Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 6 - Evidence, August 14, 2008
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Subcommittee on Cities of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 9 a.m. to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.
[English]
The Chair: Welcome to the Senate Subcommittee on Cities. Our subcommittee is conducting a study of major Canadian cities with an initial focus on poverty, housing and homelessness. In undertaking this study, we are building upon previous work that has been done at the Senate, most notably the 1970 report from Senator Croll and his committee, as well as the work done in 1997 by Senator Cohen, whose report was entitled Sounding The Alarm: Poverty in Canada. Since our guest this morning is from New Brunswick, I thought I would mention that Senator Cohen is from New Brunswick. We invited her to come today. She was unable to do so, but I understand she continues to do a lot of good work in the Saint John area.
Our study is also complimentary to a study on rural poverty recently completed by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry.
Our subcommittee has completed hearings with witnesses in Ottawa, and at the end of June we issued our report, Poverty, Housing and Homelessness: Issues and Options, listing some 103 options regarding the major challenges in poverty, housing and homelessness. This morning we begin our second day here in HRM, Halifax Regional Municipality.
Our first witness this morning is Dr. Luc Thériault, Professor of Sociology at the University of New Brunswick, where he teaches courses in theory, evaluation and social policy. He has also been on the faculty of the University of Saskatchewan, and while there he conducted research on transitions from social assistance to employment and on the roles of the voluntary-sector organizations. We have heard a fair amount about this topic, and we are anxious to hear what you have to say about it, professor. Welcome.
Luc Thériault, Professor of Sociology, University of New Brunswick: Just to correct you, I was on faculty at the University of Regina. The competition would be upset, right? I thank you for inviting me.
Your report is wide in scope. I was a bit surprised when I read it, so I will run through a number of small points with the hope that with the questions we can zero in on things that are of particular interest to the committee.
There are over 100 recommendations. Obviously, I cannot go through all of them in seven minutes, so I will make a brief statement on a number of points, and then we can come back for questions.
I was a bit surprised that you have so much to say about social assistance, given that social assistance is under provincial jurisdiction. I would advise you to be cautious in your recommendations regarding social assistance, because, as you know, the provincial governments will tell you, with some good reason, that that is not your turf.
On the other hand, areas like employment insurance and CPP are clearly in the federal realm, and in those you can have a lot of credibility in making recommendations.
I want to say first a few things about my general outlook. I stress the importance of working with community-based organizations or non-profit organizations or single-society organizations. In Quebec, we call them social economy organizations because they really know their own area and they have great expertise. Some of your recommendations allude to them. One is about respecting them and working with them.
Respectfully, I do not believe that salvation comes from Ottawa in social policy issues. I regret that some of the leadership at the provincial level sometimes has an attitude of waiting for Ottawa to make a move and then seeing how they can react to it. Many policy and social policy initiatives have been developed in provinces, and then with the help of the federal government they have become nation-wide. I just wanted to stress that fact.
There is mention here and there of the rights-based approach. I am not a big fan of the rights-based approach in social policy, not because I do not want people to have rights, but because it leads to litigation and a judge having a huge role in decision-making. I do not find that very constructive.
Similarly, I am not a big fan of the fiscal approach, or the fiscal route, or the ``fiscalization'' of social policy, which is to tinker with social policy using the tax system and income tax, among other things. There is a place for that, but the problem is that it becomes undemocratic, not transparent. It becomes a technical issue for an accountant to deal with rather than a political debate. When you create a benefit, you put a program in, you have to debate it, you have to support it. It is not seen as just tinkering with a detail of the taxation system.
Those are my prefatory remarks.
Regarding Employment Insurance, I am not as negative as maybe Keith Banting is in your report. I think there is still a place for EI. I think that the logic of it is not that bad. However, we have had EI surplus in the past decade, so what is to be done with this surplus? Employers usually want a reduction in contribution. I favour more a relaxation of the eligibility rules, making EI more accessible, because right now a lot of people have to pay mandatory contributions but have no hope of ever collecting. I do not think that is fair. There is an issue of fairness. At the same time, I would also make the system a bit more active as opposed to passive. I would emphasis targeted training programs under the EI administration. In a nutshell, that is what I wanted to say regarding EI.
Regarding social assistance, clearly some of the amounts being paid to social assistance recipients are too low, especially if they live in cities where housing is very expensive. No politician will win an election in Canada saying that he wants to raise social assistance, so this is one of the problems we have. There are political realties.
I want to point your attention to page 68. There is an interesting comment there that I think is an invitation to the federal government to clean its own house regarding income support programs. This is option 97. Focus on what you can say to the federal government about how it can clean its own house rather than tell the provincial government how to change social assistance. In French, we have a saying that one needs to sweep his own porch before telling his neighbour how to clean up his house.
My key three themes for poverty reduction in general are the following: child care, social housing and public transportation. They cover everyone, because anyone can have a child, everyone needs housing and people need to get around. Major, massive investments in child care programs, social housing and public transportation would make huge improvements to the situation of low-income people in this country, and they would do it in a way that would be non-stigmatizing because they would also benefit other people.
Regarding social assistance, Saskatchewan has experimented with reducing the welfare wall in making sure that supplementary health benefits remain available for people who leave social assistance but who are still low-income. That sort of practice is exemplary, in my view.
I have already talked about the ``fiscalization'' of social policy. I will not come back to this, other than to refer to the tax-back on social assistance. Obviously we have to give an incentive to people on social assistance to keep some of the money that they earn, at least as a transition phase. The first 50 per cent is sort of the idea, which would be great. If you are taxed back one dollar for each dollar you make, why would you do it? That has to be looked into.
The minimum wage has to be raised. I understand that small businesses cannot pay a minimum wage of $11. I am not sure what the minimum wage in New Brunswick is, but it was very low. It is not reasonable. We have to make work more attractive.
Regarding child care, I think the files show some of the problems we are having here. Quebec has a great experiment going. Minister Ken Dryden went across the country and had a lot of trouble trying to negotiate with 13 jurisdictions agreements that would have enough commonality to create a national system. These are the challenges we face in the federation when trying to create a national program, especially in fields under provincial jurisdiction.
We need to keep the pressure on regarding child care. With all due respect to the Conservative government, I do not think that the benefit introduced by the Harper government is taken seriously by anybody.
Why is public transportation important? So that poor people can move around and look for a job and go to work if they find one. We have a major issue. Montreal has a very nice subway that was built in the 1960s when nobody thought about people who are in wheelchairs. I do not know of a single elevator or a station in the Montreal subway that is accessible to disabled people. It will require a huge amount of money to make this happen. We will all be disabled in the future in the sense that we will age, and when we get to our seventies or nineties, we will have mobility problems. It is not like us versus them. Potentially, we are all disabled, and the population will age, so these things will need to be done. Transportation, just like child care, is a huge issue.
I will skip language requirements for immigration. I am sort of in favour of this. This relates to page 35.
There is a debate in your report about housing first versus the continuum. I think that in the last decade we have focused too much on homelessness in the sense that homelessness is the worst-case scenario. We have the homelessness problem in part due to what happened with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC, in the early to mid- 1990s and the fact that the federal government got out of social housing construction and support We have to get back into building social housing for people in cities, often single people or small families headed by women, so that people can house themselves before they become homeless. I would not say it is too late, but we have been focusing on the problem when the patient is in intensive care. We have to be a bit more preventive and invest in social housing.
CBOs, community-based organizations, non-profit organizations on the ground, can be very helpful. They have a lot of ideas about this.
Regarding accountability, on page 60, the post-Gomery accountability framework or mentality for CBOs, for example, is an obstacle because it becomes a barrier to innovation. If you want to innovate, you want to change, you want to take a risk. When you take a risk, you may waste some dough, but if you never take risks, you never innovate, you will keep doing what you are doing. The accountability mentality we have now, which anybody who deals with government faces, is that you are rewarded for doing things the proper way, which is the way that they have been done before. I am all for accountability, but when it becomes a barrier to innovation, I think it is a problem.
I do not have a lot to say about the machinery of government, because you know Ottawa better than I do, but let me tell you what we in the outskirts of the country think about the climate in Ottawa. We think that it is frozen. We think that no decisions are being made right now, that every civil servant we contact cannot take any decision. Something has to move, because this permanent state of indecisiveness is not good for the country.
In terms of machinery, the focus has to be on intergovernmental affairs, relationships between the government and the provinces.
To end, I really like your last recommendation, Option 103, about talking to the beneficiaries, talking to clients, because you can learn a lot while talking to a welfare recipient about welfare, sometimes a lot more than you can learn talking to an economist.
The Chair: I agree with that last point, but I think some of the economists and people of other walks of life have much to contribute as well, so we are assembling a lot of information. What you said at the beginning took me a bit by surprise. I fully understand that provinces have jurisdictions and that we have to be careful how we deal with those. We respect that, and I do not think anything we do here will say, ``Provinces, you must do this or that.'' We would be attempting to bring about a more collaborative atmosphere in which the different orders of government, not only the federal and provincial governments but also the municipal governments and the community, can work together to solve problems that cross all those jurisdictions: poverty, federal and provincial income support systems and so on. We want to take a holistic approach to dealing with the challenges of poverty, housing and homelessness.
Do you see any particular vehicles that might help to bring that together without us trying to sweep our neighbour's front porch?
Mr. Thériault: Yes, I thought there was a mention of the Council of the Federation, which is a relatively recent creation that seems to go through some ups and downs in its relevancy. The last two meetings were maybe questioning whether the premiers are really committed to working together, but I think there could be a role within this council for creating a focus on poverty reduction and on inner-city neighbourhoods that have problems. At least I think this would probably be a place where the provinces would not feel threatened or bullied. That is something to explore. Because it is a new institution, the council is maybe more open to change than institutions that have a long history.
The Chair: That is an interesting point.
Two provinces have adopted poverty reduction strategies, Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, and Quebec has actually legislated it. Nova Scotia passed a piece of legislation that provided for a working group, and presumably through legislation they will put in place a poverty reduction program. My home province of Ontario is also going through that kind of study.
Could you see then, with the leadership of those provinces, getting other provinces involved? Could the Council of the Federation perhaps be a lead player as opposed to the federal government?
Mr. Thériault: A standing committee of deputy ministers from all provinces, select ministers who have responsibility for issues relating to poverty, could present recommendations that would feed back to the leadership, to the premiers. That could be explored. Of course, they would have to listen to the people on the ground.
With respect to machinery, I also wanted to mention the idea of a consultation round table at the regional level, below the provincial level. When I was in Saskatchewan we had them in different fields. We had one about housing and one about domestic violence. People came to these round tables from governments, from community-based organizations, from cities. The round tables did not talk about how to allocate money, but participants informed each other about what they were doing and talked about issues, and often it was surprising how a relative consensus about their priorities would emerge. They were really from front-line people on the ground.
These round table consultation processes are not onerous. They need one leader like a coordinator and a little bit of money to pay for transportation, booking a hotel room and all that, but they can really pinpoint workable solutions in a specific location.
You talk about space-based policy in your report. I do not know about the federal government, but I do not think that most provincial governments have the expertise to do space-based policy analysis. How many people in government can use GIS to make maps, to describe the location, the intensity of location of some social problem? Very few. At least in provincial government there has been a depletion of expertise at the mid-level of policy analysts because they are not the first-line providers. Therefore, governments sort of run their programs in the dark. There is no feedback; they do not know whether things work, but they keep doing them. At the same time, when we give community-based organizations $100,000, we ask them to do all kinds of reporting and evaluation with 10 per cent of their grant, but we administer billions of dollars of programs without any evaluation to speak of. I think looking at what the community is doing could be very informative through round table consultations.
The Chair: I understand you have had a fair bit of experience in dealing with the issue of make-work pay. That is one phrase used in that connection. On this trip, both here in Halifax and in St. John's, we have heard about the problem of the gap when people go off social assistance and into the work world and they do not get enough money but their health card and their dental and so on are cut off, so it does not pay, really, to make the shift. It is a tough struggle all the time.
What do you think are some of the answers to that? Particularly, what do you think the federal answer might be?
Mr. Thériault: You are correct. If you are a mother of two young kids who have health problems and they need a special diet or something like that and then you are cut off of assistance and you have to pay for that for yourself, you are worse off. There are costs to working. There are transportation and clothing costs and all kinds of costs associated with starting work that are difficult to bear for people who are moving out of assistance.
I pointed to transportation earlier. Making public transit as efficient and as low cost as possible makes it easier for people to look for a job and to get to their job on a daily basis. Similarly, getting social housing in place means that you actually have an address that you could give an employer interested in hiring you.
Imagine looking for a job when you do not have a permanent address to give to your prospective employer. What do you think your chances are of being hired? If the employer cannot find you, they will find someone else.
Housing and transportation are huge. Then, of course, if you are a single mother of two preschool-aged children, child care enters into the picture. This is why transportation, child care and social housing are, in my view, the priorities.
The Chair: Very good.
Senator Segal: Dr. Thériault, thank you very much for being here this morning and for your comprehensive assessment of the committee's options paper. I also thank you for the tremendous work you have done as an academic and as a researcher on some of the barrier issues as they relate to moving from welfare to the workplace. It is a constructive contribution to the quality of the debate and, hopefully, to the quality of public policy.
With all of that, I am puzzled by the categorical nature of your rejection of the ``fiscalization'' of the responses. My problem is that on the one hand you take the position that this is really not much of the federal government's business, that income security is a provincial jurisdiction. On the other hand, you also take the position that we should not be ``fiscalizing'' the problem, when the one instrument that the federal government has used over the years — successfully, I think — is the Child Tax Credit. There is also the Guaranteed Income Supplement, which is tied to how seniors file their tax returns and what their income is. To its credit, the present government happens to have just raised the limit to which you can still get that benefit even if you are earning some other income.
I am not suggesting that you do this in any conspiratorial way, but sometimes you can make one criticism, which is that it is not the federal government's business, and then by saying it is inappropriate to ``fiscalize'' the problem, you diminish the one constitutionally valid area by which the federal government could participate.
For example, the federal government made a decision back in the late 1970s with respect to senior citizens and the Guaranteed Income Supplement. They used the tax system. When the GST was brought in, however controversial that was at the time, it took the government of the day from about 29 per cent or 30 per cent in the polls down to 7 per cent, which meant that at that moment in time, more people thought Elvis Presley was alive than intended to support the government. Nevertheless, the government did bring in the GST tax credit so that people earning less than $30,000 would get some of that GST back, because we know that GST sales taxes are the most regressive for low-income people because they do not have much discretion. They spend everything they have on consumer requirements, which means that a lot of that is taxed except for expenditures on food.
I want to probe a little bit with you about that and, if I may, I want to link that to the paper you did, I think in 2000, dealing with some of these welfare issues. One of the most prominent proposals in the marketplace, which came from Milton Friedman, was the negative income tax, which, if it were to be put in place as an income security project, would be a massive ``fiscalization'' in a sense of the process.
Could you reflect a little on some of those linkages and share with us why you are so troubled about the use of the tax system?
I say in my own graduate course at Queen's that the size of the Tax Act gets larger and larger and the discreet policy decisions implicit in every regulation often imply policy decisions that we have made as a society about which we have never actually been consulted. For example, the Tax Act says there are a million things a small business can spend money on that are deductible, which means the state supports those expenditures. Families spend money on a whole bunch of things that are not deductible. I guess somewhere we had a meeting to say that the family does not deserve the same support as a small business. I doubt that we ever had that.
Could you give us a perspective on that?
Mr. Thériault: In my enthusiasm, maybe I overstated my case, but first I want to say that I did not say that the federal government has nothing to do with income security. Certainly, we have Employment Insurance, EI, Canada Pension Plan, CPP, and Old Age Security, OAS. There is a large field in which there is a federal role in income security. I was talking specifically about social assistance; that is my first clarification.
Second, on the matter of ``fiscalization,'' I agree with you that there is a role for fiscal policy in social policy. That is obvious. I will also agree with you that there has been success using this route. I am not naïve enough to think that it will cease or that we will stop doing this.
What I was trying to say is that at a point or at a juncture where we are trying to debate these things, I sometimes favour a democratic debate about instituting a benefit or a program rather than a technical debate about changing or tweaking something in the taxation, because really, for the overwhelming majority of Canadians, that goes completely unnoticed.
I am a fairly well-educated person and I have given up filling out my own income tax form because each time I do, first I get a headache, and second, Revenue Canada sends me a letter saying I did it all wrong. Now, like many people, I hire an expert, an accountant, and I pay him and he does it well.
I do not see this as a vehicle for a good, solid, democratic debate about social policy. That is not to say there is no role for ``fiscalization,'' but I am concerned about the ``fiscalizing'' and that some were trying to use this useful tool for every solution or for every problem. In your tool box, you have a hammer and a screwdriver. If you try to fix everything with a hammer, your house will probably look funny.
Regarding negative income tax and Milton Friedman, I think we are facing a debate about whether we will keep tinkering with the systems. We know that this has a negative, unintended effect, because each time we modify, we lose coherence. Keith Banting has said that and it is in the report clearly. On the other hand, when we try to make major modifications, like Ken Dryden did, whether you think that he was on the right track or not, we see the huge hurdle in the federal system that this entails. At this stage in my life, I am still more in favour of trying to find some positive tinkering and I am a bit worried about a complete overhaul of the system.
There are good proposals, for example from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy, that need to be studied further. I am not fond of the savings account solution, because very low-income people do not have any savings. I do not see how that will take us very far. It is a sort of a U.S. solution. Talk to me in a couple of years, and maybe I will have changed my mind and I will say that the time of tinkering is gone and we need to really grab the bull by the horns.
Senator Cordy: Thank you very much for your input today on our report.
My first question has to do with your comment about the rights-based approach. I understand what you are saying. We do not want an approach that will be so tied up in litigation that the only people to benefit are the lawyers. For once, there are actually no lawyer senators around the table, which is interesting. Yet, we have heard from people who are involved in the system and they keep talking about the fact that things are not changing. A number of those who have spoken to us feel that unless there is a rights-based approach — they did not use that terminology, but that was the gist of it — things will not change. There have been wonderful reports from all levels of government. The House of Commons passed a motion in 1989 to eliminate child poverty by the year 2000. That has not happened.
I understand why people are saying they want the rights-based approach. The chair spoke about the Government of Nova Scotia and its best intentions; fortunately it is bringing a focus to the whole idea of poverty with its approach to trying to eliminate poverty. However, I understand from speaking with somebody yesterday that in the recent budget no money was allocated for that. The reality is that if there is no money, it is a wonderful document on the shelf. How can you make sure that we have outcomes, that there are changes? The people who are in poverty and many of those who are disabled, whether physically or mentally or in situations beyond their control, are doomed to a life of poverty unless we have outcomes, unless we have results to make things better.
Mr. Thériault: On the rights-based approach, there are important things to be said regarding the rights of beneficiaries. For example, I am very much in favour of obliging people who administer social assistance to inform beneficiaries of their rights, which is not always done, I can assure you.
What are your rights regarding EI? Are there proper appeal mechanisms in place? The problem is that when we build something about the notion of rights, you have to be in a situation to actually have your rights appealed. Your rights are not implemented automatically. You have to ask for your rights to be supported by a court, so it is an instrument. Just like ``fiscalization,'' it has some weight and some usefulness, but if you look at the international level, there are all kinds of covenants and things that are signed by different countries, and they have no teeth because there is no policing of it. They are, again, just things on paper.
I believe that social change comes through alliances and debate and power relationships. Quebec created their child care policy because many forces on the ground banded together and pressured the government by saying that they wanted this. I believe in advocating more than I believe in legal documents, in the sense that you can never lower your guard and say, ``Oh, I have this legal protection.'' Yes, it is nice, but you always have to fight for your rights, and you have to pick your fights.
Maybe the child care window of opportunity is closed for now and we have to look at something else, but that is kind of a philosophical perspective on how social change comes about. I am not saying that I am right, but I know that friends of mine who are lawyers, because of their training, put a lot of emphasis on this. I think that if you are trained in political science or in economics or in sociology, you do not put the same weight on the rights-based approach. Canada has signed covenants that it does not implement, and there is no way that I can see that they could be implemented, so I think that is an illustration that the rights-based approach is not sufficient. I am not saying it is unnecessary, but it is not sufficient.
Senator Cordy: We know that many UN agreements Canada has signed have just been put on the shelf. We have now lost the Court Challenges Program, so those who are most in need do not have that available to them.
Mr. Thériault: Being a francophone, I know that on the language issues things have been achieved through this program. Sometimes people say ask why the government would financially support people who challenge it. Well, you are the government of every Canadian, and just like the Quebec government used money from the lottery corporation for advocacy groups that criticized the Government of Quebec, I think the Government of Canada should reinstate this program or its funding. Our legal system is not accessible to people who are not rich. We need some sort of support, not only in criminal matters, to make the system a bit more accessible.
Senator Cordy: My second question has to do with child care. You mentioned that poverty is complex, and you talked about three major issues that you would like to deal with: child care, transportation and social housing. I agree with all of those.
I would like to talk specifically about the issue of child care. You talked about the current program and the $100 a month, and I would have to agree with you that child care should not be delivered by the postal worker, but how do we go about that?
Mr. Thériault: In many cities around the country, people are trying to form child care co-operatives. There are non- profit associations interested in child care. They are actually made of parents. They are not bureaucrats from Ottawa. Parents get together and try to create an association. They need to be supported. We need to work on the supply of services.
The current view of child care in Canada is a bit like transportation. I have money to buy a bus ticket. I am at the street corner waiting for the bus, but there is no bus line on this street. Who cares if I have money to buy a ticket? You need to work on the supply. Child care is the same thing. Many people who actually can afford child care cannot find it. There is a two-year waiting list in many places. In New Brunswick, a dirt poor, backward province, something like 75 per cent of women who have preschool children have labour force attachments. It is not even a political party issue. If we want this economy to work well, we need a modern child care system. It can vary from one place to another; it can take different forms. There could be different types of providers — private, non-profit, co-operative — but we need to get our heads out of the sand and stop thinking that just a little bit more money in one's pocket will create the supply by magic. That will not happen, so we have to look at child care just like we would look at bus lines.
The Chair: Our next senator has his roots in New Brunswick, Senator Jim Munson. It is a beautiful province.
Senator Munson: Especially the North Shore. There is no shore like the North Shore, that is for sure.
You mentioned the surplus. When I was a reporter, that surplus was always a favourite punching bag of different parties, and government just loves that EI surplus. I think the figure now is about $55 billion. Just for my edification, and maybe Senator Segal can help me as well, this surplus just keeps moving along. Do you have ideas about what should be done with this surplus to pay for these other programs? Should money be moved from the EI surplus to some other place? This government likes a surplus just like a Liberal government likes a surplus now.
Mr. Thériault: Sure, everybody likes a surplus, but I think the thing not to do with this money is put it into general revenue or use it to balance the budget or pay the debt. That goes against the fundamental concept of an insurance program into which money has been paid by workers and employers for the purpose of alleviating work transition or periods of unemployment. It is a pot of money. Money flows into the pot, and in times of need, money flows out of the pot. Really, for me, this pot of money should be protected and isolated, and then there are three things to be done. You can reduce the contribution if you think there is too much money in the pot; you can make the benefit more generous, for a longer time or easier to get; and you can put in place some special programs. I am thinking, for example, of a program for people in their fifties who lose their jobs in some mills in New Brunswick, because we sometimes have large pockets of individuals with a common profile who will be very difficult to place back into employment. There could be some specially targeted programs so that EI does not focus only on giving cheques but also on manpower training and people training. Which programs exactly would probably vary from one place in the country to another. Am I answering your question?
Senator Munson: Yes, you are. You just talked about Northern New Brunswick. In Bathurst, the mill has been closed for two years and will probably be closed forever, and in Dalhousie the mill is closed probably forever, at least for our lifetime. With that manpower training, is there a mobility issue? Would you actually move people to different parts of the country to be trained and to work out of that surplus?
Mr. Thériault: The mobility issue is always difficult. We are not in Stalin's Soviet Union where you could move people at will for your needs. We live in a democratic society, so we can entice people, but they decide in the end. There is movement happening as you know between Newfoundland and Alberta, between rural areas of Atlantic Canada and Fort McMurray. I think that these round table consultations about unemployment could exist where local people would say what their priorities are or how a program might look like or whom it might target. In one province, it could be a program focusing on one group of workers. In Valleyfield, Quebec, it might be about people who lost their jobs at the Goodyear factory that closed down. We could at least have some pilot projects to emphasize the active nature of EI.
Senator Munson: Senator Segal talked about the fiscal approach and Senator Cordy about the rights-based approach. The three areas or key themes have been covered: transportation, child care and social housing. I would like to ask about transportation.
You talked about massive investments in these three areas. Yesterday we heard from witnesses about transportation, for example getting to a call center in a small town. Is there a federal role in this? You said that you do not believe salvation comes from Ottawa.
Mr. Thériault: The money can, yes, in terms of infrastructure and joint programs, because these things are very expensive. As a Canadian taxpayer, I feel very comfortable when Ottawa sends money for public transit in a city, even if it is not my city. I feel less enthused about augmenting the sprawling roads, which will have to be maintained forever, but we need more buses, more streetcars, more subways, more trains in this country. It is pretty obvious.
When I was a student in Montreal, I lived on Longueuil on the South Shore. Every morning I would walk 10 minutes to the subway and pass by the Jacques Cartier Bridge on which there would be a long line of cars, all bumper to bumper, not moving at all, and every one of those cars had one person trying to cross the bridge, which took about an hour and a half. That is not a solution for the future of Canada. The future of Canada would be to have more subway lines crossing that river. It is a massive investment, and we will not be able to do everything, everywhere, but something has to start, and the federal government has a role in supporting the provinces and sharing the cost of the infrastructure.
Senator Munson: You are saying we should change our priorities. Look at the trains in Europe and Japan. Everybody has talked for a long time about the Windsor-Toronto-Quebec City-Montreal corridor. Yet Europe is a confined space, and Japan is a confined place with more people. People move and time is money and so on. We do not have our priorities right?
Mr. Thériault: No, we do not. Unfortunately the oil shock will force us to change. Even Chevrolet is announcing that they want to get green. They just discovered that. We will have to abandon the one big car for everybody's solution to get around. It is simply not sustainable.
I was in Barcelona recently, where for 750 euros you had 10 trips on a transit system that is way better than what we have in Montreal, which costs about two or three times that amount. Obviously, there is something out of whack here in how we are not investing in public transit. It makes the city cleaner, it makes people move around, and it is good for the economy. We just have to change our mindset.
One thing I like about taxation is creating disincentives or incentives for consumption. I would tax things like Sea- Doos and Ski-Doos and everything that puts oil in the environment just for the fun of it, and I would remove every tax on buying kayaks, bicycles and canoes. I am not joking. We need a tax system that rewards people for behaviours that are environmentally friendly and punishes those who waste gasoline.
Senator Munson: You would be in favour of a taxation system in Toronto and in Montreal and even in Halifax similar to what that they have in London and other places where there are alternate driving days or licence days. You are charged a certain amount of money to —
Mr. Thériault: To enter the city core, as in London? It is fairly successful. I do not know that we are there yet, because they have even more of a problem, and if you have breathed London's air, you know about it. However, it will come. Again, we are sheltered in North America. We think the stuff that is happening elsewhere will not touch us, but it will.
Senator Munson: You talked about preventive medicine. You said it is like focusing on the problem when the patient is in intensive care. I like that statement. It is the same as urban pollution. We might not be there yet, but why should we get there?
Mr. Thériault: It is coming.
The Chair: I would like to ask you one additional question on minimum wage, which you mentioned as you went through the recommendations. A report from the Federal Labour Standards Review, the Arthurs report, which is referenced on page 30 in the issues and options paper, said that the government should adopt the principle that no Canadian worker should work full-time for a year and still live in poverty. This principle should be translated into practice during a phase-in period of several years. During this time, the federal minimum wage should be raised until it meets the low-income cut-off index.
Minimum wage has been a provincial jurisdiction. At one time there was a federal minimum wage, but the federal government has stayed out of it for quite a number of years now. Of course, a federal minimum wage would apply only to a limited number of federally regulated entities, but it could set an example, if it were used. I suppose that is what the Arthurs report is trying to say. Any thoughts on that in your studies?
Mr. Thériault: There are two parts to your question. The first part takes us back again to a rights approach, the principle that should be respected. As to the first part, as you say, no one should work for minimum wage.
The Chair: Yes, that is a general principle.
Mr. Thériault: I am going to hold off on this one. You know what I have said about these kinds of principles. I will just say yes.
I come back to my saying that the federal government should focus first on what the federal government can do or on its own business. Yes, I do agree that if it is possible for the federal government to set examples on the minimum wage, raising it somewhat in areas of activities that are under its jurisdiction, I would certainly favour that, but I do not know whether it is possible. It would pull the bar a little bit and it would give activists an argument. I do not want to say where the minimum wage should be exactly, but I think that, as a package with other measures, it should be raised to make work more appealing.
On page 29 of your report someone said that we should not raise minimum wage because most of the people who work for minimum wage are students. I cannot believe that. This is a form of reverse ageism. Not all students stay at home, and some have children. Whether people who work for minimum wage are students or not is irrelevant in how we set the minimum wage. I find this argument reprehensible. Remember ladies, we used to say that women do not need to be paid the same amount as men because they have husbands to take care of them. It is exactly the same type of argument, so I am very surprised to find it in there. I know it is not you. You are just mentioning what someone has argued. I was not comfortable with that.
Yes, the minimum wage should be raised somewhat to make work more appealing. The federal government has a role in showing the example, and perhaps it could do that by setting a minimum wage in areas under its regulations, such as transportation. I assume that flight attendants make more than minimum wage, so I do not know how many people would actually be touched by a change like that. Probably not that many, but it could still be done.
The Chair: Thank you very much, professor, for your time and for coming from New Brunswick. This is New Brunswick day.
Mr. Thériault: Thank you very much.
The Chair: Senators, our next panel is also composed of people from New Brunswick. We welcome our two new guests, who have come to speak to us about our subject of poverty, housing and homelessness.
We are the Subcommittee on Cities and we have been hearing from people for the past year. We put out a report highlighting issues and options, and now we are getting reactions to that report from different corners of the country during our cross-country tour.
Our first witness for this session is Councillor Peter McGuire from the City of Saint John, New Brunswick. He is a veteran councillor who has been around a few years, which means he has a lot of in-depth experience, so we will learn from him today. He is responsible for social development and housing in his council. He is a member of the leadership round table for Vibrant Communities. We have heard from that organization before, a community-driven effort to reduce poverty in Canada. He is also a member of the city's Vision 2015 Committee and he is a member of the Affordable Housing Development Group of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, FCM.
Gary Glauser is a consultant for the New Brunswick Non-Profit Housing Association. In 2003, he retired from a long career with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC, and he joined the association, which represents 200 non-profit groups managing some 7,000 units.
Welcome to both of you.
Peter McGuire, Councillor, City of Saint John: Thank you for allowing Saint John to present today.
I will try to follow the philosophy my father always told me: Be good, be quick and be gone. For a politician, that is never the easiest thing to do. You have my presentation, so in my 10 minutes I will outline some of the challenges and opportunities within my city around homelessness and poverty.
We are in a unique situation now where we are in the midst of an energy boom in my city. Within the next decade, $19 billion will be invested in the Greater Saint John Region on a second nuclear power plant and a second oil refinery. Therefore, the whole issue of homelessness and poverty is taking a different view now. In essence, from an anecdotal standpoint, currently some folks who are working are losing their housing, because as the energy folks and the big companies in, rents are going through the roof and folks who have had an apartment for ten years are now facing the street or the Salvation Army. That has just hit our city within the last six months. It is a unique situation that, quite frankly, we are struggling with.
Saint John has a poverty rate of about 22 per cent. We are only 70,000 people. The outlying areas, the Rothesay, Quispamsis and Grand Bay areas, do well. Rothesay has one of the best per capita incomes in the country, and they are about three minutes away from the heart of my city. There are extreme poverty within the urban sector of Saint John and fairly health rich areas on the outside of the city. Most of those folks drive into my community every day.
We have the largest public housing development — I call it a ghetto — in New Brunswick, an area called Crescent Valley, where 388 families have been congregated and segregated for about 45 years. With the aid of an extremely bright, aggressive social development minister, Minister Mary Schreyer, we are now starting to attack that area, tear it down basically, much like Regent Park in Toronto, and put those people in better housing. We have identified five neighbourhoods that are greatly plagued by poverty. We call them vulnerable neighbourhoods, and we are starting to change our terminology around city hall and are calling them priority neighbourhoods. They had been abandoned by city hall, the province and the federal government for decades.
We are the oldest incorporated city in the country, so our housing stock is very, very old, probably older than Dartmouth's. We have neighbourhoods where 75 per cent of the people living there are single moms. The struggle is really urban and is a congested struggle.
We have several thousand children in poverty. We are guessing that between 5,000 and 6,500 kids do not get enough to eat and live in slums. Education is a struggle, and I think our data says about 600 or 800 of those kids will not finish high school.
The city is in great need of skilled labour as the energy boom hits, and we are trying to educate the city to see those children as potential workers and see how we can get those children through school and employed. Within the next five or six years, there will be literally thousands of jobs in Saint John, and on one side, we will have to bring in skilled workers, and on the other side, 600 or 800 kids cannot get through high school. We have some key issues.
The last point on challenges is affordable housing. In Saint John, there are probably at least 1,000 people waiting for affordable housing. After they have waited for a decade, they take their name off the provincial waiting list, so I would think really there are probably closer to 1,500 people waiting: seniors, folks on disability, folks with mental health issues, folks with intellectual challenges, and just regular single moms who are looking for a warm place to stay.
I will move on to opportunities. Saint John has been very aggressive with minimum property standards. We have always taken a view that poverty is a city issue. We just cannot wait for the federal and provincial governments to help us out. We have to be aggressive on the file. Since 2004 when we took over and I was appointed the social development person, we have been very aggressive.
The minimum property standards we borrowed from Regina, Vancouver and Halifax. We think it is the best legislation in this country. We have just started to put it on the street. We have about 800 property violations in my city. These are slums. You would not let your dog or cat live there, but we have people and children living there.
We attack the affordable housing issue from two fronts. On one side, we are a strong, strong advocate to get the province to build in our city. Honestly, for four years, I have emailed the province three or four times a week. ``Where is this project at? Where are the dollars at?'' It is not a role I wanted, but we were being ignored by the province. If you do not want to be ignored, you have to be a strong advocate.
On the other side, we go after slum landlords. We think this legislation is the best in the country. The landlord is given a ticket. It does not have to be the owner, because many of these properties are owned by numbered companies, and good luck finding them. I have staff in my legal department going through the streets and they cannot find these people; they are somewhere in the country.
Now with the minimum property standards, we can give the ticket, based on the violation, to the landlord. If he does not pay it in 30 days, the city goes in and cleans up the property. We send him the bill. If he does not pay it, it goes on his property tax for the end of the year. There is no way around this.
All of a sudden, within the last two weeks, we are seeing slum landlords for the first time in 40 years fixing up their properties.
The other piece we will face is that when the landlords fix up their properties, they will raise the rent. Then what do we do with those folks who have been living there for a decade?
We are the only city that waives development fees for non-profits; water, sewerage hook-up, some of the land issues — we basically pick up that cost for those folks.
We have been aggressive in our five neighbourhoods. We put in about $150,000, which does not seem like a lot. The city's yearly budget is about $120 million, but this was the first time in Saint John's history that dollars went directly to those neighbourhoods. We have a panel; they come in with an idea, and if we think it is a good idea, we fund it up to $50,000. It could be an early intervention program for kids or a variety of other things.
We have found that cities have to be involved. The Crescent Valley neighbourhood quite frankly was a nightmare of drugs, rock and roll, crime, prostitution, gangs. We started off by putting a community policing person in there, and that got people saying, ``The city is paying attention to us.''
Then we put about $1.2 million into new roads and sidewalks, and that gave a lot of joy and hope to those citizens, those 388 families all living in poverty and on social assistance for two or three generations. It finally said to them that the city is interested in what they do. We had our first community town hall meeting there and asked them what they need. They did not talk about their housing. They basically wanted a decent sidewalk on a street, which is a municipal responsibility.
After that, citizens started talking to our engineering people, asking, ``Could we put a tree there? Could we put a park bench there?'' You could see people starting to trust officials. These folks did not trust anybody because of years of being neglected.
The province saw us coming to the plate with $1.2 million. They said, ``You know what, we should put in a community center, and can you joint-fund a community park for us?'' We are in the process of doing that now.
When I first went into this neighbourhood in my capacity at city hall, I would go to a meeting and there would be three of us. At the last meeting I attended, there were 63 people.
Basically we asked the people what they needed, we helped them with a survey, they fed back to us, and since that time the province has started to tear this place down based on the Regent Park type of thinking.
We are starting as a city to get involved in a bigger picture. I will be blunt: we get tired of being at the bottom, constantly yelling at the province and the federal government who are on top of us to do some things. I do not like being an advocate. I want to be a partner at the table, but that has not happened.
We have had great success with our local person from CMHC. That was a political move. We asked, and Joe Fontana basically gave this person to us. It has been a remarkable piece of our success. The new Minister of Social Development has been a breath of fresh air, and we are starting to see a bit of a partnership informally take place. However, if cities are to combat poverty and homelessness, we have to be a formal partner at the table.
The Chair: Thank you. I note in your written submission that you have made a number of comments about the options in our paper, so thank you for that as well.
We will now hear from Gary Glauser.
Gary Glauser, Consultant, New Brunswick Non-Profit Housing Association: I represent an association in New Brunswick of non-profit and co-operative housing providers. We number around 200 and own and administer some 7,000 units of affordable housing in the province. We serve both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal clients. The whole issue of housing and homelessness is near and dear to our hearts because the people in our association deal with those issues on the street every day, so we try to take every opportunity we can to advocate for affordable housing. I agree with Councillor McGuire, it would be better to be full partners as opposed to advocates, but I think we are making inroads in the area of partnerships, which is good.
I have had a chance to read your report. It is extremely comprehensive. We have been advocating for all of the issues that have been identified and most of the options for some time. We have made presentations to the federal finance subcommittees during pre-budget consultations in the past three years. We welcome this opportunity to be here today.
We are very interested to see how the work of your committee will flow into getting some of these recommendations through the cabinet process and actually implemented. Some of our advocacy efforts at the local, provincial and federal levels have not borne much fruit. We are part of the national network with the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, CHRA, and you have consulted with them as well. We try to provide local input into those efforts. We would welcome some action-oriented results coming out of your work.
We fully realize that poverty and homelessness are complex issues, and multi-faceted approaches are needed to address the issues. We see that in your report you reference Tom Carter's model, Housing Is Good Social Policy. We fully endorse that. Three years ago, Mr. Carter laid out his concept at our annual conference, and we have been pushing that ever since, that housing has to be a central pillar in attacking issues such as homelessness and poverty because of the links to healthcare, education, immigration, employment and income security. Housing has to be a central pillar so that these other social objectives can be met.
In the report, the numbers have been articulated: the number of people in need of housing, the number of people on waiting lists and the estimates of our homeless population. I have seen estimates anywhere from 150,000 to 250,000, so as you said in your report, pick a number, but the numbers are huge. In New Brunswick 30,000 households are in need of affordable housing. Those are census numbers.
Councillor McGuire mentioned waiting lists. Provincially, there is an active waiting list of some 5,000 names. However, as Councillor McGuire mentioned, many people have given up and they take themselves off the waiting list. The Human Development Council estimates that one in six children in New Brunswick is living in poverty. There is a huge gap between low-income and high-income families, and that gap appears to be widening.
All these numbers are huge and unacceptable. We have had the benefit of some federal housing programs since 2000. The Homelessness Partnering Strategy, the Affordable Rental Housing Program and the Rental Rehabilitation Assistance Program, RRAP, are coming up for termination in March of next year, but all these programs have been doing is sort of managing homelessness and poverty and the lack of housing. We need initiatives that end these problems.
The issue of the programs' stopping and starting and being renewed for a two-year period or a three-year period wreaks havoc on the local groups trying to put housing projects together.
We have a perfect example in Fredericton. The John Howard Society has been trying to put together a housing project that combines affordable housing for their clients, a place for their outreach workers to work out of, plus a space for their office. It is an innovative concept. They would use some of the revenue from the outreach and the affordable housing components to fund their office structure. However, they have been having a very difficult time finding a place to locate the project. The ``not in my backyard'' NIMBY issue comes up time and time again. For them to put together a project in a year and a half or two years just does not work. There needs to be long-term stability in the affordable housing game so that such projects can go through all the approval processes and all the processes to get community buy-in and so on.
I heard of an example of an affordable housing project in Toronto for youth at risk. The proponents said that it took six years to get the project going. You can see that when groups are dealing with deadlines for programs that are about to terminate and these groups are under the gun, it is extremely difficult for them to serve their clients plus try to put projects together.
Councillor McGuire mentioned that municipalities have to be involved because the negative impacts of homelessness and lack of housing permeate at the local level. He talked about what Saint John is doing to grapple with the issues. We have a good success story in Fredericton as well. About a year and a half ago, we set up an ad hoc affordable housing committee in Fredericton. It has all the players. It was championed by the City of Fredericton, proclaimed by the mayor, and it is a subcommittee of the city council's development committee. We have Service Canada dealing with the homelessness issue. We have CMHC, the provincial housing department, the city and their planning department, the Aboriginal community, private developers, the chamber of commerce, our association and local service groups all working together to address housing issues in Fredericton. We are very happy that this is taking place and we are working hard to create the partnerships that are required.
We like to stress that these partnerships at the local level are important, but we feel strongly that a strong leadership role by the federal government is required to ensure that funds are available and that there is a long-term strategy to deal with these issues, which are national in scope though they rear their heads at the local level.
One issue in Fredericton is that when we try to develop affordable housing, there is no land. Or if land becomes available it is snapped up by private developers. There is always the land issue, and if you can find some land, the cost is prohibitive. There need to be long-term plans, such as land banking for affordable housing, to make sure that land is available over time to facilitate these projects.
Evidently we are advocating the housing-first model: provide housing first and then provide the supports to the clients that are required to make sure that they can stay in a housing environment over time and be successful participants in the community. Also, housing is, in that context, very cost-effective.
A year or two ago, Dalhousie University did a study in Halifax looking at various options there to address homelessness. They looked at the per diem costs of these options. Supportive housing was $40 a day per client. To put someone in a shelter cost $58. To put someone in a jail, $121; in a prison, $275; in a psychiatric hospital, $210; in a hospital, $662. So supportive housing is by far the most cost-effective way to address the problem.
One other thing: speaking specifically for members of our association, roughly 1,500 volunteers are involved in the management of our social housing projects. As we say, they are volunteers. The Province of New Brunswick has put together a secretariat that will deal with the non-profit housing sector. The Government of New Brunswick is working to establish a better relationship with that sector because the government realizes the value of that sector to the overall economy. New Brunswick has embarked on a self-sufficiency initiative; the province wants to be self-sufficient in 25 years or something like that. The government wants to ensure that this sector is viable over time.
Claudette Bradshaw was the chair of this task force. She consulted with people all around the province and came up with a list of recommendations. A secretariat has been set up to address those recommendations to make sure that this sector of the economy is viable over time. We are very excited about that. I think you mention in your report a recognition that the volunteer sector needs to be supported. We would support any initiatives that would help them out.
We are very interested in how this comprehensive report will make its way to government and get the actions brought forward. We view this as a non-partisan issue. It should not be a place to get votes. It is a nationwide problem, and we support the government to move forward on the recommendations.
The Chair: Thank you for your input and also for coming here on such short notice to join us.
Councillor McGuire, you said that poverty in Saint John was at about 22 per cent. How was that figure calculated?
Mr. McGuire: It comes from national data. Vibrant Communities has a researcher whom I think you folks may have met, a gentleman called Kirk Peacock, with Tom Gibbons, who I think presented to you about six months ago.
The Chair: Yes.
Mr. McGuire: Mr. Peacock has gone through those numbers from Statistics Canada and has done his own research. We had a pretty good anecdotal idea. You can drive down our streets to see where the slums are. It is not hard to do in my city. The slums go on for blocks of the city. I think the 2006, 2004 and 2002 statistics also identify within Saint John some of the worst neighbourhoods, just behind Saskatoon, I think, in terms of clusters of poverty in the country. The numbers are fairly accurate. From our standpoint, we try to drill down regarding where those children are at.
It scares us that 700 or 800 children will not get out of high school just because of where they live. Young folks living in Saint John have a child, and then because they do not think the urban schools are strong they leave the city. They have the means to enhance those schools, but we are seeing our inner-city school numbers drop, and of course that affects their funding because it is based on size. Funding for the outlying schools is going up because everyone is moving out, while our urban schools are starting to die, funding-wise. A gym is a bonus. Roofs leak, and so on. Frankly, those are the children who should have the highest level of funding, especially early on. We are seeing those issues; we think the numbers are fairly accurate based on Statistics Canada.
The Chair: You are working in an interesting context. You have some severe poverty conditions. An additional piece of information our staff provided for us is that Saint John has the highest rate of lone-parent poverty in Canada, yet you are cheek by jowl with more prosperity in other communities. You have growing job opportunities, but you have more severe poverty. The gap is widening. You have neighbourhoods where some of that is concentrated, which reminds me a lot of my own home city, Toronto. Yours is a much smaller city, but they face similar contexts and challenges.
I want to ask you about something in your presentation. You say in one line that cities must be equal partners with federal and provincial officials in poverty reduction. I certainly would agree with that. You say in another line that the cities must own poverty issues. That is a pretty bold statement, particularly since cities do not have the wherewithal, the financial resources to do a lot of this. You see a collaborative effort, but that seems to suggest that you see the cities in the lead role. Given the lack of financial resources, how will you do that?
Mr. McGuire: I can only speak to the context of when I was elected in 2004. Again I have to be honest: previous regimes simply ignored these neighbourhoods. That is why they sat for 40 and 50 years in slum conditions. He had a background doing a lot of volunteer work for those neighbourhoods, and he said, ``We need someone to champion this and get it on the docket. We need to talk about this.'' We meet every two weeks as a council, and for four years we have talked about poverty, which really makes some people very uncomfortable. I talk about poverty, about the fact that I have 800 children who will not get through high school. This is ridiculous. We knew the energy boom was happening. We have been very fortunate and we have built good partnerships with some of our new energy companies, Repsol out of Spain, Irving Oil, Brunswick Pipeline out of Nova Scotia. They have come into my community putting in pipelines and various things. I have knocked on their doors saying, ``You know what? If you are going to be here, then you have to contribute here.'' And they have. Again, that is the city being almost like an advocate. We are not an equal partner. We said that if these folks are coming here and making billions of dollars, then they have to contribute to some of the neighbourhoods that their pipelines are going through, but we are in a real dilemma.
We just hired a new commissioner of planning from Red Deer, so he has some understanding of Fort McMurray. We do not want to be a Fort McMurray. No offence to Fort McMurray, but we do not want to be in that world. We like the dollars that are coming in, but we do not like 800 kids not getting out of school.
The Chair: I have all sorts of questions, but I want to give time to my colleagues. Let us start with Senator Jim Munson, who has his roots in New Brunswick as well.
Senator Munson: Senator Munson is from Alma. Let us put that on the record again.
I want to follow along on what the chair was saying. Are you advocating a change in the law?
Mr. McGuire: Yes.
Senator Munson: You said that there are 1,000 names on provincial waiting lists. We have heard that from other municipalities. Of course, you are on the front lines. Are you saying that municipal laws should be changed dramatically to allow you to deliver on affordable housing?
Mr. McGuire: Yes. In my city, Saint John Non Profit Housing does an amazing job, but as Mr. Glauser said earlier, they are plagued by land. They are plagued by infrastructure. They have one secretary. In Saint John we try to get those energy companies to lend us an accountant, lend us some of their business people to offset the gaps there. We are the ones closest to the people — I get the emails saying, ``Councillor, I am going to lose my housing next month.'' I am not going to call the province or the federal government to fix that. It is on my plate. When we looked at the Winnipeg model of tripartite agreement, I could not get the federal officials to call me back because I was pushing for something a little different. We wanted to be an equal partner. We thought the Winnipeg model was a great model.
Senator Munson: In this day and age, is it realistic to think that that could happen, that you could have a meeting of the minds with federal and provincial officials without changing the constitution and have that done?
Mr. McGuire: Well, I will be blunt: I get very tired of looking up.
Senator Munson: Me too.
Mr. McGuire: Yes. We have had good success with CMHC and a new social development minister, but that is informal. As Mr. Glauser said, we have built some nice informal relationships, but I know darned well that because I do not have the resources, I am not an equal partner.
Going back to Senator Eggleton and FCM, we have been moaning and groaning for years about infrastructure dollars. Infrastructure is hundreds of billions of dollars in this country. The urban centers are falling apart. I have seen that when you put in a new street or a new sidewalk in those vulnerable neighbourhoods it gives people hope. We are starting to see a correlation there. If the infrastructures came back to the cities where they should be and the federal government could identify dollars to go into some of those needy neighbourhoods, we would be more than happy to sit around that table.
Senator Munson: Mr. Glauser, you said that provincially, 30,000 people are in need of a home.
Mr. Glauser: That is 30,000 households.
Senator Munson: Houses, yes. Can you give us a breakdown of where the line is? Is it worse in Northern New Brunswick or Northeastern New Brunswick? I come from Northern New Brunswick, and there are some pretty tough times in that part of the woods.
Mr. Glauser: Definitely there are employment issues in Northern New Brunswick. I have seen some in-migration statistics that show that a lot of people are moving from Northern New Brunswick into the Fredericton, Moncton and Saint John areas. I would say a lot of that migration going south relates to the issue of affordable housing, which will become even starker in those areas people are moving to. The issues in Fredericton, Saint John and Moncton are huge. I think most of the need for affordable housing is in those areas.
Councillor McGuire talked about the rising rents in Saint John. The same has been happening in Fredericton. Rents have been going up. Housing prices are going up, and as that happens, people in the lower income ranges are becoming more and more marginalized, and the need for affordable housing is exacerbated in those cases.
Senator Munson: Education is a big tool. You made reference to Fort McMurray. The common knowledge is that people are leaving Newfoundland and Cape Breton to go to Fort McMurray, and you cannot get yourself a skilled welder, carpenter, you name it, in the province of New Brunswick no matter where you live. In Northern New Brunswick, hundreds of people on the Acadia Peninsula are living in Fort McMurray too. It is wonderful to see the money flowing back into our environment.
From a municipal perspective, your perspective, how do you involve yourself in the reworking, the thinking of putting people into community colleges and getting that education? It seems that everybody wants to see their son or daughter get a university education, but there are some practical trades like pipefitter, welder and carpenter that should not be stigmatized.
Mr. McGuire: I think you folks have identified it very well in your document. Look at the United Nations' statistics on countries such as Ireland, Sweden and England: when they front-load their dollars into early intervention, their dollars when the children are 18 drop off significantly. From the point of view of my city, that is critical.
Saint John has a program, First Steps, that takes single moms with a child, gives them housing and now is starting to educate those young women. At a graduation about a month ago, eight out of seventeen graduated. They received about $75,000 in scholarships. I know from a practical standpoint that without that program, those young ladies would not get through high school. Yet we are struggling to get the education minister in New Brunswick to acknowledge that within his department. I am telling you that this is probably one of the nicest, most effective grassroots programs I have ever seen. It is always a struggle.
Getting back to your question, those early intervention dollars are so critical, especially for low-income families, to help mom and dad be a better parent, to get those children into integrated social, cultural and recreational opportunities, which you identified in options 41 to 43. I think you have got to start there. In all honesty, there are folks in my city who are in their forties and fifties. I am not sure they will get jobs. I would like to look at whether their child or grandchild has a chance to become a university professor or a pipefitter.
As a final point, Crescent Valley, a neighbourhood that is a cultural ghetto in my city, is about a three-minute bus ride from the University of New Brunswick, which is my university. One child out of those 388 families goes to that university a three-minute bus ride away. Some almost bizarre cultural things are happening.
Senator Cordy: There are some good things happening in Saint John. I had a meeting last week with Paul Zed, and it was the first time I realized about the major boom. I had had no idea that this was happening, but it is as you have both talked about. This is a good news, bad news story. There are good things happening in housing and there are good things happening around the country. As we do this study, sometimes we think, ``Oh my God, what is going on?'' We cannot lose sight of the good things.
Mr. Glauser, you also talked about the volunteers. We cannot forget the thousands of people across the country who are involved in trying to help those who are less fortunate. In the past few days here in Halifax, many people who volunteer for those less fortunate have been sitting through the hearings, and I guess this is a chance for us as a committee to thank them very much.
What is happening to all the people who are waiting for housing? We have got 30,000 people across New Brunswick. I do not think that is any different from other provinces.
I was in Cape Breton last week. I am also on a committee dealing with seniors, and I know that a relative of mine who has been in the Cape Breton Regional Hospital since January has a two-year waiting period. She will be in the hospital for the next two years at least waiting to get to a seniors' home. Considering the costs that you read off, it makes no sense whatsoever. You could build a place for the cost of her bed alone in the hospital.
Mr. McGuire: Mr. Glauser can jump in here because he is the expert in this and I am not, but there is a great deal of anxiety in my city regarding the federal-provincial affordable housing agreement. I hear it every day, because I work closely with Mr. Glauser's colleagues. They are nervous as heck that the federal government is not going to extend this, not going to make it sustainable. It is on the tips of everybody's lips.
Paul Zed and I talk about this weekly. He is the member of Parliament from Saint John. I am not supposed to be a politician here today, right? The province is saying, ``We have got to spend these dollars before the sun goes down,'' and so non-profit folks are calling me every day, saying ``Damn it, Peter, I have got to find a piece of land,'' as Mr. Glauser said. ``I cannot find land, but I have to spend these dollars.'' There would be a collective calm in my city, in my province, probably in my country, if the federal government and the provinces could hammer this out and make it sustainable, not this kind of two- or three-year period. Make the darned thing a decade.
Going back to your point about the non-profits, they spend as much time doing paperwork and taking anti-anxiety medication as they do finding land, and that is just not fair.
Mr. Glauser: As Councillor McGuire said, there need to be ongoing housing initiatives to bring stability to the whole affordable housing game. When March 2009 comes up, if there is no federal funding, from what we are hearing the province will not be going unilaterally with any kind of program. There will be no program in New Brunswick, so we will be back to the mid-1990s when there were no housing programs from 1993 to 2000. The need numbers will continue to climb, and the people you spoke about — the ones on waiting lists that you wondered what would happen to — they will continue to live in substandard housing or to go from shelter to shelter. There will be an increase in those issues.
Senator Cordy: It was interesting to read your numbers from the Dalhousie study, because the gentleman who was before us yesterday was with the Cape Breton Island Housing Authority, and his comment was that social housing spending saves social spending.
Mr. Glauser: Exactly.
Senator Cordy: I have noticed in the City of Saint John the $150,000 toward proactive programs. Both of you have mentioned the multi-faceted aspect of poverty. You cannot deal with just one issue. I think housing is ultimately the most important. People have to have an address to get a job and so on.
You talked a lot about education and the University of New Brunswick's being just three minutes away yet not being used. It is difficult if you have got no role model in the family, if nobody has ever gone to university. As Senator Munson said, it does not have to be university but some post-secondary education or training to get a job that will pay more than minimum wage.
What types of things are you looking at? I am assuming the $150,000 is for not housing but for other social programs. What exactly are you using it for?
Mr. McGuire: It is early, because in city politics you have 10 people around the table and you have to get six of them to vote for your motion. I won that $150,000 in a vote of six to four. I have got councillors sitting beside me saying, ``Well, you know, Peter, that is not our issue. We are roads and police and sidewalks and clean water,'' which is always our issue. In municipal politics, sometimes you do not have to think outside the box: you have to create a bigger box. That is what we are trying to do in my city.
Senator Cordy: You also have to create friends.
Mr. McGuire: Yes. I will not be re-offering, so I have three years of doing whatever I want.
I have not got back to the Paul Zed comment, but I will.
We spent about $50,000 hiring summer students to do a reading tent program in Crescent Valley because what we found out that the little children go to school, but over the summer mom and dad do not read with them, so by the time they go back to school in September it takes until October to get their reading skills back to where they were in June. We have loaded about $50,000 into some of those neighbourhoods. We call it the Mother Goose Story Tent program. When I raise that at a civic council meeting they practically throw rocks at me: ``What are you talking about? Mother Goose reading?'' We put $50,000 into that and we hired a research person to look at whether the children's reading levels stayed the same or were enhanced by the time they got back to school. Again, it is cheating. I should not be spending city money on educational reading programs, but what the hell? If that will assist some of those 800 kids to be university professors some day, I will take a gamble on that. I am not running again, so I can do such things.
Senator Cordy: I used to be an elementary school teacher. I love your idea.
Mr. McGuire: The other piece I have to comment on is a group in our city led by James K. Irving. He sent his employees to be mentors in a tough urban area about a two-minute walk from where they worked. The employees would read to little kids. They would coach their soccer teams. Probably about 80 per cent of the kids coming out of that urban city school before did not finish high school. The numbers now are down to about 20 per cent. Within five years they have made a remarkable difference. That goes back to your point about mentoring. I could not agree with you more. You can have the most dysfunctional home in the world but if you have a mentor who will pay your fee for hockey, maybe take you to the theatre or to a hockey game — things that you would never otherwise see in your lifetime — that can make a big difference in your life. It has made a significant difference in our city. I have even convinced city hall; even though it is unionized, we also took a school. Companies take a school and go in and clean it up. They paint the gym and take their old computers there. It has been a very aggressive model and has won international awards. From a municipal standpoint, we try as much as possible to partner with our corporate citizens.
Senator Cordy: In your conclusion you talked a bit about transportation. I love that you said that all policies must end up at the people level. I think we should remember that.
You talked about public transportation, and we mentioned it in our options. I am on a committee dealing with seniors' issues. All seniors in British Columbia get a free bus pass, which is great if you live in Vancouver or Victoria, but not necessarily great if you are in a rural area. What do we have to do for public transportation?
Mr. McGuire: I use that example as a local politician. You have to campaign, so you knock on doors. If you ask the right questions, you get the right answers.
I remember sitting with a single mom who had two little children. I asked, ``What are you up to?'' She said, ``Well, I am trying to get my high school diploma, but I have to catch six buses to drop my kids off at various daycares and I am always late and I am falling behind.'' That was really significant for me to realize. Why do we not put the daycare, the GED program, the educational training in the neighbourhood so that she could walk there, make sure her kids are in a safe place, and then go down the hall to get her education? It is bizarre how we set things up.
I am always arguing with the chairman of the public transportation system. I say we have got to put more buses in those five neighbourhoods so that there is accessibility and flexibility for the people to get to educational programs and to a decent daycare. It is not an easy fight, but I think we could eliminate that if I could get my supply and services department to build an educational preschool center in those five neighbourhoods where mom could get her education and the child could be safe and be stimulated, and she would not have to worry about 14 buses. I might add that this takes most of her social assistance cheque. I think it is critical.
I work with folks all day who just want a bus pass so that they can get to things. It goes back to what I think Judith Maxwell said about being place-based. If we can start to put services in the right place, we will eliminate all kinds of anxiety.
The Chair: Coincidental to the mentioning of a certain New Brunswick MP, I got an email on my BlackBerry. It is a press release that says, ``Paul Zed is fighting to save the Rothesay Post Office.'' With that, I will go over to Senator Hugh Segal from Ontario.
Senator Segal: I want to thank both Councillor McGuire and Mr. Glauser for coming and sharing their perspectives with us. I particularly want to congratulate Councillor McGuire. Many municipalities have in the past externalized all their problems. There are problems because, ``We do not get enough from Ottawa. We do not get enough from the province. We do not get enough investment. Businesses do not do their fair share.'' Clearly you have taken an activist approach to dealing with the things the city can deal with in ways that are constructive. That is an example for all of Canada and I give you full credit for that. I am one of those people who can say that I was in the same political party as Elsie Wayne for 10 years and I survived, so I have a sense of how tough Saint John's council may be.
Mr. McGuire: It is an accurate statement.
Senator Segal: I congratulate you for your success in that respect. I have a small information question first and then a more general policy question.
Does the 22 per cent poverty line represent a quantum leap over what it was 10 years ago or is it about the same? Has it crept up or crept down or stabilized? Do you have a sense of that?
Mr. McGuire: It is down. I go back to Statistics Canada. I think it is down about 2.75 per cent or close to 3 per cent, so we are starting to see some success, which is very positive. However, our fear is that with the energy boom, those folks who are living on the cracks, as I call it, will go through the cracks. We are fearful that those numbers could start to creep up. It is like the hamster in a treadmill. We are all working hard, but again it goes back to good policy.
Senator Segal: When you have engaged some of the large companies involved in the energy boom and the $19 billion in proposed investment, have you done it by saying, ``We would like you to engage and be helpful,'' or have you said, ``If you do not do it in a voluntary way, the municipal may have to act''? What has been the context? How have you gone at it to get them to constructively support some of the important projects?
Mr. McGuire: It goes back to relationships. I know of my budgetary restraints. I realized probably three or four years ago that I was going to have to bring some new partners to the table, and who better than someone putting a pipeline through your city? Brunswick Pipeline probably spent as much money on lunches as I could use in a school program. They have been extremely good with some of our First Steps programs, with single moms and their children. They have stepped up to the plate on scholarships.
We are an Irving town — I mean Irving Oil and Irving Pulp and Paper. We are a heavy industrial town. They have done some remarkable work. Going back to our standpoint that the city has to own it, we started talking about it. Every second week we are on Fundy Cable. When we meet as a council, the whole city watches. God knows why. I cannot figure it out, but it is cheap entertainment. We would talk. We would constantly bring up the numbers and talk not just about the numbers but also about the positive programs.
Senator Segal: When you went to business and industry to do that, did you offer any possible matching from either you or the province to get their interest up in some way?
Mr. McGuire: Well, any good negotiator, as you know, goes in with nothing. I would say, ``Look, I do not have any dollars, so how can you help out?'' Of course they would come back with, ``If you can put in 10 per cent . . .,'' and I would say, ``I really do not have 10 per cent.'' Then possibly I would talk to the province and they would throw in 5 per cent and I would throw in 5 per cent. The $150,000 I mentioned earlier was as much as I could get out of last year's budget.
Senator Segal: Right.
Mr. McGuire: It is based on relationships. It is based on persistence and saying to them, ``This is your city now. You are putting a pipeline through it. You are thinking about building a second oil refinery. This is your city also.''
Senator Segal: I will ask both you and Mr. Glauser to stand back for a moment from the particular roles that you are now discharging so effectively and put yourself in the role of a federal minister. For today's purposes let us not care whether it is a Liberal minister or a Conservative minister, just a federal minister. Here is what you know. You know that the demand for non-profit housing far exceeds supply. Even when a federal program has been operating in a relatively robust fashion, demand still exceeds supply. You know that if a federal government launches a program, the provinces will say, ``Well, actually some of that is in our jurisdiction. We need to be at the table.'' You also know that, justifiably, the municipalities will say, ``Whoa, this is housing? Hello? Zoning? We need to be at that table,'' right? Now you have to consider relaunching the program, which by the way I would support and I hope they can make an announcement soon.
The other option, of course, is to say that there are sections 91 and 92 of the Constitution. We may not like them, but those sections have been there since Confederation. Why do we not tell the provinces we will withdraw from three or four points of the federal income tax and give them those points to spend on their priorities? They would have to be non-profit housing or more education or investment in the cities. For our purposes today, let us say they would be equalized points so that there is no problem of a point' being worth less in some provinces than in others. You equalize it to the average. Do you think that if New Brunswick got the cash it needed to do this right it would allocate what you think is right to non-profit housing, or would you have to re-fight the battle all over again even if the province had the money?
What would you do if you were the federal minister? Which path would you go?
Mr. McGuire: I would look at it differently. I am tired of non-sustainability.
You folks mentioned a federal minister responsible providing leadership at a federal level for poverty reduction and homelessness, whatever you call it. I think you start there.
Nova Scotia has just started a poverty reduction strategy, an aggressive model that I think we will try to steal for New Brunswick.
However, if the federal minister is there, the provincial minister is there and maybe FCM is there, I think you need to start it at a leadership level. You need some champions on this. I would turn the dollars down. I would rather have those champions, three of them, sitting in a room and maybe 10 counterparts from across the country saying, ``We are not leaving here until we sort out priorities and where the dollars are coming from, and let us make it sustainable.'' Otherwise, as you know, the dollars will dry up in two or three years and we will be back to the same.
I really do think it needs that federal cabinet minister charged with poverty reduction, 10 provincial counterparts and then FCM sitting around the same table. Then we can sort it out on a sustainable level. The Americans have a 10- year homelessness plan. I get the emails every day. They are doing some remarkable things. Let all three levels of government put together a 10-year plan to reduce poverty in this country. I do not want the money.
Mr. Glauser: I have seen estimates that homelessness costs Canada $5 billion to $6 billion a year. A study done out in B.C. estimated that. It is a huge price tag. That burden is there year after year, so that is the cost of not doing what we should be doing. It is a national issue. Like Councillor McGuire said, there has to be leadership at the national level.
Senator, you asked what would happen to those federal funds if they came to New Brunswick. What would New Brunswick do with them? I think those funds would go into the New Brunswick budgetary process and the housing people would fight it out with whomever. That is exactly what happened with the housing trust money that came recently. Those federal funds that came from the Department of Finance went into the provincial budgetary process. Actually, when March 2009 comes up, in New Brunswick there will still be $7 million that has not been allocated to housing.
Mr. McGuire: We will take that in Saint John. We will take those dollars if they are being passed around.
Mr. Glauser: Yes.
The Chair: No, but you still want some federal leadership. You have to watch the application of sections 91 and 92.
We have run out of time. Thank you very much to both of you. You have given us a lively little discussion here, and we appreciate it. I think we would all agree that you are doing terrific work for Saint John and generally for people who are disadvantaged and in need of support, whether it is housing or poverty reduction or mentoring for young people to keep them in school. You are doing some good work and we applaud you.
The committee adjourned.