Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 1 - Evidence, April 2, 2009
OTTAWA, Thursday, April 2, 2009
The Subcommittee on Cities met this day at 10:45 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 Subcommittee on Cities. Today, we will be studying the effects the economic downturn has had on poverty, housing and homelessness.
This is very topical. The last time we met was in the Thirty-ninth Parliament. The last time we had witnesses, at least, was in the Thirty-ninth Parliament, and the economic conditions then were quite different than the economic conditions that exist today.
From our previous testimonies, we know of the challenges faced by many in this country in terms of the issues of poverty, housing and homelessness. Today, we will update as to where we are vis-à-vis this current economic downturn and the impacts from the recent stimulus package and other budgetary measures.
We have three witnesses here to help us along. The first is Dr. Roger Gibbins, President and CEO of the Canada West Foundation. He is with us via video conference from Calgary, Alberta. We also have Sherri Torjman, Vice- President of the Caledon Institute of Social Policy; neither are strangers to this committee and both do wonderful work, as does Lea Caragata, Associate Professor with Wilfrid Laurier University, who has some very interesting information about disparities as they relate to women and lone mothers, particularly.
Roger Gibbins, President and CEO, Canada West Foundation: I apologize to the translators for not having a document in front of them for this oral presentation. I would like to thank the committee for this opportunity. However, I do want to stress that any opportunity to discuss the impact of the recession has to be treated with a great deal of caution. We still have no idea what the length and depth of the recession will be. We do not know if we are seeing a blip or a major economic realignment.
Therefore, talking about the impact of the recession on cities or on particular groups is still a very difficult and tentative topic. However, you are here and I am here, so I will take a stab at it.
I should mention where my comments come from: The Canada West Foundation has run a nine-year project on Western Canadian cities. Six of the 14 cities in your first report were included: Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Saskatoon and Winnipeg. In that study, we produced about 45 reports on Western Canadian cities.
We focused on urban finance, urban infrastructure, affordable housing and homelessness, and urban Aboriginal peoples. We also did a survey this fall — or I guess it was early December 2008. We asked 25 Western Canadian economists what an appropriate stimulus package for the federal government would be.
Turning to the substance of my very brief comments, when we talk about cities, of course, we are in many ways talking about Canada. This is particularly true in the West, which is a very heavily-urbanized society. At the same time, cities contain large numbers of particularly-vulnerable Canadians: Recent immigrants, urban Aboriginal peoples, visible minorities and the homeless population all tend to be concentrated in large urban centres.
The problem is that the impact of the recession on cities is quite diffuse. A hit to a particular sector has a very diffuse impact on large urban centres, just as a stimulus package to a particular sector has a very diffuse effect. The easiest stimulus targets are in one-industry towns or, for example, communities across Southern Ontario, that are highly dependent on the auto sector. There are very few analogous communities or situations in Western Canadian cities.
Therefore, in thinking through your mandate, I find it useful to consider two quite different approaches to the recession and how they weave into your mandate. One approach to the recession is to recognize that the recovery will come from outside the country; it will come from a recovery in the American economy. Basically, Canadian governments can try to protect the most vulnerable until the storm has passed.
If this is the approach, then, of course, the cities are a good target in the sense that they contain so many of the vulnerable Canadian population. When we asked our 25 economists across the West what the stimulus package should be, their emphasis was very much on strengthening the social safety net rather than doing particular things for particular firms or industries.
On this point, I would stress that much of the programmatic support for the vulnerable Canadian population is provided by the charitable sector, and this sector is being hit very hard and very quickly by the recession. The charitable sector almost makes the auto sector look like a bed of roses in terms of the immediate impact of the recession. Therefore, if the goal is to protect vulnerable Canadians, one way to do that is to try to protect and assist the charitable sector.
The second approach is to believe that governments should actually try to stimulate the economy. If this is the scenario, in many ways, cities are very poor targets. The economies are very diffuse and infrastructure spending has a limited impact. The urban labour force is very diffuse. Very few of us have shovels in our hands to make us ready for shovel-ready infrastructure projects. The urban workforce is very different in character. Cities, if they need infrastructure support, need big things, not a scattering of skating rinks and community halls.
However — and this is really the essence of my presentation — there is one way in which urban needs and infrastructure stimuli align. Nothing is surprising in this; it has to do with affordable housing. Affordable housing makes economic sense. It provides a targeted stimulus to the construction industry. It is a way of ensuring that when we come out of the recession, we are better off than we were going in. There is an economic argument, a social argument and a sustainability argument for affordable housing.
I will end my brief presentation by noting a particular development in Calgary of which the committee may not be fully aware. The city, in cooperation with the provincial government, has launched a 10-year program to end homelessness. It is an interesting program because it is not to address homelessness; it is not to try to moderate homelessness; it is to end it. The strategy is based on a housing first approach, that is, you have to provide housing as the first and most immediate step. However, that means money for affordable housing.
It is here that the recession and the desire to stimulate the construction industry provide a match made in heaven. In this case, we could well come out of the recession better off than we were going into it. That would be a major accomplishment for our Canadian cities.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Gibbins. We will go to questions shortly, but meanwhile we have two more speakers. First, we have Sherri Torjman from Caledon.
Sherri Torjman, Vice-President, Caledon Institute of Social Policy: Thank you for inviting me to speak to you today.
In the late fall, when the country was preparing for the economic update, a lot of discussion centered on the fundamentals. Apparently, the fundamentals were in place in the Canadian economy: Our debt to GDP ratio was the lowest in the G8 and was on a downward slide; we did not have the same subprime mortgage problem that the United States was experiencing, at least not to that extent; and our banks were in relatively good shape.
We noticed something was missing from the conversation about the fundamentals: the discussion about social programs. In our view, these are crucial social and economic fundamentals. They are social fundamentals in that they act as shock absorbers for individual households and families. They are economic fundamentals in that they are designed to act in a counter-cyclical way. They are designed to act as economic stimulus, and no conversation took place about these essential components of our economy and society.
We wrote a paper called The Forgotten Fundamentals to contribute to the conversation. We proposed in this particular paper to look at three income-tested programs currently in place and to look at how we might improve those programs, either through increasing the benefits or through design changes. Those were the Working Income Tax Benefit, the Canada Child Tax Benefit and the refundable GST tax credit.
We also proposed changes both in the short term and the long term to Employment Insurance. As you know, this is not an income-tested program but rather social insurance to which we make contributions. You know by virtue of the report that you produced and the testimony that you have heard that this program is broken. It no longer acts in the counter-cyclical way in which it was intended. We proposed a number of changes to short-term components to address eligibility, which is a huge problem in the country. We also proposed longer-term reforms that I would like to discuss in the question and answer period if possible. Perhaps we can get into some of the fundamental restructuring that we feel would be important.
The budget did a number of interesting things. It made important changes to the Working Income Tax Benefit. It introduced tax changes billed as helping low- and modest-income families, although the biggest benefits from those changes actually go to the families with the highest income. We were disappointed in that regard. Also a minor change to Employment Insurance, EI, was to extend the benefits. It is an important component, but it does not address the fundamental problem of people qualifying in the first instance. We have proposed a temporary income program that would take into account people who do not qualify for Employment Insurance.
We not only looked at income security programs but also put forward another component in regard to economic stimulus. It had to do with investment in social infrastructure. We felt much of the conversation taking place focussed on infrastructure for cities primarily in the form of hard infrastructure such as roads, sewers and transportation. We recognize that is essential, and we are not saying this is unimportant in any way. However, at the same time, we wanted to put forward the notion of social infrastructure because it is essential from the perspective of creating jobs and investment to help to re-kick-start the economy.
It also has a significant long-term impact in the health and well-being of communities and addressing the social determinants of health. Dr. Keon has a great interest in that area in particular.
The report talks about three particular components of social infrastructure. First is child care, investing in affordable high-quality child care. It is a very important social program from the perspective of child development but also essential economically to enable parents to work, to pursue education or training.
Second, we talked about social housing. We were pleased to see an investment in social housing in the budget, both with respect to the federal-provincial affordable housing agreements and also additional infrastructure money for social housing and for particular populations.
We had one concern about the spending announced in a statement made by the government shortly after the budget. It was to the effect that this infrastructure funding was only a stimulus and not an indication of any further interest or commitment to the area of social housing as a long-term component of an affordable housing and poverty reduction strategy. We thought, well, why not? It lies at the heart of a poverty strategy in the country.
Third, we talked about social infrastructure from the perspective of the amenities in communities that make a big difference for families. We talked about recreation centres, arenas and cultural places. We did that because in the past, we had seen in the budget several of what we call "boutique tax credits." They are small tax credits going to moderate and higher-income families for fees and equipment. However, it does not really help the families typically left out.
We know the value of recreation and cultural participation. That proposal was put forward on social infrastructure as a broader notion of investing in our communities and societies beyond simply our roads and sewers. Good investments were announced in the budget. For example, it was positive to see infrastructure money for more than the road and sewer components to include recreation centres, especially.
Work is needed around Employment Insurance to shore it up in the short term with respect to the problems we are now facing. Fundamental reform of what we call the architecture of our income security programs is also needed to look more broadly at how the whole system is working. Child care is another essential area we need to re-examine as a country.
Finally, I will leave you with the thought that the provinces and several other nations throughout the world are now working on comprehensive poverty strategies. They are looking at components of a poverty reduction strategy not only from the perspective of individual pieces but also as an integrated whole. This is an approach that makes sense, where all the pieces are working together and we understand the interactions very well.
I look forward to having further discussion with you about these points.
Lea Caragata, Associate Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University: Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to appear this morning.
I certainly concur with the comments of both Ms. Torjman and Dr. Gibbins. I will take you into a slightly different place, in acknowledging that we need the kind of social infrastructure, including social housing, that has already been talked about. I will not waste my seven minutes going over that same ground, but I want to heartily endorse that those are major issues. I will talk about Canadian women, in particular about the poorest subset of Canadian women and what is happening to them, especially in our current economic context. I say that because Canadian women tend to do not as well as Canadian men, even when we are not in a profound recession. It is important to look at that because we talk in terms of social and economic stimuli and program revision and restructuring without addressing that basic fact that women do less well.
In Canada, women and youth account for about 83 per cent of Canada's low- and minimum-wage workers. On the gender income gap, Canada is fourteenth of 15 peer countries. I could go on and on with pretty shocking statistics. We do less well by women in our country, and we do particularly less well for women who are Aboriginal or visible minorities. Those women suffer more. An average income for an Aboriginal woman is about two thirds of the already- low income for a non-visible minority or non-Aboriginal woman.
I am the principal investigator of a large cross-Canada Community-University Research Alliance, CURA, that is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, SSHRC. We work with lone mothers and academics, government and non-profit organizations in St. John's, Toronto and Vancouver. We have a nice sort of cross section of what is happening. We interview over 100 women every 8 to 12 months, so we have the benefit of being able to follow them as they have moved through a better economic time into this less good one.
We are seeing what we saw at the beginning: a level of deprivation that most of us around the table would find shocking. One of the quotes that stands out in my mind, which is not in the notes that I provided to the committee, is by a woman who, when asked what she would want most, gets a sort of dreamy look on her face and says, "What I would want most is a fridge with food in it all the time."
Imagine that being the one thing that you want most — a sort of life's aspiration — because of the despair of not being able to feed your kids. The women we are talking to cannot feed their children and are reliant on welfare benefits. Welfare benefits are insecure and provide an insufficient amount of money. These women try to get into the workplace, but the work available to them, when it was available, was precarious and part-time. One woman came to us triumphantly to tell us she found a job. She had three different split shifts comprising a nine-hour day. Each of those would require transportation back and forth. Recently, she called to say that she had been cut back to one shift. It is that kind of erosion of the part-time, minimum-wage work that is a real consequence. It will hurt those people who are already hurting.
We clearly need to move into the social infrastructure investment that Ms. Torjman was talking about, which I heartily endorse, but we need to do more. We need to look at our social programs, minimum wage and labour market skills training initiatives with a gendered lens. I guess I am old enough to think back to Status of Women Canada's preparing women for non-traditional trades. Interestingly, the mother of one of the women in our longitudinal panel was trained as an underwater welder through that program. She went on and on about what a difference that made in her family's life and if only there were a program such as that today.
We need to pay attention to such messages. We need to rethink social infrastructure and think through what we need to do to address this huge gender imbalance that will only get worse. Many of the stimulus initiatives that have been put in place will support the traditional male-oriented jobs. Certainly, for welfare leavers, the jobs that are still available tend to be in those traditional male-oriented roles. Jobs for women — service sector jobs — are being cut most quickly.
I offer that perspective based on compelling interviews with 100 poor Canadian women who are trying to raise children in an environment where they sense no support from the Canadian state. They see nothing to rely on in the way of a social safety net. They feel entangled in that net by one trap after another. I look forward to your questions. Thank you.
The Chair: Thank you for all the work you have done in this study. I cannot say some of the statistics cited are alarming; I have heard some of this before, and it is shameful that such a disparity exists within our country. Thank you for your presentation today.
Ms. Torjman, in your speaking notes you reference the Canada Child Tax Benefit. I know that the Caledon Institute's proposal was that it should go to $5,000 per child from the current $3,332. Frequently we hear that the resolution was passed by the House of Commons in 1989 for the elimination of child poverty by 2000, which we all know has not happened. No programs were put in place by any government at any time to back that up. Nevertheless, you have some statistics that run a little different from what I have been hearing.
Some people will say that we have not improved at all in terms of child poverty such that we are in about the same place as we were in 1989. However, in your submission, you talk about the Canada Child Tax Benefit, CCTB. If we did not have the CCTB, the low-income rate for families with children would be 15 per cent, and under the current system it is 9.3 per cent. That would get better if we went to the $5,000 maximum.
How does that correlate to the comments by some that we have not improved since 1989? Have we improved? Do we still have a long way to go?
Ms. Torjman: The current problem is the labour market. When that is not functioning well, we continue to have a rise in poverty. We were trying to show the impact of the CCTB after transfers and taxes and that with no child tax benefit in place, we have rising poverty. With a child benefit in place, we are able to reduce that extent of poverty by that percentage.
Poverty levels might still rise, but when we are in a situation of high unemployment and people, especially women, as Ms. Caragata pointed out, are not doing as well, then you will have an increased rate of poverty. Effectively, we are showing the impact of the child tax benefit on a post-tax and post-transfer scenario.
The Chair: Overall, have we improved, or are we about the same as we were in 1989 in terms of child poverty? I take all things into consideration, not just the child tax benefit.
Ms. Torjman: We have improved somewhat. A small reduction in child poverty over the years has occurred, and, certainly, child tax benefits have played a substantial role in that regard.
We are fighting against a labour market that is very difficult. Had we have had a higher child tax benefit, as you pointed out, we would have had a lower child poverty rate; and certainly we would have had a better rate had the economy been improving as well.
The Chair: You suggested a number of benefit changes in terms of improvements to Employment Insurance: the 360 hours, for example, replacing the present system, which is different in different parts of the country; moving up the replacement earnings from 55 per cent maybe to 70 per cent; eliminating the two-week period, et cetera. How would you see those being paid for? Would it be out of general revenues, or since Employment Insurance is at least technically supposed to be an insurance program, would you see the premiums being increased as well?
Ms. Torjman: The program, obviously, has to be funded primarily through premiums. However, we have talked about the possibility of having some additional investment in Employment Insurance through general revenues, especially in a time when we are in recession and when we have to look at additional benefits because we have much higher caseloads. We have not ruled out the possibility of having an investment of general revenues in order to cover those costs.
There is a problem in the financing in the sense that it is supposed to be counter-cyclical, and we have not really seen the financing work in that way. We made some recommendations about how you might fix that and get it on a better footing to have a true counter-cyclical program. In the meantime, some areas may require money to be put in from revenues to shore that up.
By the way, we just had a report out yesterday — I am pointing this out because I do not know whether you have seen it — on the gender imbalances in Employment Insurance in particular. We are very concerned about the impact on women, who find it difficult to qualify in the first place because they do not have sufficient hours. When they do qualify, they receive much lower benefits in percentage terms because of their lower wages in the first place. There may well be a need, in recession, to have general revenues.
We have also talked about a fundamental reform with respect to Employment Insurance. Some people will not qualify for social insurance. Many Canadians — be they new Canadians or people who are self-employed — are not qualifying for this particular program.
What do they do in the short term? Their only option at this point is to go over to provincial welfare. We know that is not a suitable solution for many reasons — from the perspective of poverty, but also from the perspective of rusting of skills. It is not a good economic solution, let alone social solution.
Our proposal is to put in place a temporary income. That is one option we are looking at. A temporary income would be income-tested. It would be for those only in financial need. It would be a temporary program as I said, let us say for example, a maximum of six months. We would have to work out the details of the approach.
It would be to stem this growing tide of people who are not qualifying for Employment Insurance, who are left with nothing and are not able to feed their kids. We do have to take some significant measures in this economy to address that big gap in the current system.
The Chair: Interestingly, the statistic in this regard is that while more than 80 per cent of the people who qualify for Employment Insurance get it, only 40 per cent of the people who pay into Employment Insurance actually receive it. There is a big gap there in terms of the people who do not qualify.
Let me ask one more question to any and all of you on affordable housing. This stimulus package from the government did include money for that, including money for retrofitting and upgrading of social housing programs with respect to environmental needs, energy needs.
It had some money for reserve Aboriginals. Interestingly enough, it did not have anything for non-reserve Aboriginals, which are most of them. More than 50 per cent of Aboriginals live in our cities and towns.
It had something for seniors and also for the disabled. I might have missed one or so here. However, it did not really address those people who are in unaffordable housing. Many people are paying more than 50 per cent of their income — or trying to pay more than 50 per cent of their income — on housing costs, and there is no new affordable housing being built for them or rent supplement programs.
Could you comment on that? Particularly, Dr. Gibbins, you said that one of the key stimulus programs on the infrastructure level could be affordable housing. I will let you tackle this one first.
Mr. Gibbins: I am happy to do so.
An expression that floats around in the Calgary community quite frequently is "never waste a good crisis." You can waste a good crisis by being too unfocused in the response. The tendency is to use the recession as a wedge or as a tool to address a very broad political and social agenda.
When we look at what is being done on the social-housing side, we find this Canadian disease of being too modest: too little done over too broad a front. The stimulus package does address housing needs across a fairly broad spectrum. The issue is whether the investment by the federal government, and then by municipal and provincial governments, will be sufficient to make an impact.
Again here, I come back to this fundamental dilemma. If we use the recession as a way of addressing underlying weaknesses or vulnerabilities in Canada, we need to have some focus on that. My concern is we will move forward doing a little bit here, a little bit there, and at the end of the day, we will have little bits of improvements here and there without any sense of strategic focus on what we might do.
The challenge for the government, and I guess the challenge for this committee, is to figure out if there is a focus. I make the argument that affordable housing fits many of the stimulus needs of the package and has a long-term impact on many of the groups we have been discussing today.
It is a good point of entry, and it has a greater prospect of immediate traction than broader plans, for example, to improve EI. EI is a fundamental issue, but I do not see any appetite to do that in a significant way during the recession.
Ms. Caragata: Roughly 70 per cent of all lone mother-led households in Canada meet Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation's, CMHC, definition of being in core housing need. That rises to almost 80 per cent when you consider lone mothers on social assistance.
Social housing is a profound marker for them to be able to create some important levels of family stability. A large amount of data demonstrates the importance of having secure housing if you are in an employment search, for child health and well-being, et cetera. Interestingly, as we have followed women who have moved from welfare to work, the presence of social housing has been a significant factor for women who have been able to make and sustain that transition.
I could not agree more. It is a critical infrastructure investment and makes a real difference for everyone, as long as attention is paid to the types of gender issues that I have raised, in terms of who will access it.
Ms. Torjman: I wanted to reinforce the point that Dr. Gibbins made in terms of social housing being an important infrastructure investment. We really do need to look at a strategic long-term plan in the country for affordable housing. That is why we were dismayed when we heard the announcement after the budget that this is really a short- term plan, and do not interpret it as any other commitment to this area. That is precisely what we need with respect to both the recession response and a long-term poverty reduction strategy for Canada.
Senator Segal: I would say to Ms. Torjman that income tax was temporary, and it is still with us, so do not lose all hope with respect to housing. Some of us will engage to see if we can do to social housing support what was done for income tax over the years.
I would first like to put a question to Dr. Gibbins. A comment that we most often hear from civil servants and economists, who are otherwise well-meaning people, about programs that are aimed at poverty, and particularly at income security, is that if we provide a level of support that is too consistent, too continuous, too much above the poverty line — which by the way, none of our welfare levels of support actually even come close to the poverty line, and they are well beneath it across the country — then it creates a massive work disincentive.
I am aware of the Mincom experiment, which took place in Manitoba, and new analysis that was done, which was presented at the progressive Eastern Economic Association in New York by Professor Lago, who took a fresh look at the Mincom results. People will recall that this was basically a guaranteed annual income approach in and near Dauphin, Manitoba, many years ago. She was able to get Manitoba health insurance, the education department and the corrections department to give her some time-sensitive numbers about what happened in those communities during that period of time.
The professor found that while there were some people who withdrew from the workplace, they withdrew from the workplace to take care of children who otherwise had no place to be taken care of. Some withdrew from the workplace, because they had this basic income, to take care of sick relatives and older parents who otherwise would have fallen, in some measure, on the state to deal with.
A tiny uptick in educational attainment was noticed as was a tiny decrease in people showing up at their doctor's office. Clearly, as Senator Keon's work has shown, poverty is a huge predictor of health difficulties. Also a tiny uptick in separation and divorce occurred, and Professor Caragata may want to comment on this. I am not an economist; I am a historian, to the extent that I am anything academically. The economist who conducted the study said that she, as an economist, believes in choice and that if women who had a slightly better income base felt they could leave abusive households because they had that independence, then that was probably, on measure, a good thing because of the overall cost to our society of abusive households.
Calgary is seen very much as an entrepreneurial leader, as a place where, when they look at a business person or at a social program that does not really deliver what it promises, the expression used is "big hat, no cattle."
I want you to try to explain to me, if you could, this concern about the work disincentive; whether you think it is pervasive, in your own assessment. I will invite colleagues around the table who are also guests this morning to reflect on how we might deal with that.
Clearly, any of the innovations that this committee might consider with respect to income security will run into that same anxiety, and it would be good if we could reflect on how to deal with that as we continue our work across the country.
Mr. Gibbins: Thank you, senator. My own sense of this is that as the level of support increases, the risk of work disincentives will increase as well. However, I still think the gap between where we are now and where those work disincentives would come into play in a significant way is so significant that I am not concerned in the short term. In other words, a lot of growth can take place before we will be worrying about that.
In terms of framing an argument, I would come back to the homelessness initiative in Calgary, where the business community has come on in a big way. They were convinced, on the raw economic arguments, that the costs of homelessness were so great in terms of the general medical and social assistance and law enforcement issues that there had to be a better way out.
Another important notion came out of the American experience, and maybe Calgary is one of those communities where the American experience has some bearing. The American experience with housing first had a real impact on how people began to think about homelessness issues here.
The argument is simple, that secure and affordable housing becomes the foundation for re-engagement in the labour force and in society. Although homelessness is a complex condition, the first point of access is actually to address homelessness, to provide that security of place, and out of that then flows the opportunity to participate in the labour force.
All I can say in response to your more general political concern — and I use "political concern" in a positive way — is that in this particular environment, it was not difficult at all to bring a fairly conservative business community in line with a very bold plan to eliminate homelessness in the community, that the economic arguments seemed to be so compelling that the support was there.
Senator Segal: Could I invite other witnesses to address this issue?
Ms. Caragata: I would be happy to comment. I thank you for raising the spectre of women who are being abused in their intimate partner relationships and the ways in which economic insecurity play into that vulnerability.
Our data are showing that between a third and a half of the lone mothers who we are talking to have ended up on social assistance because they have left an abusive partner. We have also seen some of those women return to their abusive partners because they cannot live on their welfare cheques.
With respect to the issue of work disincentives, it is an extremely important area, one which we need to pay attention to. I would suggest that we need to look at work income support slightly differently. I will invoke Jane Millar from the U.K., who is a research colleague. She says, quite cleverly, that in our current employment-based welfare state, the state has two roles, and this is a real change from our earlier role, where the welfare state picked people up, if you will, when the labour market failed. Instead of that, we need to support security in work, for example, whatever it takes to keep someone in the labour market. Maybe that is earning supplements, job supports, et cetera. Then we need to ensure security in income from work, so some type of income support, such as a guaranteed annual income, something that, once someone has made a connection to the labour market, enables them to sustain that. We are failing badly because of a piecemeal approach and because we are still hanging onto the idea that one had this unusual critical incidence of labour-market loss.
The current recession tells us that maybe times have changed and that people are poor and need some income support even while they are working. In the midst of the current recession, we need a more sustained look at how we keep people in the labour market.
With respect to social housing, it is an important base for people. It is a way in which people can be sure that they can hang on to that job because they have housing security. We are interviewing and following several women who are homeless and are living in hostels with their children. All you have to do is look at the Canada-wide incidence of the number of homeless people who are living in hostels and working full time to see that we have gotten into a problem where the basic housing stability does not lend itself to the attachment to the labour force that we are all after.
Ms. Torjman: Thank you for asking that question. We find that we encounter difficulties all the time. Whenever we propose any increase to any income-tested benefit, we face the economic argument that this will create an increase in the effective marginal tax rate, EMTR. We cannot seem to get away from that EMTR obstacle in anything that we do.
We tried to design our programs to ensure that the proposals smooth out the benefits so that we do not have these big jumps and people will not see big losses at certain income levels. Generally speaking, we need to confront that argument head-on. We need more empirical evidence on this. Quite frankly, in our view, the people who make those work incentive choices are people who are higher up the income scale and are deciding whether they should work more or take the afternoon off or Wednesdays to play golf. The effective marginal tax rate issue does not come into play when you are talking to and working with low-income and modest-income people who are trying to make ends meet. That is not a concern. The people who write and talk about this as a concern need to get out and talk to low-income people and listen to their reality. Those are not the choices that they are making.
We need to do a cost-benefit argument as well; all the benefits to which Senator Segal referred in terms of the stability of households, to have sufficient income to be able to feed their children properly, ensure adequate child development and leave violent situations. These are the types of arguments that we need to make, along with the so- called disincentives that we continually fight when we are trying to make improvements to income-tested programs, which is one of the biggest problems we face, quite frankly.
Senator Segal: I was taken very much by Dr. Gibbins' reference to the fact that when the Calgary business community — and I know there are individuals who are involved in the leadership of this effort — was presented with the actual cost overall to the productivity of the community and the economic output of homelessness versus the cost of trying to resolve homelessness, they were impressed by the gap and engaged in a way that is remarkable, if I may say so. This is evidence of leadership that other private-sector groups could take, working with government and other parts of the country. It is very much to Calgary's credit.
I propose the following to our three guests: We may not have enough empirical evidence to put it all together, but the two numbers that I have received from the Canadian Council on Social Development and from the Library of Parliament about an automatic top-up — that is, anyone beneath the poverty line is topped above it — is an annualized dollar figure of about $23 billion to $25 billion, based on what they refer to as the average census family, which the social scientists will understand better than myself.
I think that $25 billion is a large sum of money. It is one third of what the federal government, through CMHC, extended to purchase good mortgages off the balance sheets of our banks and lending institutions, and it is also about 10 per cent of the total federal budget.
On the other side, where I would argue we could make the case if we had more empirical data, we do not actually have the hard numbers to tell us because the poor are wildly overrepresented in our hospitals, prisons and judicial system. A fixed and growing cost applies to that, driven in some measure by demographics. I do not think we have the empirical data sets to know what that precise countervail is. However, $25 billion in and of itself is a hard number to sell in these challenging times. That is, unless we can say the actual yearly, annualized and increasing cost of not addressing poverty is $25 billion-plus, or more, over time. I would suspect it is more in the range of $100 billion a year in terms of the fiscal system, let alone the immeasurable costs to other people.
First, do you think that if we had those empirical numbers, we could make the same sort of case that was made to the business community in Calgary with respect to housing? In your judgment, would our think-tanks, government departments and the Library of Parliament be well advised to try to put those numbers together?
Second — and, perhaps this is more important to all of our distinguished guests this morning — do we think poverty is the result of a series of other causal events, for example, poor education, illiteracy, family breakup and low birth rate? Or do we believe — and, this is seminal to the work of Senator Keon on his Subcommittee on Population Health — that poverty is the core causal effect for illiteracy, family breakup, family abuse and all those other factors? It strikes me that where we net out on that as Canadians will determine where we are on that issue of focus, which Dr. Gibbins raised. That is, do we focus on a thousand different areas, hoping that, by making progress in each place, we move the ball ahead; or do we pick one thing, which clearly in Calgary has become homelessness, to that city's great credit, and focus on that, hoping to get the greatest leverage on public policy impact and benefit for the greatest amount of people?
I have a bias, but I cannot base it on any empirical data as we speak. Any advice we may get — which may, by the way, attack my bias — would be fine. I think it would be helpful to our committee's work.
The Chair: That is a big "brief supplementary" question, but it is important. The business-case information, and so on, is important.
Ms. Torjman: It would help to have the information that you are talking about. Whether it would actually help make the case for a $25-billion investment in guaranteed income, I am not sure. We have done some costing of what the increase would be for an adequate child tax benefit, which we have pegged at $5,000 per child. The additional cost would be in the area of $4 billion to raise the Canada Child Tax Benefit from the $3,332 level right now to a $5,000 level.
To us, that is very doable. To us, it is a way to start. We have in place some of the elements that actually can do this — namely, work toward adequacy right now. If we identified what those elements were and moved in that direction, we may be able to move this agenda along very well.
Increases to the Working Income Tax Benefit were made. We were pleased to propose that and supported what was done in terms of the effective doubling of that benefit and the change in the design to move it out a bit to capture more people. Effectively, it is helping make work pay — and this is the point Ms. Caragata was making — in terms of keeping people in the workplace and helping make work pay.
We now have a structure where some components are working very well and are doing what they should be doing. If we could build on those pieces without having to make the case right now for a big, full-blown income security program, we would be making a big dent in poverty and addressing the disincentives.
We do have some core components that are not working well and that are missing people, for example, the EI eligibility. That is one major area. If we could fix some of those parts of the system, then we would be moving our country along considerably.
That would be my preferred approach. I may not be answering directly what Senator Segal is asking, but if we are to put our eggs in any basket, I would say take the money we have to support the components that are there and that need to be substantially improved.
Senator Segal: That is relentless incrementalism.
The Chair: I understand Dr. Gibbins has to leave us at noon our time, 10 a.m. his time, so I will let him answer next.
Mr. Gibbins: That is a big supplemental question. A few months back, it used to be that $25 billion was a big number. We are being bombarded with numbers now that are so far beyond our imagination that $25 billion seems like almost a mere bagatelle in terms of our long-term feature.
I will make two quick points. First, what worked in the Calgary case was a big strategy and a big goal. You might have thought that a more incremental strategy would have greater appeal, but what caught people's imagination was the boldness of a plan to end homelessness.
If the initiative had been to moderate homelessness or reduce homelessness, any of those words, the enthusiasm simply would not have been there. We would have been back into the thought process that the poor are always with us; and what can we do about it? The imagination of people was caught by the prospect of bringing an end to this concrete social issue.
This leads into Senator Segal's main question of whether poverty is a consequence of other factors or the cause of other factors. To my mind, it is obviously both, but it seems to me that for governments to address poverty as a monetary or cash deficit makes a lot of sense. Some of the other issues that swirl around poverty are much less approachable and probably much less appropriate for government intervention.
For example, poverty may emerge from marital breakdown. Poverty may encourage marital breakdown. Do we want the Government of Canada to be involved in issues of marital breakdown? I do not think so. I do not think the government has much expertise in that area.
Poverty, as a cash problem, as a cash deficit, speaks to the ability of governments to do things in an appropriate manner, and it provides points of leverage on a broad spectrum of social issues. It is not a single solution, but as a point of entry, it makes a lot of sense to me. This is why I come back to the importance of social housing as a good point of entry for a broader spectrum of social issues.
Ms. Caragata: Thank you, Senator Segal, for the engaging an important question. With respect to cause or consequence, it is both the cause and effect of poverty. Certain other circumstantial, situational factors contribute to people's poverty, and then poverty creates a whole other set of factors, including less positive health outcomes, lower educational attainment, et cetera.
It is cyclical. If you intervene at any point, you get significant change in terms of the hard economic savings to a society of reduced health care, reduced emergency-room use, higher educational attainment, better child outcomes, et cetera.
I also want to point to some of the social fabric issues that need to be on the table. Many of the European Union countries have paid and are increasingly paying attention to the ideas of social inclusion and social exclusion. In our research, we are seeing women whose children have never, up to the age of 14, participated in a swimming program or played baseball after school, et cetera. They are quite isolated, to say nothing of the skills deficits they have that their peers do not have, and they are never likely to catch up. A cost is associated with that. Those kids begin to feel as though they do not have a stake in Canadian society the same way that others have. However, I am not sure that a public appeal to raise welfare so that some children can play baseball on Saturday would sell. On the other hand, the grand vision of moving Canadians out of poverty, with the economic and social savings that would follow, has real merit.
In terms of costs, it would be possible to cost much of that, but an easy way of understanding the cost implications and savings is to look to some of the countries to see whether there is limited economic disparity. We can readily find reduced health care costs, higher levels of educational attainment and higher levels of workforce attachment. There are ways to mount that case.
Senator Keon: I am delighted to have an opportunity to interface with you, Dr. Gibbins, before you leave, because I fundamentally disagree with what you said. I think that throwing large sums of money at housing in isolation is a mistake. You will not improve the overall well-being of the communities, in Calgary or anywhere else, with an isolated duck flying north. You are into a very complex social program. In the short term, if you can get an improvement in the overall housing situation in Calgary, that is great, but I think you are going about it all wrong.
If you do not build communities of good health, well-being and productivity, your housing will fall apart because the people who will occupy those houses will not have the proper education or the proper empowerment of women, et cetera, that is necessary to raise the bar in the social well-being of people who are deprived, poor and so forth.
I hope that you will give this more thought. There is no question that you are to be highly commended for getting involved in this initiative. We can build a lot of housing in Canada before we come anywhere near producing the required targets. However, much more important than building houses is building them in the right place, in the right context, in the overall context of social well-being and in the overall context of improving population health, well-being and productivity. We have to build communities of productivity. If you just build houses and let people occupy them, you will not get the job done.
I would like to hear your response to that.
Mr. Gibbins: I am happy to respond, and then I will apologize for having to leave the conversation.
I do not believe that we fundamentally disagree. The issue, to my mind, is how to achieve a point of access into a very difficult social issue. My concern is that if you come to an audience — and I will use the Calgary business audience as an example, but I do not think they are atypical in this — and tell them that it is imperative to do something, but that before we can move forward, we have to improve health, empower women and improve the level of education in Canada, people tend to leave the room because the problem becomes so big and complex that the steps forward become difficult.
My sense of the people who will push the housing first is that they are not ignoring in any way the issues that you address. They recognize that to make this work you have to build many things around that housing initiative. If you simply create a structure, you do not go very far, and you do not go far enough. However, it becomes a platform or an opening around which you can begin to build the other kinds of things that you identify as being so important.
To my mind, I see our difference being not in an understanding of poverty but a tactical difference in terms of how you begin to get some effective community and political leverage on a very complex problem without scaring people away or having them say, "This is so big, so difficult that I will just go back and worry about meeting my payroll and my thoughts will go elsewhere."
The Chair: Thank you very much, Dr. Gibbins. We appreciate you being here.
Mr. Gibbins: Thank you for the opportunity.
Senator Keon: I thank you too, sir, even though I would like to talk to you at length some day.
Mr. Gibbins: We will find that chat some other time.
Ms. Torjman: Thank you for your comments and your question, because quite frankly we could not agree with you more.
Recently we wrote a short paper called Put Your Money Where Your Wealth Is, and it was the argument for investment in social infrastructure in communities and neighbourhoods, including social housing, but the other social amenities to which I referred.
You had an interesting conversation with Dr. Gibbins in the sense that, to me, it speaks very clearly to the need for a poverty strategy with many different components at its core. It can be strong income security, and that is a role that the federal government clearly can play and play very well. However, many other related components also need to fit in, one of which is social housing. The other is affordable high-quality child care, or investment at least in that supply, and, as I was speaking about before, the investment in other social amenities that create healthy communities. We know from a burgeoning literature on health, the importance of the quality of place. That is becoming a very powerful evidence base.
At the community level where Dr. Gibbins is working, when you bring a group of people together, business people and the voluntary sector and citizens, you do have to take a piece out and you have to focus on a specific aspect in order to get something done in the community.
However, this problem speaks very much to the need for a broad strategy, and we do not have that in the country. Why do we not have that when so many provinces are talking about that now? When they are recognizing that this is how we have to think, when we have Nova Scotia, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Newfoundland and Labrador looking at poverty strategies and other provinces exploring these areas, why do we not have this type of thinking federally where we really would need this leadership and putting together the parts?
Thank you very much for talking about those other components because we certainly support what you are saying and have written to that effect.
The Chair: Dr. Caragata, did you have anything to add?
Ms. Caragata: Very quickly just to support Ms. Torjman's comment and add that the most effective social housing we have built in this country is social housing built as a part of a process; working with communities in their development rather than simply laying on bricks and mortar. I agree with you that often that type of social housing has led to all type of other problems.
Senator Keon: Chair, I have a small supplemental.
The Chair: It will have to be very small because we are running out of time.
Senator Keon: I want to make a point to you, Ms. Caragata. You should raise the bar for what is needed for empowerment of women both in our country and globally. We talk about social problems and about environment and so forth. Most of these problems would be solved if women were empowered to do what they want, to be free.
The reason I raise it is that I am particularly interested in motherhood, in good motherhood as opposed to bad motherhood, and I think all women would be good mothers if they were empowered.
Ms. Caragata: I could not agree with you more, and I am happy to take up the challenge.
Senator Dyck: Thank you for your presentations, ladies.
I am from Saskatchewan, and we are in a unique situation currently in that Saskatchewan is leading the nation in terms of economic growth; however, I do think that the recession will hit us sooner rather than later.
At the same time, though, Saskatchewan is one of the provinces with a high percentage of Aboriginal peoples — First Nations and Metis, primarily. We have the on-reserve and off-reserve issues, and I was very much intrigued, Professor Caragata, with your comments about vulnerable groups.
I had the pleasure of attending a conference in Winnipeg last fall on poverty. A number of women from the community who were on welfare were there and shared their stories. One of the things they said, of course, is that they had to make choices. They do not have enough money for food; they do not have enough money for their rent; they have no money to send their kids to figure skating or hockey or whatever; and, on top of that, they had the invasiveness of the welfare department, or whoever they were dealing with, invading their lives, trying to find out if they had additional sources of income; and then there were the clawbacks.
What should we do about the welfare? Should we try to increase the rates? Should we try to decrease the pervasive inquisitiveness into people's personal lives? Should there be a mechanism whereby when a woman attempts to improve her economic situation, her resources are not cut back? Otherwise it becomes a disincentive to try to improve her life because the moment she tries to get ahead, she loses something. Is there a strategy to get around the trap a woman can fall into? It is similar to a Catch-22 situation.
Ms. Caragata: Absolutely. You have said it very eloquently. It is indeed a trap that women fall into, and numerous quotations are in the brief, which I provided you, of women who tell a story about getting a job. They are pleased to get a job, but they lose their drug benefits; they perhaps have a disabled child; they get a job in the precarious labour market that requires after-hours daycare, and pretty soon an entire house of cards falls apart.
I am glad you raised the welfare surveillance issue. It is a major factor for people in terms of the insecurity of their income. Some interesting international data show that it is not even so much family income that has important impacts in terms of child well-being, but it is the security of family income that has very important dimensions on child well- being.
Welfare has become, in Canada, very insecure. Women report cheques being held because they did not get a form in, so they never know whether they will have enough money. It is imperative that we develop a strategy that provides reliable benefits and encourages labour-market attachment without then immediately stripping away the welfare benefit or the income security benefit, whatever its form. That will provide people with the security to move into the labour market, which may be a while coming because no one will be moving into the labour market too rapidly right now. However, at least it enables people maybe to keep those part-time jobs they have right now. Lone mothers particularly are afraid of exceeding the cut-off at which they then lose their benefit because many lone mothers either have children who or they themselves need various drug benefits. The very second they lose that drug benefit then they cannot stay in the labour market.
A whole set of factors really compound the day-to-day lives of people, the juggling of benefits. The CCTB is fantastic in terms of a benefit that people can count on. As welfare benefits have been reduced by those amounts, people have to juggle: They will get X amount from welfare and X amount maybe from CCTB, but then maybe their welfare cheque will not come. It becomes a very complex budgeting process.
If we could do something to put in place some income security for people, we would see huge outcomes in terms of family well-being.
Ms. Torjman: I just wanted to respond briefly because in 1985, I wrote a report for the National Council of Welfare called Welfare in Canada: The Tangled Safety Net.
It was so terrible at that time that to obtain any information about the system in order to write about it, I had to get a lawyer's letter to protect me, to ask permission to approach the provinces and to obtain information about how much these benefits were worth. It was a shocking system.
We have some information now, as you know, about the welfare system, but it does not make us feel any better about how it operates. Welfare was never intended to act as a long-term guaranteed income for people across the country. That is not its purpose. It was intended as a last resort, an emergency and safety net when everything else failed, and it has become a frontline program. Fifty per cent of the welfare caseload across Canada, for example, is composed of people with severe disabilities. That makes no sense. Why is it serving in that capacity? For single parents, there is a huge problem. It is not the program that was intended to act as a long-term income security program.
What do we do? Quite frankly, we are trying to take it apart. We are trying to dismantle it piece by piece to the extent that we can ensure that other adequate components are in place. One of those components is the Canada Child Tax Benefit, which effectively was meant to take children off welfare. We are trying to get people off welfare.
We have a whole other set of proposals around people with severe disabilities and how to take them off welfare. They should not be on it. It makes no sense. We have talked about a Guaranteed Income Supplement-type approach for those people.
The other associated pieces include an affordable high-quality child care program. You cannot move off welfare unless you have access to that. The portability of health-related and supplementary benefits afforded through welfare has to be moved out. We have written extensively about getting out those extended health care benefits that keep people on the system and that actually tie them in there. If you have any type of additional health costs or if you have young children, it makes sense economically to stay on welfare, which makes no sense. Therefore, we need to take that out and make those portions portable, such as dental care for children, for example, or access to disability support. People should not be required to stay on welfare in order to have access to those benefits. That is where the investment in social housing also comes into play.
We need a number of components if we really want to dismantle that program, which is inadequate, creates rules that are terrible for people and really does nothing to prevent poverty; the program just reinforces poverty.
Senator Cordy: Thank you both so much. It is always wonderful to hear you speaking about this. It is not a job for you; it is a lifestyle and a passion.
I love your stories, Dr. Caragata, because they really tell us the importance of dealing with the whole issue of poverty. I very much liked the idea you talked about with respect to social inclusion. I used to be an elementary schoolteacher in middle-class areas and in very low-income areas, and I saw the challenges that were faced by people living in poverty. Parents would be reluctant to come to parent-teacher meetings because school was never a good place for them, so the whole cycle begins because the parents are not involved in the school. As teachers, we used to say that the kids whose parents were involved were the kids who would be successful. It is all out there.
Following on Senator Dyck's comments about getting off the cycle, I always get this picture in my mind of a little hamster running on the wheel and the hamster cannot get off. We seem to have put these programs in place federally and provincially so that it is enough to help people minimally, but not enough to get them off the system and off welfare, which carries a whole stigma, which again leads to social exclusion of the family, the parents and the children.
We talked about the Calgary model, where they are building houses, which is good, but it is not a program to help alleviate poverty and to help families. It gives them a place to live, which is a starting point.
You talked about provincial models within Canada. I am from Nova Scotia, and it is great to see that something is being started; the document and the talk is good, but, unfortunately, no funding is in the budget, which really tells the tale.
Are there good models within Canada? I know you mentioned a model in Norway where parents who are separated from marriage receive a one-year financial incentive — incentive is probably not the right word — a financial package so that they do not have to immediately sell their homes. You told stories about that in your written brief.
Are there good models that we should be looking at? The gentleman from Calgary talked about the first step when speaking to business people. Where do we go when we are looking at a national program?
Ms. Caragata: Ms. Torjman may have better knowledge of this area than I do. One of the real problems we are facing in Canada now is that there is no place to look for a national strategy. We have individual components that work better than others, and that is about the best we can say. Let me just pick up on one tiny element of the issue, and that is that Newfoundland remains one of the only provinces in Canada that actively enables lone mothers on social assistance to go to college or university and hence obtain the skill training that will enable them to get off of social assistance. That used to be in place across the country, but, one by one, provinces eliminated that under some short- sighted idea that it was double-dipping, even though accumulating student-loan debt does not seem to me like a huge social benefit. That made a real difference to people.
Among the panel of women we are interviewing every eight to twelve months in Newfoundland, we have now seen six people enrolled in degree programs that will get them jobs. Once they get those jobs, they are off the system; yet, it is that sort of longer-term thinking that we seem to be so bad at. We need to recognize that poverty in Canada is about vulnerability, as Senator Dyck has said.
We need to begin to look first at women as a vulnerable population, then look at Aboriginal women, visible- minority women as increasingly vulnerable and visible-minority men, et cetera. We have these pockets of marginalization, and we require a re-think of what the system should look like in order to address the profound levels of poverty.
Thinking more broadly and being slightly more economically focused, Canada does not do well on skills training or on the high value-added, non-basement types of jobs that we pride ourselves on. We need a skills training strategy that accompanies a poverty alleviation strategy so that we can move to building a high-value workforce of people who want to engage in and are trained to engage in the labour market.
Ms. Torjman: Thank you for your question. I agree; there is not one place in the country to which we can look as a model, unfortunately, but we can cite some important elements and some exemplary practices.
For example, the child care in Quebec is always looked at as a model for the rest of the country. Parenting and literacy centres in Toronto have done a very good job with new Canadians. There are some programs such as Pathways to Education, for example, in some communities in Toronto, such as Regent Park, where we know there are successes, and we should be building on that. In P.E.I., they have taken out disability supports from the welfare system and made it a portable program. We also have the Canada Child Tax Benefit and other income-tested programs. We need work, but we have some of the elements in place. We know where there is good practice and the areas upon which we should build.
One component that we have not really focused on is how actual communities are trying to reduce poverty in various ways, where they come together and create plans to reduce poverty. Often times, they find that they are up against government rules and funding that makes it very difficult for them to operate in this way. They have a grant that is for one year only; they cannot get a longer-term grant. They have a grant that may be to produce a report such as this rather than to say how many more people are included in this community because those are considered to be too "soft" as outcomes and not adequate from the perspective of what we are looking for for our financing. Effectively, we put in place barriers for some communities to do really good work that is underway across the country. They struggle against the funding rules, including government rules, that actually make it difficult for them to do their job.
We have written on what we call the enabling environment, which would make it easier for communities to get involved and become engaged in some of these very significant poverty reduction initiatives, as well as government.
The Chair: You have mentioned some best practices, and I am sure you have done analysis of a number of them. We know some of them and have had some of them here, but if you have a list or a catalogue or something, that could be quite helpful.
Ms. Torjman: Yes; we will get in touch.
The Chair: It would be good to have it.
Senator Cordy: Looking at the whole issue of training — and this is not just against this government because it does not matter what political party it is — large amounts of money have been misspent on training. In Nova Scotia, when the fisheries industry was going down, small communities were training 30 and 40 hairdressers. For the community, this was great, but no one could afford to go to the hairdresser anyway, nor would they have needed 40 hairdressers for 400 people.
How will we use our training? There does not seem to be a program. This budget has a large sum of money in it for training. That is a positive thing, but how will we ensure that the money for training is well used? Dr. Caragata, you talked earlier about a woman who said that the program for training women for non-traditionally female jobs worked in this woman's case. However, in some ways we have said, "Well, women have it all now, so we do not need these programs."
What do we have to do to ensure that the money will be spent effectively on training? I do not believe that is happening; it is training people for low-income jobs or jobs that they will never find. When they finish the training, there is no hope of getting a job in that field.
Ms. Caragata: Senator Cordy, I could not agree with you more, and I thank you for raising the issue. One of our partners in our Lone Mother's: Building Social Inclusion, this research project, is the social services department of the City of Toronto, the fourth-largest welfare-delivery body in the country, and they have an enormous training budget that they fully expend. In my humble view — and I wish my partners were here so they would know I was saying it, but I have said it to them many times — it is wasted money because they train lone mothers to be personal support workers. When do personal support workers work? Often, they work at off-hours when lone mothers because of the absence of child care, as Ms. Torjman pointed out, cannot possibly be there, and on and on. In the brief that I gave you, I think you will find a quote about people being trained for "rinky-dink jobs."
I would like to know the total amount of Canadian tax dollars spent to train people for jobs that will neither build to a national skills strategy, because I do not think we have one, nor build at a micro-level to those people becoming sustainably attached to the labour market. We need those two things. We need a national skills strategy and a clear idea as a country of what it is that we want to build for in terms of labour markets; then we need to apply that.
With respect to women in those roles, women are now re-concentrated in the same female-dominated professions in numbers that are equivalent percentage-wise to those of the 1950s. We know that those are low-paid work in education and in health care. We are training women for personal support worker jobs. You raise a very critical question.
Ms. Torjman: Some of the work we have done in the area of training has to do with customized training, where we are looking for training around demand-driven areas. This would be a very local approach, and we have explained how that would work building on some of the excellent work that is actually underway in communities across the country, where we identify market-relevant needs in communities and we do customized training around those needs; that is one component.
A second component has to do with the areas where we know we have impending labour shortages and where we actually have some shortages right now. Nursing is one example, and electricians would be another example, as are many of the apprenticeships and skilled trades. We know that we have current and impending shortages.
We also know what those areas are because when we ask people to come into the country on the basis of immigration, we have a list of positions where we are looking for people and looking for skills to be filled. We can use those guidelines as an area to do training.
A third area where we have to do intelligent training is around emerging areas where we know that if we are to be competing effectively in a knowledge economy, we must be training around biotechnology and emerging technologies. It is very difficult, actually, to get training in some of those emerging areas. Just a few years ago, a local college closed a biotechnology program because not enough people were enrolled. However, it is just in an emerging area. We will always have that because it is coming on-stream. Therefore, to some extent, we have to make that facility available and build up the student base and the clientele to do that. We have to make an investment that may at the beginning be a loss, but we have to identify those areas where we will be able to compete in a knowledge economy and make those investments in training.
There are three pillars or components to the training that we have to do.
The Chair: Returning to the subject of homelessness — and I am sorry that Dr. Gibbins is no longer with us — I was in Calgary a few weeks ago at a national conference on homelessness and learned more about the Calgary program. Ten-year programs are suddenly cropping up, not just here in Canada, but in the United States, and much of it appears to be based on the model created by Philip Mangano in the United States, although I think Calgary told me that they got theirs from the U.K. It does not matter.
I find two aspects about this intriguing and beneficial. Business cases have been developed that outline how much it costs the system for a homeless person to go to the hospital emergency continually, to go into the justice system, for police involvement, et cetera. They actually had some statistics for those costs, and a homeless person could probably be housed in a luxury condo for cheaper. I am not advocating that but just saying that the building of the business case helps to sell it to the community.
It also helps to sell it to the business community, obviously, because the business community became involved in Calgary. Some people might ask if that will really work. Many of the business people will bring their market discipline concepts to the table and the idea that we have these targets that we have to meet, and eliminating homelessness in 10 years is a pretty powerful target. If they buy into the business-case argument and put their shoulders to the wheel to help to make it happen together with other people in the community — not business entirely, of course, but all sorts of other people in the community — then it appears to have some merit.
Could you comment on the programming that Calgary has, which, as I say, seems to come from the Mangano formula?
Ms. Torjman: It is fantastic, and that is what we should be doing. Any poverty reduction effort should involve governments at different levels and the community. We are not just talking about a government approach, or federal, provincial or even municipal alone; we are talking about what every sector can do, both individually and together. The Calgary model is fantastic. It is an example of what a community can do around a complex problem by taking one component of it and working on it in depth.
In our view, we need a whole set of initiatives at different levels. We have been tracking, in much of our work, what communities across the country are doing in their respective areas. In some cases, they have taken housing as an issue. In other cases, they have taken single parents and are trying to working in depth with single parents. Other communities have educational goals. In other areas, they have selected crime prevention. We have documented many of these. For example, I brought the book, Shared Space: The Communities Agenda, which talks about how communities are becoming involved by bringing different sectors together and creating comprehensive plans. They cannot do this on their own; they need investment in social infrastructure and adequate income security because they are not replacing those fundamental public investments.
In this book and in a report called Community Roles in Policy, I have written extensively about the "business case and the evidence base." That was a section on where to get the evidence and how to build the case to actually convince people that this is worthwhile, that this is an important vision and that we need to come on board and work together to tackle this. It is actually a crucial part of the bigger and broader picture that you raise, and thank you for pointing that out.
The Chair: What is the state of funding for the Vibrant Communities initiative?
Ms. Torjman: That has been funded by a wide range of different sources. The Vibrant Communities project, for those of you not familiar with it, is a pan-Canadian, poverty reduction initiative in which 15 cities came together in a learning partnership to try to find local solutions to reduce poverty. Each is involved in something very different, but they are learning together.
The financing for that primarily came and still does come from private foundations, notably the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and the Maytree Foundation in Toronto. Other sources of financing, including the federal government, came on board later in terms of helping along. They were not the primary funder. In fact, the project did not want government to be the primary funder in the first instance and made an explicit decision not to approach government because of the rules and procedures to which I referred before that would effectively tie their hands and make it impossible to follow their principles.
The Chair: Are their investments and endowments, et cetera, suffering from this downturn?
Ms. Torjman: Each community is struggling. The communities themselves have to match the national investment. That is part of the deal; if they come on board, they have to match it. They are suffering from the problems facing the voluntary sector, generally, in terms of the United Way and community foundations being able to raise money and disburse it locally.
Ms. Caragata: With respect to the long-term perspective, specifically the idea that Calgary will eliminate homelessness in a 10-year period. It is the idea of that long-term plan. If you think about Canadian history, as I am sure you do, most of our big nation-building successes have come from that longer-term planning.
For example, in 1968, Sweden decided that it would eliminate homelessness and put in place a 10-year national plan to build a million homes, and they did it.
We have tended to move away from long-term planning, in that we do incremental changes that we can do right now, but we do not build a national consensus about a long-term goal. If we are to address social housing and poverty issues, it will come because we really build a national consensus.
I spent 20 years as a front-line community developer building social housing before I ever became an academic, so I could not agree more that one has to engage communities. However, it is the idea of building a public discourse that says that we can do something about this and that it is in our self-interest. That is where the business case comes in because it is in our self-interest. We can put those numbers together.
The Chair: On that note, we will close this meeting. Thank you all very much for having participated in this discussion. From my perspective, you have indicated well, as have others before you, that the system is broken. The question is how we go about fixing it.
You have given us food for thought on how we can do that. That goes into our system, and we will try to figure that all out and build that consensus.
(The committee adjourned.)