we will try to work on some of the other related areas, that is a very important insight for communities. Show where the links are but say that we are here in the process.
Sometimes funding does not easily allow that. Caledon and Tamarack worked on a national project called Action for Neighbourhood Change, which was funded by the federal government. Five branches of government came together to support this work. We were told it was a miracle that the five branches were able to pool their money into two contribution agreements.
This project was neighbourhood renewal. It allowed the community to come together around a broad range of issues and work on any of the determinants of health that they identified as important.
The challenge we found was that because the funds were linked to certain areas like literacy, drug abuse and housing, the people funding those would say, "Where is the housing? We want to count the houses." Those in literacy would say, "Show us the literacy scores." In some neighbourhoods they started out with garbage because it was important to them to create a clean neighbourhood before they started. Their priority was public health. In other neighbourhoods it was safety, making sure they had lights on the streets. Again, it was an incredibly profound intervention to start where the community was at and build into these other areas, but from the financing of it they were pushed into certain boxes. If we could help break down some of those boxes and show the links, community-based and integrated approaches would be supported.
A final thing is to provide some support for learning across the country. There is a lot going on in many parts of the country. There is a tremendous amount of fantastic work. The problem is that because we are such a big country and we are so diverse, we do not have the infrastructure to do enough of that sharing. Tamarack plays that role to a great extent, and a terrific role. The problem is the ability to learn about what is happening in Sackville, New Brunswick, for example, and to ask whether there are areas that we can apply to our own community. We do not have to reinvent the wheel all the time. Unfortunately, that is what we do. We spend a lot of time reinventing rather than applying innovation. Therefore, public awareness of the important concepts, more open funding arrangements and support for applied learning would help to move this agenda forward somewhat.
Ms. Maxwell: I would like to add a couple of comments because most of what I know about this I have learned from Ms. Torjman.
The first part is that the different kinds of funding arrangements that are necessary from the federal level are an important piece. The other part is having more delegated authority so that federal departments have program officers who are in and out of those neighbourhoods on a regular basis, have built trust relationships with the leadership, can observe where the needs are, can see how well-founded the activities are and do ongoing, informal evaluations in addition to the formal ones.
Having an interlocutor who can speak for the federal government, within the appropriate range of delegated authority, of course, would make a huge difference in building bridges to what the provinces are doing and what the local government is doing, so that you end up with a package that is far greater than any single government or any other actor could put together on its own. If things like housing, health clinics, social service delivery and the creation of community hubs, which we talked about earlier, are supported by the local police, the local government, the United Way and the business community, they will flourish. However, if they are seen as the federal initiative for citizenship and immigration here, and then over here you have human resources and over there you have the crime prevention envelope, and if they operate individually, it just dissipates. You will not begin to see the kind of progress that you want to see. To address whatever aspects of the 12 determinants of health a community wishes to address, you need a whole different mental map of what policy is, what programs are and how they are organized.
Ms. Torjman: The federal role is not just money. Money is crucial, and direct investments in infrastructure are crucial, but the federal role is also expertise. There is so much expertise that could be of help to communities, and I am thinking, for example, of Saint John, where Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is helping the community design affordable housing and figure out what it needs because the community has very high rates of poverty in certain neighbourhoods. They have an old housing stock, which in some cases they do not want to destroy because it has historical and cultural value. They needed the technical expertise to figure out how to redesign that housing stock in a way that would be both respectful of the heritage and economically and structurally sound. CMHC seconded someone to work with that community to help them develop the options. It is a terrific example of how the expertise housed at the federal level was able to set a whole initiative under way and get some very successful social housing being developed there.
Senator Keon: It is not necessary anymore to isolate one of the 12 determinants of health, although poverty is a big one, but the disparities are so bad. We have people being born of poor mothers in Canada now who have a life expectancy of about 50 years. People born of healthy mothers have a life expectancy of close to 90 years. The disparities are so bad that we do not have to break the data down.
I do not know how to sell this idea of developing communities and a setting for place-based interventions, whether we use postal codes or whether we ask all the mayors to break their cities down into communities. Again, Mr. Born, your point is well taken. The last thing you want is some bureaucrat coming in to organize a community. The people in the community are who you need to get it going.
Do you have any ideas about how we could propose something to our country that would be helpful? I have good ideas, I think, for the Aboriginal community, and I will do a special piece on that. For the rest of the country, do you have any ideas?
Ms. Torjman: To go back to your example of children and single parents, that is where a range of measures and interventions is essential, not just one approach. This is where we talked about having an adequate child benefit to be able to address the poverty issue from an income perspective. We know that is not sufficient.
Again, it is in communities where you can provide support for many of these single parents, most of whom are mothers, who are on their own very often or who do not complete high school because they have to go out to work. Again, using Saint John as an example, one of the initiatives that they chose to follow was to help young single parents complete high school and break the cycle of poverty. Only in communities can you do that. You cannot do that with a federal instrument. You can support their initiative, but it is in the community where you can get out to those young women, identify them, ensure that they have the appropriate child care. Often it is difficult for high school students to have a schedule that will suit their needs, for example, so the whole intervention is designed around the needs of those young women because they want to break that cycle of poverty. They want to ensure that they complete their high school education. Then they want to ensure that they can go on to other forms of education and training. Again, it is only there in the community that you are able to provide those supports and assistance.
You have a significant federal measure that must be bolstered and continued, and then you have the other kinds of assistance that make it happen and make it real in people's lives. That is one example of why I think the two are important. It is where the change and the interventions to make a difference take place.
Mr. Born: It is a wonderful thought. You speak so much from the heart on this one. It is important to you.
I had the wonderful privilege of spending three days with Senator Kirby around the mental health issue. Seven of us were invited to come and help his team think about how we go from thinking like an organization to thinking like a movement. How do we get a widespread change? As one person said, "What is the wheelchair ramp for mental health?" It is a wonderful thought that we can get that kind of a revolution in the country around mental health. It sounds like you need one of those sessions. It was marvellous.
Brandon, Manitoba, has an early intervention for mental health that is showing marvellous results. We latched onto that for a while and said, "How do we get more Brandons out there?" That was the challenge. There is a network, a new organization called Social Innovation Generation, that has seven hubs already in Canada, focusing on the notion of taking ideas to scale and looking for wide-ranging change.
There is a book you might find moving to read, called Getting to Maybe: How the World Is Changed, by Frances Westley, Brenda Zimmerman and Michael Patton. If you are interested in one of those sessions, let us chat about that. It is an interesting approach, asking, "How do we get movement for change in a country?"
The Chair: I have a question that follows up on what Senator Keon was talking about, that is, the possibility of urban development agreements as a delivery mechanism for dealing with place-based approaches for poverty. I know of two of them, one in Winnipeg and another in Vancouver. It strikes me that if an urban development agreement is handled correctly, it is a good opportunity to bring together all the stakeholders. You start with the people of the community and what their needs are. I like grassroots, bottom-up approaches. Then you bring in the federal, provincial and municipal orders of government in the various areas in which they function. You design an agreement that sets out the goals and what each party will deliver in order to reach those goals. You have a system of accountability and evaluation and all of that.
I do not know how many such agreements you could do. There could be an awful lot of them, particularly at the federal or provincial levels of government. We do have a couple of examples, and I have seen those agreements. They might not be perfect, but are such agreements a possible approach to bridge-building and better coordination of all stakeholders? What do you think of urban development agreements?
Ms. Torjman: They are a terrific example of an instrument that supports the kind of place-based approach we are talking about. Discussions were under way in Victoria as well, where they were going to try to use urban development agreements as a basis for furthering their own comprehensive plan.
Communities are looking at that model as a way of organizing. It is an excellent way of getting some federal financing to support comprehensive planning without stipulating that it must go to housing or to literacy or to drug abuse. It is a way of supporting a decision-making process and a problem-solving capacity in communities to allow them to figure out how to develop their comprehensive plan and how to prioritize.
With respect to urban development agreements, as we have always said, it is crucial to involve the people who are the targets of the intervention, whether they are people living in poverty, Aboriginal Canadians or others. Although it is not difficult, it should be noted that it is important to ensure that the agreement is not just a government process, that it is a broader process and that citizens are involved as well. Other than that, it provides a terrific mechanism for a generic problem-solving capacity.
Ms. Maxwell: Urban development agreements make a lot of sense in bigger cities. The other kind of delivery mechanism, which is a complement for smaller communities or communities only beginning to focus on poverty reduction, is a single-window office in the federal government where the expertise in place-based policy could be clustered and work as a service to any ministry that could be brought into a particular initiative, be it CMHC or the departments of citizenship and immigration, human resources, public safety or justice.
The reason for the single window is that it is very difficult for each of those departments to have a depth of understanding of place-based issues. They will all be much more effective in delivering their programs if they can begin to work with community. They will learn from that and will also be able to contribute when a community is getting started.
"Single window" is nice jargon in public administration. I do not know much about how to make one work, but it is part of the notion of getting to citizen-centred government. Service Canada has been demonstrating ways to get departments to deliver through a common office, but the services provided are more instrumental or mechanical as opposed to change-making, place-based policy. It is a different kind of expertise. I do not know whether a place-based policy and interventions window should be in Service Canada.
I would not want to have only one delivery mechanism. The urban development agreements have a particular place, but they are very big, very difficult to negotiate and very slow moving, simply because there are so many actors. There may be many other seeds to plant across the country in the meantime, and you could do that through more of a single-window approach.
Mr. Born: I spent four days last month with the Association of Yukon Communities, which is comprised of the mayors, chief administrative officers and councillors from the different communities. We heard from various community leaders who talked about the four levels of government in the Yukon. There is a unique level of government there for the Aboriginal peoples. Someone said, "Yes, but how many departments?" That was a very telling statement, because when they want to get something done, they do not work with four levels of government: they work with 40 departments.
The big question for them is why the departments never talk to each other. Perhaps that is the single-window approach. They want it to be easy. We know there are multiple levels of government and different jurisdictions; nothing is that narrow anymore. Things run across so many departments. When we want community-based responses, we cannot ask for simple, single-tier or single-department instruments. Communities are complex, adaptive systems. Building communities is much like raising children. They have a life of their own, and they adapt and change. Success raising one child is no guarantee of success raising another child. They are all different.
When we show up, it is so confusing. Little communities of 850 people were submitting 400 or 500 reports a year. It is bizarre. How do you even navigate that system?
That is very important. There are some instruments. The urban agreements are a very good start. We can go to the next level. We also have the Urban Aboriginal Strategy, which is working in similar ways. We have smaller instruments in crime prevention. Different bureaucracies are working together. Action for Neighbourhood Change was another attempt at that.
These are important elements of working, but it is that kind of thinking that will take us to the next level. We have very crude instruments right now, and we need much better ones.
I am hoping that this group will be able to think through how we can come up with the next level of instruments — or even the next level of government. How do we change? It is an evolution, not just a new set of programs and priorities. It is a different way of thinking and working.
The Chair: Thank you for your answers. We would like to see some reform of government. Certainly more horizontal links would be helpful. However, reforming government before we work on poverty reduction would be an awfully long way to deal with the issues.
Ms. Torjman: I would like to reinforce the point you are making about providing some support for that decision-making process in communities. Across-the-board support is missing right now. The question you have asked is essential to bear in mind, and it would certainly address a major gap in place-based interventions. Thank you for pointing that out.
Senator Cordy: Last week we had a witness before us from the National Anti-Poverty Organization. He said something that has stayed with me. He said poverty steals from the soul. If we can look at community-based approaches and community-based solutions and get people actively involved, we give them back their soul, we give them their heart and dignity. The comments I have heard from you today are certainly the way we should go; we should not just have top-down solutions.
I was really struck by the comments about using the schools. This goes back almost to the olden days when the school was the focal point of the whole community. We have moved away from that. I was an elementary school teacher, and I used to see that particularly with parents who did not have a university education or a high school education. School was for them an intimidating place, so they did not always feel as comfortable as a middle-class parent would feel to come in and discussion situations with a teacher or with a principal.
Schools as hubs would provide more than just the use of the buildings: it would say that school is a good place to be, and parents would become involved in their children's education and in the community that uses the school. In fact, we see our schools sitting idle from five o'clock in the evening and on weekends, particularly schools like some in Nova Scotia that are built by private concerns, because it is a challenge to open them on the weekends or in the evenings. It is even challenging to have sales in the school to raise money, because the private partnership owns the cafeteria. However, that is a whole other issue.
My concern follows those of the previous two questioners. This is all very much at the local level. Government tends to be very rigid. We have sets of rules, and no one can break away from the rules. You spoke about the situation in Saint John, New Brunswick, where someone from within CMHC did not follow the rigidity of what CMHC is supposed to do but in fact got involved in working with the communities.
We talked about urban development agreements, and we talked this morning about Service Canada. You mentioned that you need support for getting groups together. What else can we do from the federal perspective? We cannot make recommendations to the municipalities. We can, but I am not sure they would listen. However, we can make recommendations federally. I truly believe community-based solutions are the way to go, but communities are far removed sometimes from the federal government.
Ms. Maxwell: The idea that comes to mind when you articulate that concern is that there are organizations like the United Way and community foundations that are rooted in community. They can see what is going on in the community and they can see where the needs are. It is feasible for the federal government to work out arrangements with cross-Canada movements like the United Way or community foundations, which can be facilitators for identifying circumstances where some kind of seed money would enable dialogue to be initiated and would allow people to begin to think through what their common goals are, which is the first step to community mobilization; as well, it would give them the time to bring in interlocutors from across the community and from neighbourhoods in greater difficulty.
Using those bridge-building organizations, it would be possible for the federal government to adopt a very enabling approach to place-based policies. The government would not have to go through a big bureaucratic exercise and applications and so on but could allow the United Way or the community foundation movement to create the mechanism and then delegate the authority to decide how the funds should be allocated. Obviously, the United Way or the community foundation would have to report on the allocation of funds and everything, but they are in a much better position to do that kind of reporting and to evaluate results than are the emerging organizations that will be the agents of change in the community.
Ms. Torjman: As we were saying, there is a lot of interest and activity under way throughout the country. Much of it operates on a shoestring budget because people are trying to find resources for decision making and problem-solving capacity. We do not have programs that are funding bodies that support that per se. It is a new kind of development.
Providing support for that capacity would be very helpful, but we have already established, for example, a Vibrant Communities initiative in which 15 cities across the country are joined together and have done a lot of work developing extensive and exhaustive accountability mechanisms and reporting and learning components. Many more cities want to join on, and there is a limited capacity to that kind of support from the voluntary perspective.
It may be possible to look for some of those really good examples and then provide additional support to allow the communities that wish to do so to come on board. Mr. Born could probably speak to this, but I know that there was a potential for expanding Vibrant Communities to have one such effort in every census metropolitan area, CMA, across the country. That is one thing, to build on existing approaches and to explore some of the new approaches to which Judith Maxwell referred.
The other is to provide technical support and assistance for learning. This means taking a look at some of the interesting results taking place across the country and then having someone take that work to other communities and help them with those approaches. We are developing some fantastic innovations, and we cannot scale them up so that other communities can benefit.
I will give you one example. In Edmonton, they found that people were not filling in tax forms and getting access to many of the tax-delivered benefits to which they were entitled. For low-income households, that sometimes meant hundreds or thousands of dollars because of the Canada Child Tax Benefit and other federal and provincial tax benefits delivered through the tax system. Because they did not have a taxable income, they did not think they would need to fill in a tax form. That group got together with Canada Revenue Agency and developed a methodology for ensuring that every low-income household in that community filled in a tax form so that they would gain access to those tax-delivered benefits, both federal and provincial.
There is a wonderful example that we could easily take across the country if we had the resources for a position — I call it technical assistance — someone to help scale up that innovation.
There are many other examples in the Waterloo region working with seniors and new Canadians in particular who did not know they had to fill in a form to gain access to the Guaranteed Income Supplement and did not think they would be eligible for that. The Waterloo group developed an approach with the federal government to help work on that. We have literally hundreds of wonderful examples of interventions making a terrific difference in people's lives, yet we have very little ability to scale up so that others can benefit as well.
Mr. Born: It is an interesting question. Both of these responses are really important. I want to take it down to a very simple level and look at it through the lens of poverty.
The federal government does not recognize place-based poverty reduction. Employees are not rewarded or enabled to do anything about it. I am not saying we should dismantle the way the system is currently organized; I am saying let us recognize very strongly that place is important and that poverty is different all across the country in every community. We have to recognize that. Place is important. Number one is clear recognition that this is important, that there is something here.
Both in your own government, with all your employees, and in the communities, there will be a release with that. That is the starting point, I think. Your committee can make a difference there.
Second, we have to think through how we unleash the Government of Canada's greatest asset, which is its people, its employees. How do we unleash them again? When I was a naive young person coming out of seminary and realizing that that was not my life, I was embraced by a couple of people from the employment development branch. These people were deeply rooted in their community, and somehow they could magically, with pockets of money that were situated for something while always staying within the rules, make things happen for communities. Their role was to mediate government policy with community needs. We have lost most of those people, and of the few employment development folks still hanging around and fighting, many are my friends, and they have a hard life.
How do we get more of that back into our bureaucracy? We have one of the best bureaucracies in the world. Wherever I go, I come back mesmerized by the kind of talent and commitment we have in our communities. How do we release the people? How do we give them the instruments to do what they need to do? How do we build capacity at that level? We now have a small group that Ms. Torjman and I have been helping. The "federal family" is what they call themselves. It is a very small department in Human Resources and Social Development Canada, HRSDC, that tries to bring all the departments together here in Ottawa to have monthly learning sessions around horizontality, around different ways that place-based and community work can happen. I would love to introduce your community to them, because they are living out what you are talking about and are involved in these larger conversations.
In terms of poverty reduction, I would ask to partner with what is already happening. This is not something you will make happen. It is already happening. We have so much demand for communities that want to become part of Vibrant Communities. We are not a movement; that is not our role. We want to learn and to help them learn; and as they learn, they start to do it; and they are doing it all over in communities across this country.
The best way to partner is to unleash your greatest asset, your people, and get them involved as volunteers in these initiatives. Get them in there. Move your policy analysts from Ottawa to the communities and then bring them to Ottawa to make policy.
That is my three-point plan.
Senator Cordy: I love it, and I agree that we have a talented and well-educated public service. I love the phrase "unleash our employees." I serve on a committee dealing with aging. We have travelled in the Atlantic region and were in Ontario last week talking about meeting the needs of seniors in Canada. I think unleashing our employees would go a long way in meeting those needs.
Ms. Maxwell, you talked about holes created in our safety net and you specifically mentioned Employment Insurance. I heard from seniors that, regarding the Canada Pension Plan and GIC, people are not necessarily aware of what they are entitled to. You mentioned one region where people got together, and we heard last week about the Niagara region where a volunteer seniors group is talking to individual seniors. The number of seniors not receiving CPP astounds me because you would think that everyone who has worked would know they are eligible. We heard of a gentleman whose wife died when the children were young, and he did not realize he was entitled to CPP because she had died, nor did he realize the children were entitled. They discovered it when the children were adults. The federal government has an 11-month retroactivity period, so he received an 11-month retroactive payment. In Quebec we find the take-up of CPP is almost 100 per cent, and Quebec has a five-year retroactivity clause, which makes it worthwhile for the government to ensure that people are getting it in order to eliminate five-year lump sum retroactivity payments.
CPP and EI are federal jurisdictions only. What do we do about the holes that are created? The best thing, I think, is what they are doing in Niagara with seniors talking to seniors. Is that the only way we can do it? We get into the whole literacy issue. People are not getting their checks in the mail anymore, but if you send written information, there are many people who cannot read it. What do we do about the holes?
Ms. Maxwell: I would like to talk about Employment Insurance, which is a different kind of problem. The rules have been written so that people are not eligible.
Senator Cordy: You are right.
Ms. Maxwell: The rules have been written in such a way that urban dwellers, who work a good part of the year, do not have enough working time added up to give them eligibility, perhaps because they are self-employed or moving around from job to job and have quite intermittent employment.
It is much harder to qualify in an urban area than in a more rural area because of the way the rules are written. Yet, we know that a very high proportion of poverty, and the deep poverty, is concentrated in the urban areas. We also know that a lot of poor people are working people. The rules were written in this way because the government was trying to save money; and they succeeded.
However, it means that there are women having babies but they are not eligible for parental leave because they do not have enough hours to qualify. It means that we have not used our imagination to come up with an appropriate employment protection for people who are self-employed. We need to rethink Employment Insurance from the bottom up, it seems to me, in order to ensure that this basic social protection is actually available to the people who need it most.
Ms. Torjman: Clearly governments have a role to make Canadians aware of the benefits to which they are entitled. It is difficult when you have a diverse population, when you have people speaking languages other than English and French, with materials produced in only two languages, and when you have high rates of illiteracy.
This is where community and place-based interventions come into play. It is in communities where people can go out and identify those individuals or Canadians who are not getting access to the benefits to which they are entitled and can help them in interpreting and using part of the initiatives already under way.
For example, if you are helping seniors gain access to the Guaranteed Income Supplement, it is only a little bit of a stretch to put in some additional kinds of information and assistance related to the Canada Pension Plan or to filling in a tax form. We are beginning to develop methodology in communities and can build on this. It would be helpful to have some support for that kind of work, as I mentioned, because you need interpreters and to work with people individually.
Often it is not just a question of getting the information. There are many people who are afraid to actually fill in these forms. They worry about the implications. You are now in a system, and what other information will you have to provide or what will they know about you? Work is required, and it is in place where you can make that happen.
Mr. Born: If we had better and more caring communities we would need less of these programs. Let us invest in the communities if we really want to save money.
Senator Cordy: No matter where we were last week and early this week, we heard about the federal-provincial housing agreements that are set to expire, specifically related to seniors but also to others. Are you hearing this? This is of great concern to the seniors we spoke to.
Ms. Torjman: We are hearing this not only from seniors but also from communities across the country that are very worried about the funds for social housing. That is one area where you need investment and good financing. Part of it is design and expertise, but here is where you do need money at the table. Whether you are designing or building new supply or doing rent supplementation or whatever intervention you are providing, it is a question of ensuring enough support.
We have heard this in our initiatives across the country, and it is a real concern. We wanted to flag it here, and I am glad you heard about it from others in the country.
Senator Cordy: They spoke about the fact that they have not even sat down together to work out what would be in the new agreement. The provinces and the federal government have not sat down at the table together, and so they are getting nervous that we are approaching expiry.
Ms. Torjman: That is a real concern.
The Chair: That is a good point, because it takes time to develop these programs. This one is almost up at the end of the fiscal year.
I have a follow-up question to what I asked earlier about urban development agreements, and I will direct this to Mr. Born.
How does the Vibrant Communities model differ in approach from the urban development agreements we talked about? If we implemented urban development agreements, what are some of the dos and don'ts arising from Vibrant Communities that would be instructive?
The question for all three of you is what is happening in other places, other countries, with place-based approaches? Are there any particularly good, relevant models that we can learn from?
Mr. Born: We have learned a number of things about how this might work nationally and what kind of infrastructure would be required.
When we started the work of Vibrant Communities, we had three national or pan-Canadian partners. The Caledon Institute of Social Policy was continually reviewing and thinking about policies at the local level, the provincial level and the federal level. They were engaged in learning with communities about what needed to change. It was very interesting. In a sense they were continually animating back and helping communities figure out how government needs to act differently at all levels. As a matter of fact, one of the great successes of Vibrant Communities is our ability to work with governments in changing policy, be they living wage or transportation policies. It is interesting.
There is a policy element to any agreement that engages deeply with what is going on in communities and somehow feeds it back up through the system, helping communities to become contributors to policy development.
Second, we had the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, Canada's largest private foundation, and Tim Brodhead, the executive director, and Katharine Pearson are directly on the steering team. They were primarily the funder to Vibrant Communities. There was the funding role but, as you are hearing here, it is more than funding.
In that funding role, we came to an early belief that if this was going to work we would match the funding that would come at the local level. That is an interesting one. We were not allowing for that funding to be only government money. We wanted it to be an engagement process. The way that the money came from the local level, there was proof that there was wide buy-in at the private sector, the government level and the citizen level for this initiative. We wanted to see money on the table. We would match that money rather than see this as a granting expedition. That allowed us to put far fewer controls on the money, because they would have to come up with their money first. We always knew that if the money was controlled at the local level and local investors were involved, they would take care of our investment better than we ever could.
Third, the Tamarack Institute's role was to work at capacity building, to continually create a learning environment and to build the capacity at the local level to share the stories of what happens in Hamilton, Victoria, Saint John, Newfoundland. There are a couple of issues, like living wage, where we are getting waves. One municipality is doing it, and they figured out how to change it. Other municipalities are interested and they learned quickly from that municipality and started to do it in their municipality. It is fostering that kind of learning, which is very important, and creating that enabling environment.
The instrument is one thing, but we need to come at it from multiple angles. We need to work from policy, funding and capacity-building levels, but none of those are static. They are an infrastructure that engages inside of this type of urban agreement.
Does that make sense?
The Chair: Yes. Let me go to our other panellist with respect to international experiences.
Ms. Torjman: We have learned a great deal from the United Kingdom, which has neighbourhood-renewal initiatives and major anti-poverty strategies. They have produced important results, some positive and some not so positive. We have tried to learn lessons from them.
Interestingly, the neighbourhood-renewal strategy came out of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. The government was being coordinated at that level. The different government departments — education, health, transportation and so on — were being coordinated at a high level so that departments knew they actually had to work together. They were investing a significant amount of money in communities to enable them to develop local plans.
We have learned a great deal not only from that but also from the United States. The whole notion of comprehensive community initiative, a kind of umbrella term, came out of the United States and is based on much of the work that they have done around employment and trying to bring together business, the voluntary sector and community colleges in certain areas that they have identified, such as empowerment zones, to figure out how they can revitalize their economies. We have learned quite a bit from them.
Interesting work is under way elsewhere in the world, like New Zealand, for example. They have also learned a lot from what has been happening in Canada. To some extent, and thanks to the kind of work that Paul Born, Tamarack and others in the country have done, our work is being seen elsewhere as providing the leadership. We are excited about that, and we share lessons continually with others in order to improve our practice and their practice.
Ms. Maxwell: A few years ago, Mr. Neil Bradford, one of our collaborators at Canadian Policy Research Networks, did a set of case studies on communities and cities that work. He had five communities in Canada and six in the United States and Europe. On this notion that Mr. Born raised earlier about starting a movement, it was interesting that there was a common thread across those eleven case studies in terms of how a city or a smaller community could get into change-making mode and take control of its own destiny, if I may put it that way. Some were socially driven, some were economically driven and some were environmentally driven. When you looked at the structure of how they organized themselves to make change happen, you could find the common ingredients.
There was a local champion, who could come from any sector, with the charisma and the connections to pull people together and get them talking to create the dialogue and engagement process we discussed earlier. That person needed to tap into a civic culture of creativity and desire for change. People were fed up with the way things were and they wanted a different future.
They engaged across the community. They brought in business, neighbourhood groups, local government, police, school, and health and other key institutions across the community who did not have much previous experience, in most cases, of working together. They found as they honed in on a particular goal that they all had a stake in achieving that goal to help them to achieve their strategic end goals.
Then they needed to build connections with what Neil Bradford called the institutional intermediaries. In many cases, that would be federal or provincial-regional development agencies or Export Development Canada or institutions or agencies created by governments in a particular area. Those would become key allies because they could help raise money or provide money or because they had control over land or were able to break down barriers to making a change.
They then needed to agree on a single goal and a program to go forward with all these connections that they had built. It was designed in the shape of a plus sign, because they had that interaction horizontally across the community and vertically with the connections to senior governments, local government and the many agencies associated with them.
The ones that worked most effectively had the traditional elements of good management, such as accountability mechanisms, an ability to track progress and a willingness to keep on communicating effectively with all the players. What struck me was that whether we were talking about a city in Spain, a rural area in Denmark or Kelowna, we could find the same pattern of how it all began to come together.
The key thing from the federal government's point of view is to have agencies ready to answer when one of these movements first knocks on the door to ask for help. It becomes a demand-driven process and is not a case of the government saying what should be done. Rather, the government becomes a responsive partner.
Mr. Born: Are we allowed to read poetry here?
The Chair: Absolutely, as long as it is short.
Mr. Born: It is short and summarizes what has been said here.
This is "Turning to One Another" by Margaret Wheatley, one of the great business authors. I quote:
Ask "What's possible?" not "What's wrong?" Keep asking.
Notice what you care about.
Assume that many others share your dreams.
Be brave enough to start a conversation that matters.
Talk to people you know.
Talk to people you don't know.
Talk to people you never talk to.
Be intrigued by the differences you hear.
Expect to be surprised.
Treasure curiosity more than certainty.
Invite in everybody who cares to work on what's possible.
Acknowledge that everyone is an expert in something.
Know that creative solutions come from new connections.
Remember, you don't fear people whose story you know.
Real listening always brings people closer together.
Trust that meaningful conversations change your world.
Rely on human goodness. Stay together.
There is no power greater than a community discovering what it cares about.
The Chair: On that lovely note, we are at the end of our meeting. I thank all three panellists for being with us today and for their valuable contributions to this process.
The committee adjourned.