Proceedings of the Subcommittee on Cities
Issue 4 - Evidence, June 5, 2009
OTTAWA, Friday, June 5, 2009
The Subcommittee on Cities of the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 9:04 a.m. to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chair) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chair: Welcome to the Subcommittee on Cities which is examining poverty, housing and homelessness.
[English]
Today we are having a round table discussion about national strategies on poverty, housing and homelessness. As you know, last June, after quite a number of hearings, we produced an issues and options paper on this subject. Many of the people who came before the committee, both on our road trips and here in Ottawa, said let us have a national strategy on poverty; let us have a national strategy on housing and on homelessness.
We will explore further today how we should develop our recommendations relevant to the federal government dealing with these issues. We will consider whether it should be called a national strategy or whether another approach should be taken.
In moving forward, we are hoping to complete our hearings by the end of this month. Then over the summer, the report will be put together. We should have a draft report ready by the time the Senate and its committees resume again around the third week of September.
It is my hope that the report will have some specific recommendations in the short to medium term that will deal with some of the biggest immediate challenges in terms of the most vulnerable in our society. We have heard many people talk about the need for quick action in a number of areas that we will recommend.
In our travels and in the hearings we have had, we have seen a number of promising practices; some people call them best practices. We will want to talk a bit about those, not that there is any cookie-cutter approach to any of these things, but there are certainly aspects to them that could be helpful in other parts of the country as well.
Finally, we will deal with the issue of an overhaul of the social assistance system and various aspects that relate to poverty, housing and homelessness. We are starting from the premise that the system is broken and needs fixing.
That will be coming in the fall. Meanwhile, we are trying to finalize how we work into this national strategies issue, and that is the purpose of our meeting here today.
I will introduce everyone. This will ultimately be televised on CPAC. I cannot guarantee what time of the night or day it will be on. I know people with insomnia have told me they see this in the middle of the night, but we do have other hours we can get on.
Moving around the table, I will introduce everyone first and then get the discussion under way. Mr. Steve Pomeroy, President of Focus Consulting Inc., has completed studies on the cost of homelessness for the cities of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Kitchener-Waterloo, Ottawa and Halifax. I have used quotes from his reports many times in talking about the business case or the economic case relevant to these issues, particularly on housing and homelessness.
Senator Segal is from Kingston, Ontario.
Mr. Phil Brown is next to him. I have known him for many years because he is from Toronto. He is General Manager, Shelter, Support and Housing Administration at the City of Toronto. He is also from the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association. Established in 1968, the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association is a national non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and strengthening the social housing sector.
Next is Michael Shapcott, Director of Community Engagement for the Wellesly Institute, which is an independent, non-profit research and policy institute working to advance health equity through community-based research, community engagement, social innovation and policy development.
Next is Alina Tanasescu from the Calgary Homeless Foundation. She is the Manager of Research and Public Policy at the foundation. The Calgary Homeless Foundation works to end homelessness in Calgary. They have a 10-year plan to do that, as you probably know.
Rob Rainer has been before this committee on other occasions. He is the Executive Director of Canada Without Poverty. The organization was established in 1971 as the National Anti-Poverty Organization, as we know. It is an incorporated, not-for-profit, non-partisan, member-based organization dedicated to the eradication of poverty in Canada.
Margaret Eberle, who is here as an individual as opposed to as a representative for an organization, is a housing policy consultant at Eberle Planning and Research. They have conducted socio-economic impact assessments and housing policy research since 1984. She operates an independent consulting practice in housing policy and research. She has completed extensive work in both fields for government and non-government clients.
On the other side of the table, we come to David Seymour and Charles W. Hill. Charles Hill is the Executive Director and David Seymour is Director, both of the National Aboriginal Housing Association, advocates on behalf of non-reserve Aboriginal housing providers in cities, towns and the North.
Next is David Snow, who is also here as an individual. He is a former intern with the Canada West Foundation. He did some research work on poverty when he was with the foundation, and his research interests include the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Supreme Court of Canada and the intersection of law and politics. That is another perspective.
Sheila Regehr is also here, and she has been before this committee on other occasions. She is the Director of the National Council of Welfare. The mandate of the National Council of Welfare is to advise the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development about any matters related to social development.
Then there is my colleague, Senator Cordy, who is from Nova Scotia. We are also expecting Senator Keon, from Ontario. He should be here very shortly; he has another meeting.
I am Senator Eggleton and I am the chair of the committee. Keli Hogan is our clerk, and we have Havi Echenberg and Robin Wisener, our researchers from the Library of Parliament research group.
Let us get into it. We do have a bit of a guide piece of paper here. It tells us of three different themes. Theme 1 is essentially this: Do you agree that a national strategy should be recommended to the federal government? Why should it or why not, if you do not agree? If you do agree, what should be included from the federal government perspective in such a strategy? That is what we will deal with first.
The second and third themes deal with the provincial government coordination and then finally the local government coordination.
Let us start off with Theme 1 about a national strategy, the federal government perspective and such a strategy. There are timelines on the left side of the sheet, which we do not have to adhere to too rigidly. The whole idea is to be adjourned by 1:30 p.m.
I will go around the table first and we can get opening comments and thoughts on these questions from each of you. You may have come prepared to say something initially anyway, so we want to get that on the table as well. Then, from there on, we will just jump all over the place, depending on who wants to get in on whatever. I will go over to this side and start with Mr. Pomeroy.
Steve Pomeroy, President, Focus Consulting Inc.: Thank you. Those who know me would probably be surprised at my answer to this particular question. First, because of the way the question is framed as a discussion on poverty, housing and homelessness, I am struggling a little bit because that is a very broad set of issues in terms of whether we are talking about a single strategy on housing, homelessness and poverty or separate strategies. We need to come back to that later on in the discussion.
In my narrow focus in the work that I have been doing around housing and homelessness and a need for a national strategy, I have written five or six versions of this for various clients over the last 10 years. As a consequence, it causes me some pause on this question rather than saying the things I have said all along.
Ten years on, no one is listening — or maybe they have listened but were not able to do anything about it. Why is that? Why have we not been able to implement a national strategy in this area? I suspect it is because it is an extremely complex and complicated area, with multiple jurisdictions and agencies at all three levels of all government, and it is very difficult to get everyone on the same page on this. Maybe we are chasing the Holy Grail, so to speak. It is difficult to get everyone coordinated on that.
I am hedging my bets around the question of whether we should recommend a national strategy. I think we absolutely need some kind of mechanism or framework to get everyone focusing on the same outcomes and same goals, on a larger vision. However, I think it will be very difficult to actually put together a strategy.
In theory, the notion of a comprehensive framework or strategy — whatever title you want to give to it — makes sense. Certainly it is a good idea to have some long-range targets and outcomes you want to achieve, and everyone from various sectors, whether working in homelessness on the front lines or in policy agencies, can work towards those targets. I think that absolutely makes some sense. However, it is a challenge at the national level to arrive at a point of actually having a single document saying, ``This is our strategy on this.''
We have seen a number of localities successfully develop strategies. The City of Toronto has released a comprehensive strategy on housing and homelessness, called Housing Opportunities Toronto. Calgary has their 10-year plan, and a number of other cities do, as well. The Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, HRSDC, Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, the SCPI program — now the Homelessness Partnering Strategy — has required 10-year plans or community plans as a way to coordinate agencies and funding at the local level.
It is extremely effective to have strategies locally and possibly even provincially. Whether you can do it nationally very much begs the question.
I should say for the record that there is a myth being perpetuated by a number of advocates and indeed members of the house that Canada is the only industrialized country without a national housing strategy. That is absolutely incorrect. In the work I have done, there is not an English-speaking country in the world that actually has a national housing strategy in the sense of a comprehensive strategy.
Many programs and strategic directions have been articulated by the government in the U.K., where there are significant funding initiatives going on, but not in a single comprehensive strategy. It is the same in the U.S. New Zealand is the only country I can name that actually has a national strategy.
There are some interesting things, both good and bad, going on in different countries. I am not necessarily sure whether that suggests that having a strategy is a prerequisite to doing it right, as long as you have, first, a clear sense of where you want to get to and, second, at the local level — possibly the provincial, as well — some strategic framework for which federal funding could be allocated.
The Chair: Thank you very much. If you want to make comments based on the whole thing — poverty, housing and homelessness, a national strategy on a wide range of things within that umbrella — that is fine. Also, if you think there should be, perhaps, a national strategy on housing, but not necessarily on poverty, or just on certain elements, feel free to make those kinds of distinctions, as well as anything else that you feel should fit into this.
Phil Brown, Board member, Canadian Housing and Renewal Association: Thank you very much for inviting the Canadian Housing and Renewal Association, CHRA, to be part of this discussion. Today, nationwide, we have billions of dollars in federal-provincial-territorial investments to create new affordable housing and address homelessness. Those monies have been committed over the next two to five years. We have not seen this level of new investment for nearly two decades. It is desperately needed. However, while these investments are very welcome, they do not lessen the need for a long-term, fully funded national affordable housing framework.
In our recently produced discussion paper on the need for and development of a national housing policy framework, CHRA identified four key ways that the argument can be made for the need for a national framework: moral, legal, economic and social.
A caring society has a responsibility to ensure that the basic human needs of all citizens are met, including the need for decent and appropriate shelter. From a legal perspective, Canada is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which affirms the right of everyone to an adequate standard of living, including housing.
There are also strong social and economic rationales for investing in affordable housing. It is a significant component of household and societal economies. New residential construction has a substantial and direct economic impact through the creation of ongoing employment. Today, the potential exists to develop green technologies and green jobs through investment in the upgrading and retrofit of existing older rental housing to extend its useful life and energy efficiency.
A number of studies have concluded that investments in providing housing for homeless people, particularly the chronically homeless, actually save the government money. Households in overcrowded or inadequate housing in marginalized neighbourhoods may be more likely to experience health problems and safety issues and require greater social service supports. Investments in affordable housing can reduce these costs elsewhere in the service system. The cost of inaction can be higher than the cost to provide housing.
Historically, we viewed affordable housing as a cost, not as an investment. That is a key point that needs to change. We invest in social or affordable housing for a great many returns. A dollar invested in social and affordable housing by governments can be one of the best investments that can be made.
CHRA believes there are three key priority issues that require government attention as part of a fully realized national policy framework. First is the critical need to work toward ending homelessness rather than managing it. The Housing First approach to moving people directly from the street or shelters into stable housing with appropriate supports is federally endorsed already. It is a pillar upon which a national housing policy should be built. As we say in our Streets to Home program in Toronto, give someone the safety, security and dignity of a home before all else.
Second, we need a decisive policy response to keep much of the existing social housing affordable to people on low incomes. We strongly recommend that the federal government reinvest funds from expiring social housing mortgages back into social housing to ensure the ongoing availability of affordable housing for Canadians.
Third, the downturn in private rental development, which has been ongoing for some time, can be traced to changes in the tax system that governments are in a position to address as part of a national housing policy framework.
CHRA agrees that the creation of a national housing framework should be recommended to the federal government. Left to their own devices, markets are not the solution to the housing affordable issues facing many Canadians.
We believe the federal role should be enabling rather than prescriptive. The federal government should provide an upfront commitment of funding and set broad system goals through a national housing strategy that is flexible enough to take into account regional variations and allows provinces and local communities to set priorities that meet local needs.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We have now in front of us three questions I want to focus on for our round table. We are dealing with the first question. We will subsequently cover provincial and local coordination. Next we have Mr. Shapcott.
Michael Shapcott, Director, Affordable Housing and Social Innovation, Wellesley Institute: Thank you. The Wellesley Institute is an independent research and policy institute based in Toronto. I head our research and policy practice on affordable housing. We work at the national, provincial and local levels. We also work in an informal partnership with community-based housing organizations across the country. The Calgary Homeless Foundation is one of our active partners. We have partners from St. John's all the way to Victoria. We are working to formalize that network, but that is an ongoing process.
We canvassed members of our network before today's session about the questions you have set for us today. On the first question of whether there a national strategy, the consensus is no, there is not. There is a patchwork of programs and funding that exist. They are poorly coordinated. They exist at the federal, provincial, territorial and municipal levels. There are also private sector and charitable initiatives. They do not work well together.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was an erosion of funding programs, services and legislation at the national level. The federal government decided to transfer the administration of most federal affordable housing programs to the provinces and territories in the late 1990s. That is what prompted a number of housing academics such as Professor Wolfe from McGill University to say that Canada no longer has a national housing plan. Other academics, like Professor David Hulchanski of the University of Toronto and Professor Tom Carter of the University of Winnipeg, have written extensively about the fractured state of housing policy in Canada.
I do not want to get into a boring, pedantic discussion with Mr. Pomeroy about where Canada stands relative to other countries. However, the fact is many other countries have much more extensive, comprehensive and coordinated strategies, even countries with federal systems like Canada. We are far behind.
Do we need a national strategy? Yes, we do. I will give three brief rationales for why we need a national strategy and how we build one.
First, Canada has a series of obligations in international law. Canada is currently being reviewed by the United Nations Human Rights Council under a process called the Universal Periodic Review. All of its human rights obligations are reviewed, including the right to adequate housing. This is set out not only in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, to which Canada is a signatory, but also dozens of other international treaties and legal instruments.
In February, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, the senior United Nations official and expert on housing issues, tabled at the Human Rights Committee his report from his official fact-finding mission to Canada that took place in 2007. In that report, he noted that Canada is not meeting its international housing obligations, and he called for a national housing strategy.
I have attended some of the hearings in Geneva and elsewhere over the last 15 to 20 years where Canada's international housing rights obligations have been reviewed. At various times during those sessions, this question has been put to the Canadian ambassador or the Canadian representatives: Does the federal government say that, because of the federal nature of Canada, the obligation to meet the right to housing rests at the federal level, or is it a provincial territorial jurisdiction? In other words, is the federal government saying that it is not really their responsibility but the responsibility of some other order of government? The Canadian representatives consistently said they do not take the view in the international tribunals that the federal nature of our government means that the federal government has no obligation to meet the various commitments it has made.
There are two parts to the international covenant in respect of the right to housing and some of the other issues currently under consideration around homelessness and poverty. One part is the right to adequate shelter and the other part is the obligation on the part of the government to assist in the realization of that. The United Nations says that does not mean that the government has to do everything; it just means that the government has to ensure it gets done, through the use of a variety of tools, such as private market tools, affordable home ownership programs, private rental programs, social housing programs or others. Later in the discussion I will suggest some tools that we think are particularly relevant for the federal government to discharge its obligation.
The first rationale for a national housing strategy is that Canada has clear international obligations that it needs to discharge and it is seen by the international community as failing to discharge those obligations. In four or five days, the federal government will be releasing its official response to the latest Universal Periodic Review of Canada's obligations. In this review process, questions have again been raised about whether Canada has met its obligations. I believe that on June 9 the federal government is obliged to issue its formal reply, and then the process continues in Geneva.
The second rationale for a national housing strategy is that, historically, we have had national plans in one form or another and a number of them have been quite successful. A couple of plans have not been successful, such as some of the tax-based programs; and the multiple-unit residential building proposal was not a success story in terms of generating affordable housing. However, from 1973 to 1993, our national social housing program generated 600,000 affordable homes that still provide good quality housing for people across the country. There are a number of good examples. More recently, in 1999 the federal government launched its National Homelessness Initiative, initially called the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, which more recently has been renamed the Homelessness Partnering Strategy. It has been considered a successful program but it has not been adequately funded and it does not have a national reach. The second rationale for the national government's getting involved is that has been successful in the past and continues to have initiatives that make a real difference.
The third rationale for the federal government's having a role is of course that there is the affordable housing crisis, and included within that, there is deep and persistent homelessness across the country. That is a national phenomenon that requires national leadership. September 2005 was the last time the federal, provincial and territorial housing ministers met together. At that meeting in White Point, Nova Scotia, they issued a set of principles that they all agreed on: the White Point principles on developing a framework for a new national housing plan that identified roles for the federal government and for the provincial and territorial governments. Some of us have questions about some of the elements of the White Point principles. We do not think they are necessarily all perfect, but the notion that there could be a cooperative arrangement seems to be a good one.
There has been one meeting since then. The federal government decided not to participate at the meeting in February 2008 in Vancouver. The next federal-provincial-territorial housing ministers' meeting is scheduled for August 20, 2009, in Saint John's. At this time, the federal government has not confirmed whether it will participate. The lack of meetings has prevented the White Point principles from moving forward to an actual framework on which plans can be built and funding can be released.
The third rationale for a national housing plan, then, is the important national role that the federal government has previously recognized, and we have a set of principles on which to begin to build that framework.
The Chair: Mr. Shapcott, I know you have more points to make so we will come back to you. We will hear from Ms. Alina Tanasescu.
Alina Tanasescu, Manager, Research and Public Policy, Calgary Homeless Foundation: I was looking at the new questions so I will put aside my notes to try to respond to those first. They seem to be most relevant to today's issues, and I want to build on other people's comments. Calgary has a 10-year plan. Why is that? What is the relationship between a 10-year plan at the local level and the recently announced 10-year plan at the provincial level? What is the federal role in supporting those kinds of initiatives? That is where we are coming from to this issue.
The local plan is important because we are dealing with 2,000 programs and over 140 agencies that touch homelessness in Calgary. It is extremely complex. We are at the implementation stage of a local strategy and we see how difficult it is to navigate the existing system. We talk about funding but not about the complexity of coordinating the existing funding that is available. Do we know how effective the money is we are putting into the issue? We are finding that we are not putting that funding to best use.
In terms of a plan, the best value that the federal government could provide to local communities is to be an enabler, to put the policy changes in place that would enable local communities to take action on matters that they know best.
We do not know all the complexities involved that have quadrupled homelessness four times in Calgary over the last decade. We did our first homelessness count in 1992. Before that, there was no need to do such a count. This phenomenon is happening across the country. Homelessness as we know it today was not always an issue in Canada or anywhere in the Western or developing world. Something structural is happening that is creating the precursors to what we see as a major manifestation of inequality, which is homelessness. Do we go after poverty, a housing plan, a homelessness plan? We do not separate those because they are interrelated and stem from the same issue. The question is how do we address it effectively.
In our community, we see homelessness; we feel homelessness. The public costs of homelessness are well-established in people's consciousness. The private sector and the faith communities get it. The non-profit sector obviously has been in the trenches. The government understands the cost argument, and the moral argument appeals to people.
We are pursuing a 10-year plan to end homelessness because it is measurable and touches on the aforementioned issues, but it has a strategy that can get by and can cross sectors. It is saleable. Thinking about restructuring the social assistance system from a federal perspective becomes overwhelming as a way to end poverty. Will we no longer be a capitalist nation? It is unthinkable to try to change something that is so fundamental to how our society works so that we no longer have persistent inequality. That is not to say that poverty is okay — absolutely it is not okay — but we should work to alleviate it through a plan with strategies that work and show positive results to get the buy-in to do the longer-term structural changes that need to happen. That is what we propose.
In terms of the federal government's role, we look at the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, which has representatives from the federal government's relevant departments. They coordinate federal action and federal policy changes that touch on all those departments in relation to states and local communities. They are a hub of knowledge and policy advocacy, and they become advocates at the federal level with regard to homelessness and poverty. I will say more about the council model later in the discussion, but that is our position.
Rob Rainer, Executive Director, Canada Without Poverty: Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate the opportunity to be here at this round table.
I am with the group Canada Without Property. Our legal name is still the National Anti-Poverty Organization. We expect the name change to be official very soon. As the chair mentioned, we have been around since 1971, so we have a long history with this issue. When you go back to some of our earliest newsletters, it is striking how similar the nature of the conversation was then in relation to today. In fact, our group was founded around the time of the report of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty, which brought forth many of these same issues. In a macro sense, when one looks at the country as a whole, we have actually made very little progress over 30 or 40 years.
A distinguishing feature of our group is that all of our board members are people who have experienced poverty at one point in their lives. Many of our current board members still live in low income, some with significant challenges and disabilities. In the case of one board member, a car accident cascaded her into a number of challenges, such as losing her job, a family break-up, mental health issues and so forth. Since our founding, all of our board members have that direct personal experience, and that is important as we think about how to approach these issues.
The word ``national'' is central to the subject today. We have become sensitive to how that word plays out in Quebec with respect to the possibility of a national strategy on poverty, for example. At least within some elements of Quebec, it is a bit of a non-starter if we use that word. In fact, part of the reason we have backed away from the name National Anti-Poverty Organization is that the word ``national'' is a barrier to engaging with our colleagues in Quebec. You might think about that word as you prepare your report, or perhaps have some explanatory notes to explore that important context.
Ms. Echenberg mentioned that Ms. Regehr and I are outnumbered by the housing advocates at the table here, which is definitely the case, and there is nothing wrong with that. However, I have a hard time separating a national strategy on housing from a national strategy on poverty and inequality, because the two go hand in hand. Having said that, housing is such a big piece that I think it warrants its own special focus and attention. However, if a national or pan-Canadian strategy on housing is to be developed — and I would certainly encourage that — it will be need to be closely linked to a pan-Canadian strategy on poverty.
My remarks today will be focused almost entirely on the larger theme of poverty. As to the question of whether we agree that a national strategy should be recommended to the federal government, yes, we would absolutely agree. A pan-Canadian strategy is needed to complement and support provincial and territorial strategies that themselves cannot be successful without serious, significant and enduring engagement of the federal government to help combat poverty, homelessness and social exclusion.
The need for federal engagement has been identified by at least the Newfoundland and Labrador and Ontario governments per the anti-poverty strategies of those provinces in 2006 and this year, respectively. The 2006 action plan of the Newfoundland and Labrador government, for example, of which I have a copy here, is commendable for its vision, comprehensiveness and seriousness of purpose. In this plan, they identified nine specific priority areas for federal-provincial cooperation — for example, improving programs and services for persons with disabilities; addressing justice-related issues, such as funding for civil legal aid; and increasing the availability of affordable housing.
As Mr. Shapcott mentioned, and as we will strongly reiterate here today, this issue is very much a human rights issue, both of housing and of poverty. As Mr. Shapcott mentioned, the UN Human Rights Council, in the 2009 Universal Periodic Review of Canada's human rights performance, included among its many recommendations not only the recommendation for a national strategy on housing but also to develop a national strategy to eliminate poverty.
Committing to and following through on the development of a pan-Canadian strategy would help support Canada's commitment to its international human rights obligations. Again, as Mr. Shapcott mentioned, on Tuesday of next week, Canada will report back to the UN Human Rights Council with regard to which of its many recommendations, concerning a wide range of human rights concerns, Canada will accept. I do not know what they will say with regard to a national strategy on poverty. I hope it is favourable and that it makes a commitment. We do not expect that that will be the case, but that would be our hope.
When you handed out the adjusted questions, for us it was sort of like expecting a right-hander on the mound and now we have a left-hander, and we have to deal with that. In fact, it has come in two waves today. First there was a grouping of the questions and now some different questions, for which we were not perhaps entirely prepared.
The Chair: The first grouping is virtually the same, and you have a little more time to get into the other two.
Mr. Rainer: I will move now to the federal role. The federal government should and must be a leader in combating poverty, inequality and social exclusion in Canada. The government ought to convene and help support the relevant parties in a process to develop the comprehensive, integrated pan-Canadian strategy. This process ought to begin as soon as possible, and before the end of 2009. Factoring in the need for consultation and cooperation nationwide, the process should be able to result in the finalization of the initial pan-Canadian strategy to combat poverty by not later than the spring of 2011, if not sooner.
Further, the federal government ought to ensure that the minister responsible for the strategy reports annually on Canada's progress towards poverty elimination. I cannot recall whether it was before this committee or another Senate committee, but we have called for the establishment — and we would suggest within the Auditor General's office — of an office of the commissioner for poverty elimination in Canada to report independently, objectively and annually on Canada's progress towards poverty elimination.
I want to say a bit more about the importance of framing both housing and poverty as human rights issues, and I will speak to that a little later in the dialogue or in the final insights.
Margaret Eberle, Housing Policy Consultant, Eberle Planning and Research, as an individual: Thank you for the invitation to appear before you today. It is appropriate that the Cities Committee is looking at this topic, because in my reading of the history of affordable housing policy in Canada, much of the impetus has come from the local level.
I want to focus my remarks on topics that the committee has not heard before. I want first to invite you to consider a new way of looking at the housing affordability problem based on a housing system approach. I do that because I think this approach might be a more palatable approach to engaging the interest of the federal government and other parties in a national housing strategy.
Under the housing system approach, we see that the housing system has three components: the private rental market, the social housing sector and the ownership market. Taken together, this is the elephant that Duncan Maclennan has spoken of.
The housing system exists independent of government but can be influenced by it. Examples are financial regulations, mortgage insurance, social policy, immigration policy and land use planning.
I would argue that Canada has a national housing policy largely focused on one component of the housing system, that being the home ownership sector, and it has arguably been quite successful in promoting home ownership, through such means as the Registered Home Ownership Savings Plan and the exemption of capital gains tax on principal residence.
The other two parts of the elephant, however, the trunk and the tail, are suffering. The stock of rental housing is, at best, static, and there has been little new purpose-built rental housing in the last 30 years or so. The social housing stock is in disrepair, faces the expiry of operating agreements and has remained virtually unchanged in the last 10 or 20 years.
Canada had a healthy rental housing market and social housing sector in the past, with a clear Canadian or national role, and we arguably had a homelessness prevention policy.
What do we see today? Approximately 1.5 million Canadian households remained in core housing need in 2006 and the scale of homelessness appears unchanged, although largely unknowable, and has significant demonstrated costs to society.
I recently completed a study for HRSDC that estimated the size of the hidden homeless population, which is a population we know little about in terms of size and composition. This study showed that in addition to the approximately 2,600 sheltered and street homeless in metro Vancouver there are about 9,200 hidden homeless persons staying on a temporary basis with others in tenuous situations.
Why is it that Canadians are not adequately housed? We heard great presentations on the moral, legal and economic rationales. I will elaborate on a couple of the economic and social rationales, to take a different perspective.
First, on the economic side, housing is a ``merit good''. It is in the interests of the state to ensure that people are adequately housed because it is in the public interest. Adequate housing minimizes the externalities associated with the under-consumption of housing. These are adverse impacts that can occur on the quality of life for the individual or for the neighbourhood and can also result in social and economic instability. Homelessness is the case in point here.
To illustrate a different perspective on the merit-good argument, I want to take you to London, England. A few years ago, schools there were reporting an annual turnover rate of 30 per cent of employees, the teachers. To address the issue of economic instability, the U.K. implemented essential-worker housing programs in recognition of the critical role these employees play in the local economy. The Key Worker Living Programme in the U.K. is directed toward particular employment sectors, for example education, health care and police in three high-housing-cost regions. Working with local authorities, they implement measures such as equity loans for home ownership and shared ownership, as well as rental.
In my work in communities in B.C., I am starting to hear that language around essential or key workers who are unable to afford to live in various municipalities as the result of sort of a resource boom situation, a retirement boom situation or a recreational property boom situation driving up prices.
Second, in the social realm, housing has a connection with other facets of our lives. I think we underestimate the anchoring role that it plays in integrating households with communities. Housing-related poverty can exacerbate other inequalities, for example through neighbourhood effects. Communities housing a large proportion of low-income households offer restricted access to health, education and recreation facilities, as well as employment. That limits opportunity.
I would like to emphasize two points before I conclude: housing provides a basket of services that are beneficial to the individual and to society, and the market cannot provide housing that all households can afford. A national housing policy should act to ensure the healthy functioning of the housing system to ensure an adequate supply of housing relative to needs.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We now have two people here from the National Aboriginal Housing Association. David Seymour will make the presentation. Please proceed.
David Seymour, Member, Board of Directors, National Aboriginal Housing Association: We expected to have Patrick Stewart, President of the National Aboriginal Housing Association with us. However, due to his mother's passing he could not appear. I have come in his stead.
On behalf of the National Aboriginal Housing Association, NAHA, I want to thank you for having us here. We appeared here in 2007. We approach the issue from a simple, basic problem: we need houses and we need them badly. Your report from that session shows clearly that the Aboriginal people are extremely disproportionately represented in the need.
I find it exciting to hear the different perspectives on a strategy from the other side of the table. Do we need a national Aboriginal housing strategy? If it gives us money and houses, yes. If it does not, then we are wasting our time. The answer for us is that we need the resources because the need is there.
We approached the other problem and said that the federal government should take a lead. It has always taken a lead, from 1867, in stating and separating such intricate positions as section 91.24. We have always looked to the federal government to ensure that the Aboriginal community in Canada actually had a place in Canada in the face of the cities and the provinces all wanting the resources that the Aboriginal people occupied, used and enjoyed.
We have taken the position that it is simply out of care. If the federal government cared, then it would do something. We are not here to talk in those simple, basic terms, although my membership would have me speak in those kinds of terms. The federal government has signed all of those international agreements that you heard about from Mr. Brown. For example, there was the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many others. All of that was cited, argued and played out in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that cost the federal government something in the magnitude of $65 million. God, we sure could use that now. That kind of money, those resources, could have built a lot of houses if those words on those pieces of paper just remained there. We are asking that they be resurrected and reread. There is evidence of the federal government taking leadership and engaging the provinces to ensure that Aboriginal peoples' needs are covered. However, there is a right to say to members that we need to have it for more than that reason.
There is the economic reason. It is no mystery that the National Aboriginal Housing Association is a part of CHRA because we believe in the same thing, that there is economic benefit and what we would refer to as horizontality in the interaction of other programs. As Ms. Tanasescu, from Calgary, has pointed out, it is the efficiency of the whole of the system to address poverty. It is not just housing. We have the need for housing first, but once housing has come, all the other programs come into play.
In engaging the friendship centre movement, we have found that it has huge resources from both the federal and the provincial governments to provide services to Aboriginal people. However, if they are homeless and mobile, the ability to address those issues of social concerns, which are at great expense to the taxpayer, cannot be dealt with.
As I have said many times before, it is the question of the hierarchy of need. You need food, clothing and shelter first before you can deal with the situation. We have case after case where we have built new housing and put new tenants in there from a long waiting list only to discover that their social issues were not able to be identified, addressed or even thought of until the houses were provided. Why we need a national housing strategy is for the collateral benefit, the social interaction or the horizontal benefit of others.
Those who do not think there is a need for a national housing strategy can only be arguing it on a jurisdictional basis — that is, that it is better to do it on the local levels or on other levels. To those we have to say all of that strategy leaves the Aboriginal community out. If there are those around the table who would say that, we would suggest that the federal government do a national Aboriginal housing strategy, leave those people to their devices and allow us to come forward with our strategy to ensure that.
We have engaged none other than the expert in the field, Mr. Pomeroy here, to articulate and study the numbers to prove our position that we know intrinsically by looking at our waiting list and the clamouring on the street. We have been participating in the homeless counts in many cities. Vancouver, where I hail from, has 32 and a decimal per cent homeless. Thirty-two per cent of the homeless in Vancouver are Aboriginal. In a country that has only 3 per cent Aboriginal people, that is 10 times.
We hope to publish our study by the end of the month. I have a draft. It shows the cities that are in extreme need. We have come to the conclusion that in order to just stem the tide and bring us into some degree of alignment, we need somewhere in the magnitude of $366 million annually for the next 10 years. We have divided it, because we understand the whole of the spectrum. People cannot hide from the fact that the population is aging. We cannot hide from the fact that once you do homeless, you have to do transition. Once you do transition, you have to do family. Once you do family, you have to do seniors. We have seen the need for student housing.
Our position is that not only does there need to be a strategy, but that strategy should be comprehensive in nature and cover the full spectrum of the continuum of housing need — all of its sub-branches, such as the need for the handicap, the need for the seniors and the need for the students, which are part of that, as well as the other end, the need for the home ownership.
It is important that we have resources untapped because they are morally impossible to access, such as what we refer to as empty nesters. This is a house that was built in the 1980s during a time when there was a federal response. We actually saw the housing development of 10,000 units across Canada from 1984 to 1996. We saw that growth and devoted it to the vulnerable, who at the time were single mothers. As a consequence, 20 years later, those single mothers and their children have grown up and they need their own houses. Those mothers live as empty nesters with empty bedrooms. You cannot for moral reasons throw them out on the street and say, ``I am sorry, but you cannot have that four-bedroom house any longer because your kids are in their twenties.'' We are getting an overcrowding situation because mom lets daughter bring in a boyfriend, and the next thing you know you have multiple families in the same house. We are losing the stock.
Not only do we talk about the need for a comprehensive plan, we need to stem the tide, equalize the core need, preserve the existing stock, develop a homelessness strategy and develop a home ownership strategy.
Our position is that we need a national strategy; it needs to be resourced; and the federal government needs to take leadership.
The Chair: You make very compelling arguments. I do not think there is any doubt that the federal government does have prime responsibility for Aboriginal needs.
Charles W. Hill, Executive Director, National Aboriginal Housing Association: I would like to make an additional comment. On several occasions, people have spoken to the fact that Canada has signed human rights documents over the years. With regard to the Universal Periodic Review, we have recently been focused on indigenous rights, which include the right to housing. Canada is not one of the signatories to that document. I think people should be aware of that because it fits in with the comments that I will be making that there needs to be an attitudinal change toward First Nations, Metis and Inuit people in this country. Right now, there appears to be, from my point of view, pressure to assimilate.
Mr. Seymour mentioned that the National Aboriginal Housing Association is a member of CHRA. We would like to think that this could be reciprocal as well. We have been working with CHRA over the years, but I think that the federal policy right now is specifically towards that end. There needs to be a change in attitude to recognize the skills and experiences that we have accumulated over the years through the Urban Native Housing Program and the Rural and Native Housing Program, which helped us to acquire almost 20,000 units across Canada.
With regard to the home ownership question, there are a few urban native housing programs in different sections of the country that are pursuing home ownership.
I want to make one final point. With regard to home ownership and tying in attitudes, there is a drive by the municipality of Peterborough, Ontario, to take over the urban native housing stock, which amounts to about 150 homes in Peterborough. I do not know what the background reason is for the fact that the two organizations there went into receivership several years ago, but right now the receiver wants to sell the units and take over ownership of the units.
When we speak of home ownership, that is not exactly what we mean. We mean home ownership by Aboriginal people. With regard to a national strategy, there is a definite need for it because it must reflect the fact that the federal government is once again prepared to work with Aboriginal people regardless of their location on- or off-reserve. We cannot continue to be excluded from things like budget allocation just because we are living in urban areas. We do need a parallel system of housing to overcome the racism that still exists, unfortunately, in this country.
I wanted to add those points. I probably will not speak again.
The Chair: We want you to participate fully.
David Snow, as an individual: I will partially be going against the grain by recommending that specifically with respect to housing, we do not need and should not recommend a national housing strategy. I will do so for three primary reasons.
The first reason is jurisdictional. Housing policy is generally viewed as being provincial jurisdiction. Under the federal definition of powers, the social policy aspects of it, combined with section 92.13 of the British North America Act, property and civil rights, housing is viewed by virtually everyone as a provincial area of jurisdiction. As the federal government has moved out of the implementation and design of more and more housing programs, the provinces have accepted their role in the sense that they do not want strings attached and do not want the federal government telling them how specifically to spend their money on which particular programs. We are past the stage where provincial governments or housing corporations need federal leadership in order to develop positive housing policy.
Second, there is increasing international evidence and Canadian evidence demonstrating that affordability is primarily caused by local and regional supply and demand factors rather than national factors. Factors affecting affordability vary completely even between provinces. Things such as resources, demographic change, population, increase in growth, income growth, physical climate, history, owner-to-renter ratios, urban-rural divide and, particularly, local land use policies all dictate considerable differences between cities, regions and provinces. This lack of uniformity creates different provincial priorities with respect to housing. Any national housing strategy risks imposing a one-size-fits-all strategy on provinces and even municipalities with different housing needs.
For example, discussions of national housing strategy are often about increasing rental development, particularly private rental development, because of very high vacancy rates. No doubt that would be included in some sort of housing strategy. In New Brunswick, where I am from, and in Prince Edward Island, the current problematic housing needs do not have anything to do with rental vacancy rates. They are quite high compared to the rest of the country. This is one example of the sort of problem that could develop from a national housing strategy becoming a one-size-fits-all strategy.
Finally, a strategy allows the provinces to deflect criticism to the federal government. Housing policy is provincial jurisdiction. They accept it as provincial jurisdiction, but when any discussion comes up about shortcomings with housing policy, provincial housing ministers and premiers inevitably blame their problems, as they do with many other problems, on the federal government.
As happened at one of the last provincial housing ministers meetings, they came out with very few concrete policy discussions in terms of what they would do, but they came out with a universal condemnation of the federal government for not giving enough money, notwithstanding the fact that the previous year the federal government gave $1.4 billion in the affordable housing trusts.
I also want to point out that arguing this position I am arguing does not preclude the federal government from having some sort of a role. It does not preclude the federal government from having a long-term funding commitment, which I believe is very necessary. Whether this funding commitment is increased, decreased, status quo or indexed to inflation, the provinces need to know, in the long term, what they will be getting from the federal government so that they can then develop their own housing programs with knowledge of the funds they will be able to commit to them.
This does not preclude the federal government from having an increased commitment to the poorest of the poor, to alleviating poverty through any sort of tax credits or social assistance or welfare reform or anything like that. This, of course, does not apply to northern and Aboriginal housing where the federal government most definitely has the primary role as funder. I will leave it at that for now.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Ms. Regehr, you are next.
Sheila Regehr, Director, National Council of Welfare: Thank you for the invitation to appear. I commend the committee for the excellent work it is doing.
Mr. Rainer's organization and ours share similar roots, but we were formed two years earlier, so we have been working on these issues for about 40 years now.
In answer to the question about whether we need a national strategy, the answer, based on the last 40 years, is, obviously, yes. The un-national non-strategy is just too costly and it is not getting results. That echoes what others have said. We need to find ways to invest that provide greater value.
One of our members is a prominent businessman in Hamilton, who is also working with the Hamilton anti-poverty strategy, and he takes a business-like approach to the issues we are facing. He said, quite frankly, if this were a business and we had been running an anti-poverty business in this country, people would be screaming to shut it down and not bail it out; it just does not work. Even as individual taxpayers, we need to look hard at how much money we are putting into something that is not producing results.
I also want to stress what others have talked about, the issue of complexity. This patchwork we have is so complex. It is hoops, mazes and barriers. They are creating many of the problems that plague us. It is not like this complexity we talk about just happened. We have created it, which means we can untangle it, but it will be hard.
I also want to answer the question about whether it is an anti-poverty strategy or a poverty, housing and homelessness strategy. Based on all of our members' discussions, it is all of the above and more. When we produced our report about solving poverty, we looked at what other countries and some jurisdictions in Canada were doing and what worked best. For most of the European countries that were having success we found that whatever poverty efforts they were doing were closely integrated with larger social and economic issues.
I went through a stack of news clippings that I have compiled over the last couple of days, and some of the stories I have seen coming out of these are incredible. For example, a large number of immigrant women in a Toronto community are parents, well-educated, ready and able to work, but they cannot get out of the house because there is no child care, whether they can afford it or not. All of these things are so intricately linked that any effort to do something besides looking at them all together is destined not to work.
I have a somewhat unplanned comment on your second question with respect to provincial and territorial governments having primary jurisdiction in these areas. That is particularly interesting, because at our last council meeting, many of our members who are primarily involved in their local and provincial communities would have said the same thing. We took a hard and deliberate look at the federal role and, particularly, at income security areas. All the evidence would suggest the opposite. The investments in the areas that matter come from the federal government. It has a capacity that provincial, territorial and municipal governments cannot have. If the federal government does not have the right foundation pieces in place, everyone else is scrambling to fill in the cracks. That is inefficient.
Much of what I wanted to say echoes what others have said about the federal enabling role as well. I and others have been concerned lately about the kind of targeting and approach we take to some of these things. In some ways I want to agree with Mr. Snow, even when he started out to say his perspective may be somewhat different. In some ways I agree, but it is a matter of governance. It is a matter not of determining who should be involved in a national strategy. To me, the bigger question is how the different actors should be involved in the strategy. That is the key thing.
In many areas, I would agree with you, not commenting specifically on the particular things you mentioned. When you look logically at the federal government, its focus should be on big-picture, long-term, foundation and prevention pieces. Many years ago the employment insurance system was designed as a poverty prevention piece, and people forget that.
The federal government is also further away from many people. I hear many federal discussions about targeted programs. I do not think the federal government is the place for those things. It does not have the capacity to target well. It has huge capacity to provide foundations, especially income foundations. It provides basic income floors for many people already. Those do not include, by and large, working-age adults. That is one of the pieces to be filled in, and there are a number of different ways that we might look at doing that.
When you come to targeting and looking at who needs targeted programs — I want to pull out our fortieth anniversary statistical postcard we put out — there are many misconceptions about how we treat different parts of this population that we consider poor or at risk of poverty. One myth we deal with all the time is that all these poor people are out there living on welfare or are all hard cases with lots of problems. Our research shows that only 34 per cent of working-age families living in poverty had some income from welfare in 2006. That is some income. Other research shows that about half of those people will combine welfare with employment income throughout the year.
There are many people without complex needs. They have needs just like the rest of us for affordable housing and child care. They need money. By not providing those, we are creating more intense needs, multiple needs, depth of poverty, homelessness and multiple problems that need addressing in ways that we just cannot cope with right now.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Both you and Mr. Snow have focused quite a bit on the whole issue of the federal role and whether we should have a national strategy or not. Is the federal role to transfer money to the provinces, which have the prime responsibility? How far down should that money go in terms of where the policies are developed? There is some very interesting discussion around the table about national policy or no national policy, questions of rights.
Our clerk, Ms. Hogan, will take down the names of anyone who wants to get in on the conversation. You can either add to points that you have made, rebut points you heard other people make or whatever you like. Of course, my colleagues, the senators at the table, will also be involved with that discussion as well.
I will go to each of my Senate colleagues who are here, as we normally do in our hearings. From the Senate we are all trained to ask questions; we want to probe you further. You could get comments, but you will get a lot of questions. Some of those questions may go to specific people or on a specific subject that may involve two or three people, but then we will try to get others blended in.
As you get the floor in answering a question from a senator, if you have something to say about what some other people said in the previous round, then go ahead. Whatever you were going to say when you asked to be put on the list, go ahead. If you want to get into the second and third themes, provincial, territorial governments and local communities, I will not rule you out of order because I am also mindful of the time. We want to get to those questions, and whether we get to them in this discussion or subsequently does not matter. With that, I will start up by throwing out a question that will involve some of you, but, as I said, you can talk about other things as well.
We have heard about the question of rights a number of times. Based on international rights, UN agreements and such, in some respects that could be a diversion from really getting on with the reforms, the overhaul that is needed to the systems at whatever level of government. However, for others it forms a foundation for helping to ensure action at the federal level and the other levels too — provincial levels any way because under the Constitution those two levels would be responsible for these agreements. Some see it as creating that kind of foundation that ensures action and accountability.
Is it a diversion, or should we be on a parallel track, saying let us try to embed these rights into Canadian law? I take it that is what you are suggesting. We have international agreements, yes, and we can be accountable to the UN or whatever agency, but are you suggesting that we should also put them into Canadian law? If so, what specific instruments would you see in doing that? How much time and effort should we be putting into that stream of activity versus the overhaul of the systems and programs that serve people's needs?
Mr. Shapcott: It is a critical question. The rights-based approach takes the housing question away from whether someone is sort of pathetic, whether their life is miserable and they deserve compassion and pity, and whether they are more pathetic than someone else who has been brought forward. It is the public pleading for some sort of benevolence on the part of government to simply say that this is a fundamental entitlement that all Canadians have, and recognize international law signed by Canada, and there is a fundamental obligation on the part of governments to ensure that right is realized. That does not necessarily mean building every stick of housing in the country, but to ensure that the people have access to housing.
I gave to the clerk a copy of the report of the Special Rapporteur on adequate housing as a component of the right to an adequate standard of living, Miloon Kothari, that was tabled in March at the United Nations Human Rights Council. Paragraphs 88 to 111 set out specifically what the right to housing means in the Canadian context.
It is important to understand that at the United Nations, the right to housing is not simply something up at the 30,000-foot level, a series of abstract value statements; rather, detailed work on what the right to housing means in practical terms has been done by the United Nations. For instance, General Comment 4 of the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights sets out the dimensions of the right to housing. That becomes relevant for Canada with regard to paragraph 94 of the United Nations special rapporteur's report.
The definition of core housing need is a statistical measure developed by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation and Statistics Canada. Canada measures three dimensions of housing security: affordability, suitability and habitability. The United Nations says there are actually eight dimensions to housing security. New Zealand measures all eight dimensions of housing and security, so it touches on other issues.
I do not mean to slight Statistics Canada, which has a very good reputation, or Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, but speaking to what the federal government should be doing, one of the important things is to do a better job of measuring housing issues. Taking up Ms. Eberle's and Professor Duncan Maclennan's call for a housing systems approach, we need much more robust statistical measures. This is not a pedantic bean-counter thing, but if you cannot measure something, you cannot manage it. That is a basic maxim from business school, and it is true in social policy as well.
The current most widely accepted measure of housing need is core housing need. It, however, significantly under-counts the number of people living in overcrowded situations, those who are often called the hidden homeless, which Ms. Eberle talked about. Even the statisticians who administer it recognize that it does not adequately take into account a number of those measures.
Taking a rights-based approach is not simply an issue of making high-level, broad statements; it is about actually taking up the specific dimensions and elements of the right to housing and incorporating them.
Canada has signed a number of international treaties, although it has not signed the indigenous treaty, and we concur with NAHA that that should be signed right away. However, there is no provision in Canada for incorporating our international obligations into domestic law. In the United States, there is a constitutional provision that whenever Congress ratifies an international treaty it becomes incorporated directly into domestic law. In Canada, it must go through a process, and that is also something that the special rapporteur recommends.
However, courts can and do read our international obligations. There was recently a case in Victoria of a homeless man who was persistently arrested under a municipal bylaw that prohibited sleeping in public parks. His case is now under review at the British Columbia Court of Appeal, I believe. It began at the B.C. Supreme Court, and the decision there was that these municipal bylaws violate the right to housing in that the municipality is part of the broad general obligation of all orders of government in Canada to respect international housing law.
There will be other cases like that coming forward in the courts, and I am reasonably confident that judges will start reading into Canadian law some of our international obligations. There is a broad body of legal opinion that suggests that that is the case.
I know that no one in this room wants to get into a constitutional discussion. However, I am quite often invited to do presentations on housing and Canada's Constitution for first-year law students. It is simple to understand where housing fits into our Constitution. The simple answer is that it is not there.
In 1867, when the bureaucrats in London were drawing up our Constitution, I am sure that it did not occur to them that housing was an issue for the government. Canada was a rural country in 1867. If you wanted a house, you would chop down a tree and build a house. What possible role is there for the government in that?
When our Constitution was amended in 1982, housing was again not specifically included. Housing first figures in constitutional discussions with the Charlottetown Accord, where it was assigned to the provinces, but of course Charlottetown was rejected by the voters and in theory, therefore, has never become the law of the country, although some might argue that by stealth we had a constitutional change.
It is important to note that in 2001 the federal, provincial and territorial governments all signed the Affordable Housing Framework Agreement, which set out a relationship between the federal and provincial governments around housing issues. Subsequently a series of bilateral housing deals was signed with all the provinces and territories. That is now commonly called the Affordable Housing Initiative, and it is basically a cookie cutter across the country, although there are slight variations from province to province.
The most recent announcements from the federal government were in the budget in January with $2 billion for affordable housing plus $400 million for on-reserve Aboriginal housing. Most of that money flows through the affordable housing agreements that are already in place. I have filed with the clerk a copy of a sheet that I have prepared that tracks how that money is rolling out.
I would like to come back later to several other specific instruments in which we think the federal government should be specifically involved. Yes, housing rights are very important, and they have implications around important issues like the question of how Statistics Canada and Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation develop a measure to give us an idea of where we are in order that we can know where we need to go.
The Chair: I am also interested in hearing what instruments we need in terms of these rights.
Mr. Rainer: An interesting book entitled Inventing Human Rights by American historian Lynn Hunt covers the origins of human rights, which are very recent, only a couple of hundred years. I am fascinated by that narrative, because in a very short period of human history we have gone from people having no sense of a human right to rights increasingly coming more to the fore in a wide range of areas.
The book speaks to how we are evolving as a species and to our social and cultural dynamics and so forth. The author says that a human right becomes a human right when a majority of people recognize that a particular condition is wrong. I think that the majority of citizens in the world today would perceive torture as wrong. If I disagree with someone's arguments and as a result punch them in the nose, that would immediately and universally be perceived as wrong.
With regard to poverty as a human rights issue, the majority of citizens increasingly perceive hunger and homelessness as wrong. Therefore, people have a right to food security, a right to housing and, I would argue, a right to income security, a right not to be poor. These rights have become entrenched in international law, starting with the 1948 UN declaration, and in subsequent instruments.
I bring your attention to this newsletter, which contains one main article by Bruce Porter and Leilani Farha, who may have also been before this committee. Mr. Porter and Ms. Farha are two of Canada's foremost civil society experts in international human rights with respect to economic and social rights in particular. This article provides context around the Universal Periodic Review, which has been mentioned. Please review that.
Amnesty International, which in my view is one of the five most recognized non-governmental organizations in the world, has just launched its international Demand Dignity Campaign, which is focused on poverty as a human rights issue. This will be the largest campaign Amnesty International has undertaken in its 60-year history. That is significant because we have not heard Amnesty's voice a lot in the fight against poverty, certainly going back to the 1970s, as it was not in Canada, but it will be coming forward in particular with regard to Aboriginal issues. I believe that is where they will be focussing their attention in Canada.
I want to read from this brochure, and you can get copies from the Amnesty office in Ottawa. This passage is germane to our discussion:
Whatever plan is pursued, whatever projects are prioritized, whatever aid package is agreed, no solution to poverty without human rights at its core will have any long-term impact. Protecting the rights of those living in poverty is not just an option — it is an essential piece of any solution.
Economic growth is an important component of a strategy to tackle poverty, but it cannot be the only piece. Governments must create the conditions that allow people living in poverty to claim their human rights, to empower themselves so that they can be masters and not victims of their destiny.
In Canada, we do have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and a number of sections do intersect with the theme of poverty and housing and homelessness. We are particularly interested in section 7, which provides for the right of life, liberty and security of the person. In particular, the phrase ``security of the person'' has been interpreted by courts in Canada to include not only bodily security, because the origins of security of the person in international law were with respect to states not being able to seize and detain people without cause and so forth, but the interpretation of security of the person is broadening by the year, and it now includes bodily and psychological integrity. To the extent that states take action or deny action that results in a loss of bodily and psychological integrity, they are being found by the courts to be contravening the Charter and therefore the Constitution.
Mr. Shapcott mentioned the case in Victoria, which I recently became familiar with as well. It is a fascinating case because it is one of the first rulings that point to the Charter and section 7 and security of the person with respect to the right to housing and that people cannot be denied the right to housing — in that case, the right of people to create their own shelter in a public space. That has been the court ruling. It is under appeal, and hopefully the appeal will not be successful, in our view. If honourable senators are interested in more information on that case, a nice summary has been produced by the Poverty and Human Rights Centre in Victoria, which is led by a number of lawyers who have expertise in this area, and it is an important review of that quite important case.
Again, we have always taken the position in our organization that poverty is a human rights issue, and the foundation of a strategy and the foundation of an approach to both poverty and housing issues need to be grounded in a human rights approach.
Ms. Regehr: I have been involved in the human rights area for quite a number of years. A few things jump to mind around your question, particularly as to whether we should embed these rights in Canadian law. Some would argue that we might want to do that, but on a more pragmatic level, germane to our discussion, we need to put them into practice. In Canada, that has never been done, to my knowledge, in a coordinated and comprehensive way.
All of these human rights instruments have a regular reporting cycle. For most of them, it is every four years. Most governments wait until the four-year period is almost up. In a previous life, I was the one on the inside responsible for coordinating these things. You wait until the four years is almost up. You scramble around to figure out what we have done that might resemble something related to this particular right, and then we put it down and go to the committee. They say, ``We still do not understand what is going on in Canada, and we cannot tell whether you are getting better. Help us.'' We come back and wait another four years.
At the last meeting with federal officials following the Universal Periodical Review, there was a real challenging in a constructive way of the process for how we do this, and that dovetails perfectly with the idea of having a national strategy to address a number of these things, particularly the sort of progressive rights contained in the covenants on economic, social and cultural rights, for example, which are at the heart of many of the issues we are dealing with. It bears constant reminder I have found across the country that the Canadian federal government has the jurisdiction to sign these international agreements, but Canada's practice has been that those major covenants are never signed unless there is full provincial-territorial agreement. The other jurisdictions have bought into this. They have signed on and they have responsibilities.
If you can get a national strategy with an outcomes framework, that is an instrument for advancing these kinds of rights. The National Council of Welfare and perhaps a number of others were recently asked to comment on a sort of human rights report card that the Canadian Human Rights Commission is looking at, and most of the measures there that relate to economic, social and cultural rights are the same kinds of measures we would use to measure poverty, inequality, homelessness, access to education — all of the things that matter. There is tremendous convergence on the national strategy as an instrument and tool and a framework to help us get at the objectives and outcomes we need.
The Chair: I want to say something about Mr. Shapcott's presentation. We did have the UN special rapporteur before this committee. He spoke to us about those issues, so we are familiar with that.
Mr. Snow: Although I believe Mr. Shapcott is absolutely correct with respect to the Constitution and the federal division of powers, housing is not there. The provisions in section 92 of the Constitution, particularly 92.13, property and civil rights, and 92.16, matters of a local or private nature, are a much stronger argument. They are much more related to housing than anything in section 91 of the federal powers. Given the way the Supreme Court and the judicial committee of the Privacy Council before it have interpreted the division of powers, while yes, there has not been a case yet in which that actual conflict has come up, it is clear that if it were to come up, the provinces would win. I do not think the federal government would even fight it.
On the other constitutional issue of whether or not rights are an effective mechanism or a distraction with respect to housing, I am a little more skeptical. If the right to housing were to be entrenched in the Charter or, more likely, if a Charter section, probably section 7, were to be viewed as a right to housing as part of life, liberty and security of the person, the question has to be what would the policy implications of that be. How would this right to housing be enforced? Inevitably, the answer, as with all Charter rights in this country, is that it would be enforced by the courts. What power does the court have to really help housing policy, and do we want to rely on the courts in order to do that?
The B.C. decision dealt with whether or not a homeless man or homeless people could set up shelter on government property. It is very different from mandating the government to build housing for these people. I do not think that the courts would be very effective in mandating any government policy.
If the courts did have this ability and did enforce this right, what would the decisions prescribe? One of the difficulties with affordable housing and homelessness policy is that reasonable, bright people disagree as to what the policy prescription is for housing. I will use one example: There is a huge growth of international academic research demonstrating that restrictive local land use policies are a bigger factor in the rise of housing prices, supply side issues, as opposed to demand issues like income growth and population growth. People such as Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, Reserve Bank of New Zealand governor Donald Brash, Harvard University professor Edward Glaeser, and even the OECD have recognized this.
That means land use regulation, such as smart growth policies — which I would not be surprised if several people at this table are fond of — have been shown to lower affordability significantly. The most restrictive metropolitan markets in the world with the most expensive housing have the most restrictive land use planning.
Would the court then say, for example, that you cannot implement smart growth policies because it affects affordability? You cannot implement any sort of land use regulation. If the international and Canadian literature continued in this direction, and there was a strong causal relationship between these types of policies, would we be content with the court making those decisions?
I am more in favour of the political will needed to address affordable housing and homelessness policies. If we go in the direction of rights in this country, it inevitably leads to the courts. I do not think that is the best area on which to rely for good social policy.
Mr. Seymour: I have to disagree with Mr. Snow. I think that all of the rights that the Aboriginal community has acquired have been through the recognition of rights.
I must address the issue of the section 91 versus section 92 argument in the constitutional stuff. There is clear evidence and recognized court decisions respecting the living tree doctrine of our Constitution. It does evolve. We have seen the evolution in criminal law, where the provinces have taken over and developed their own ability to do penal law. We have seen the provinces go into external affairs, and yet we do not draw hard black-letter lines. It is a marble cake, as they used to say.
Housing is everyone's responsibility. If you refer to the book by Thomas Berger, called Fragile freedoms: human rights and dissent in Canada, it reflects on how we got our Charter. He talks about our history and the development of rights that are embedded there. They are a reflection of the Canadian experience.
They develop to become the social contract that we live by. It is a point in time when we say to ourselves that we recognize that people have this right. We get to that stage by having a horrendous situation.
At the National Aboriginal Housing Association, we believe that we have the right, based on three different sources. The first is the international covenants that have been made. That right we have is based on the disproportionate need of the Aboriginal community. In fact, our right is capable of being brought to the international courts; until Canada has the same proportional amount of homelessness among Aboriginals as among non-Aboriginals in relation to their population, we should have an absolute right to a house.
Second, we take the position that the federal government's responsibility for on-reserve housing is embedded in the Constitution under section 91.24. That right is akin to a fiduciary duty, and it extends to both on- and off-reserve universally.
The third source of the potential recognizable right is that Canada came into existence and became an economic engine through the extraction of resources. Those resources were acquired through the extinguishment of the Aboriginal population — if you look at British Columbia, for example — through the introduction of disease and all manner of decimation of the population in order for the resources to become free.
You can talk about all the things Canada has done to Aboriginal people throughout the ages that have put them in a disadvantaged position. As a consequence, they are unable to have or enjoy the benefits that other Canadians have. We have witnessed Canada's evolutionary process in that recognition with the apology issued by the Government of Canada for the residential school policy, which affected so many generations that we will be trying to evolve out of that for years to come.
We see it in the housing world, even today. As I described previously, concerning putting Aboriginal people into houses, we discovered that out of the residents in 20 housing units, 15 had experienced sexual abuse arising from the residential schools, or subsequent to residential schools, because once you have created an abused person, they end up becoming abusers in subsequent generations. As a consequence, we have to deal with it.
The Government of Canada has a moral duty to address that. In that sense, there is a need to put it into the rights.
Senator Segal: I have five brief, one-line questions. I will put them on the record and those to whom they are directed can choose to answer them or not.
I think it was Mr. Brown who said that tax changes exist that now actively discourage private rental construction. Could he share with this committee what they are? To the extent that they are within federal jurisdictions, it is something we should be able to look at.
Ms. Tanasescu made a rhetorical question about capitalism and poverty, as if they go together like milk and cookies. I wanted to understand whether, in her view, capitalism depended upon some measure of poverty to work. If so, could she share her insights on that with us?
Also, her group in Calgary has said that the end of homelessness will be evidenced —— correct me if I am wrong — by no homeless person having to spend more than seven days in a shelter before they are moved into some type of permanent, real housing opportunity. Does she have a view as to how we might treat poverty? If homelessness is something we are only allowed to have for a week in Calgary — to the great credit of what her strategy and committee is doing — does her committee have any view about poverty, or do we just say that it is similar to milk and cookies?
I was distressed by Mr. Rainer's strategy by 2011. Many people will die, become sick and have their lives crushed by the effects of poverty between now and 2011. Is there some dilution of urgency that I missed that he would like to share with us?
Ms. Eberle, you said that markets cannot produce housing for all those who need it. Is that because the market is fundamentally flawed, in your judgment, or is it because too many people do not have sufficient income to afford housing? Is it income-driven or is it structurally around the market?
The final question is for Mr. Seymour. Aside from the sad reality that among our urban homeless, the First Nations community is wildly overrepresented based on their percentage in the population as a whole, is there something, in your view, about a homeless Aboriginal person in the cities that distinguishes his or her requirements and problems from other homeless people that this committee should be aware of in its work?
I have another question.
The Chair: You said that you have five. This is six.
Senator Segal: You denied me three words the other day, so can I have a sixth small question? It was to Ms. Regehr, who talked about income security. The other day, we had a witness here from a wonderful business group in Saint John that has been working on dealing with poverty. One of the concerns he stressed, which will be on our record, was that there are income security programs that help people live a little better within poverty, versus income security and other initiatives that actually get over or reduce poverty.
When you talked about income security, were you talking about simply increasing some of the income security programs that help people manage within poverty, or was your counsel talking about something else?
The Chair: Before I go to each of the persons who the questions were specifically related to, I want to say again that, when you have the floor, if you have something else to say, please say it because you may not get the floor too many times in a group this size. When I put my pencil up, it is because we need to go on to the next person.
I want to go to Mr. Pomeroy at this point, either on those questions or anything else you wanted to talk about in relation to the issues.
Mr. Pomeroy: You circulated the new reframed set of questions just after I finished speaking, so I was speaking to the old ones. At that time, you threw in the last question about the federal role into the first question. I would like to come back to that one before I leave.
With respect to much of the discussion today, I would posit the notion that when we use the term ``strategy,'' it is really code for ``funding'' for many people. Certainly, many of the clients I work for — the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, CHRA, the National Aboriginal Housing Association, et cetera, when developing recommendations for strategies, it is about getting long-term, sustainable funding to support initiatives around affordable housing and homelessness.
As Mr. Seymour said, a strategy without funding would be functionally useless anyway, so let us call a spade a spade. We are talking about where the long-term sustainable money is. That speaks to the question of responsibility: who pays, what is the source of funding and how it is facilitated.
In terms of the actually strategy elements themselves, I think there would be very strong consensus. If you took all the people around this table, threw us in a room and asked us to come up with the elements of a national housing strategy, we would come back with a couple or three pages of things that were very similar.
I have written dozens of these things, and it is not really rocket science. The real vexing question, though, is how you implement those elements, package them together and, more fundamentally, who does it. This speaks to the question of responsibility.
We do not have a policy problem here; we have an institutional structure problem. I do not know if we have the right institutional frameworks currently to actually design, deliver and implement a national strategy.
What are the models that we may look at to do that? If we look at the federal responsibility, there is a clear responsibility. The CMHC has done a tremendous job over the last 50 years in creating an effective finance system. Therefore, we have access to financing, which is fundamental because housing is a capital asset for both individual homeowners and investors in rental housing. It is clearly an important part of our system, and there is no doubt it is a federal responsibility.
Tax policy is clearly extremely important, as someone else alluded to earlier. We have had a fundamental tax reform in this country for the last 30 years from a point where we were significantly producing rental housing. Most affordable rental housing in this country exists as a result of private provision. The social housing stock is a very small part of the rental system — about 5 per cent. Private rentals are at 26 per cent. Most of the affordable stuff happens to be owned by private investors.
In the last 20 years, on average, only 9 per cent of housing starts have been from rental housing. One third of Canadians live in rental housing; do the math. We are squeezing the rental system. For the first time in history in 2006, according to the census, the number of rental households in this country declined despite growth in population. Obviously, home ownership rates went up, which is a corollary of that, which is a good thing. However, we are eroding the existing affordable housing stock on the rental side through demolition, conversion and rent creeping into higher-rent areas. Hence, that reduces the availability of rental housing.
Clearly, the role of the federal government in terms of tax policies that have fundamentally disadvantaged investors in rental housing away from investing in that particular asset into other things, there is a need to re-look at how that actually works through and whether we can actually change some things there. Essentially, tax policy changes investor behaviour. We need to ask what type of behaviour we want investors to have and whether we can actually achieve social policy objectives, which would be to produce our rental housing, though not necessarily at the lowest rents. Clearly, there is no economic sense to build low-rent housing. You do not make any money.
However, any kind of supply is good because it all affects ultimately vacancy rates, and higher vacancy rates suppress the rate of increase in rents, generally, and help everyone creating a healthier system, as Ms. Eberle was indicating. It is a housing systems approach. Therefore, tax policy is an important role.
The other one is the area of federal spending powers. Fundamentally, as others have alluded to, the affordable housing problem is an issue of income. People do not have the income to be able to afford the housing that is being provided, and they need assistance to be able to afford it. If you are talking about an income redistribution problem, you are therefore talking about the government's role in collecting revenues from taxpayers and redistributing it through some mechanism, whether it is through the tax system, direct supports in terms of individual benefits, social assistance benefits, and other mechanisms such as tax credits and those types of things. There is an important federal role there in terms of the funding role.
How that role is sustained is important. Both the U.K. and Australia have examples of interesting models of how that has been done. In the U.K. case, because the housing issue is so complex, under the Blair administration, housing was basically one of a number of urban issues that was bundled together under the auspices of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. They had departments responsible for cities and communities, environmental issues, transportation and housing as junior ministers reporting through the deputy prime minister to coordinate the things that are essentially place-based. The issues we are talking about — homelessness, housing, poverty — they exist somewhere, geographically usually in very defined areas. Typically, they all coexist in particular disadvantaged neighbourhoods in areas of poverty, and taking a place-based approach looking at it through an urban and cities lens, which is germane to this committee, is very effective.
That was the approach in the U.K. It did the tricky job of the coordinating role by giving it to a very senior minister — the deputy prime minister — having the other ministers all work with them in an interagency or interdepartmental role, in a similar way to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, where the head of every single U.S. federal department sits on that agency. To some extent, that is why Phil Mangano has been successful in the homeless agenda in the U.S. because he has a very high-level coordinating committee.
The agency is not new; it existed for 30 years and did absolutely nothing for the first 22 years. It was only when you had a charismatic leader who got the folks there involved that they started to have an impact. The luck of a good leader, to some extent, is maybe part of the solution on this.
The other interesting model is the Australian model. Australia is a fascinating example for Canada. We spend a lot of time looking at the U.K. or the U.S. because they happen to be close, or they have lots of literature and journals. However, Australia is the closest comparable of any country in the world. It is a federation system; it has a historically British parliamentary system; it has big geography; and issues of Aboriginal urban migration are all similar issues. The only thing different is the weather.
In their system — with their federal division of powers and housing — they essentially have a rolling four-year agreement called the Commonwealth-State Housing Agreement that sets out a framework of conditions and principles under which the federal government will fund the housing and homeless area. Within that, there are specific outcome requirements that the states must deliver on and then the federal government gets out of the way and lets the states — provinces — get on with it.
The problem we have in our system, which Mr. Seymour alluded to earlier, is that we have been too prescriptive. The federal government has basically tried to tell the provinces how to do their job rather than saying, ``Here is the money. We want you to achieve these outcomes. We will not tell you how to do it. You figure it out, and do the best you can.'' Therefore, it fits where you have different local circumstances and you are not trying to solve the problem with the same solution in the entire country; you are letting each jurisdiction define appropriate solutions that fit their need.
You still have a system of public accountability around how the funding is spent. At the end of the day, you have very precise performance measurement outcomes: Did they do their job? How will we reframe it? You roll over it every four years and renew that. It is only four years, not ten years. It is not as sustainable as some people would like to see. That has been occurring since 1948. They have renewed every four years. It is quite an interesting model for us to look at in terms of how to get around the issue of whose responsibility it is. Is it federal? Is it provincial?
I would agree to some extent that it is both. The problem we have had in this country for the last 15 to 20 years is that everyone has been ducking responsibility. Basically, no one wants to admit it is their job, and when everyone is involved, no one steps up to the plate. We need to try to demarcate clearly what those roles are and set out three or four specific areas of federal responsibility, particularly funding. Then delegate through instruments such as a four-year or five-year rolling agreement with clear principles and outcome measures, and then let them get on with it.
The Chair: Before I move to Mr. Brown, the committee has heard the suggestion that we should adopt the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit scheme from the United States, or something similar to it. You did not mention that.
Mr. Pomeroy: I have done quite a bit of work on that over the years. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit has a couple of issues in that it is very expensive and very complicated. It works well in the U.S. because the U.S. is basically a culture of transaction junkies. They would slice, dice and sell their grandmother if they could. There is also the culture of using the tax system to engage private investment rather than government. It is a different culture than we have here. It has been a tremendously successful program in the U.S., but it is not inexpensive.
A report issued this week by Marion Steele from the C.D. Howe Institute has proposed a design for a Canadian low-income housing tax credit. In theory, it makes sense. However, one of the issues is that the main buyers of the tax credits in the United States are corporate America. They are buying tax credits to shelter income that they would otherwise have to pay tax on. They have been the main proponents of a tax credit system. They have been the main reason it has been sustained through four U.S. administrations and increased by two of them, both from the Republican and the Democrat side.
However, the reality is that in today's market, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, came out a few weeks ago with a replacement for the tax credit that they call ``grants in lieu of.'' Last year, they were unable to sell the tax credit. Only 20 per cent of the tax credits were marketable. Most banks and financial institutions have plenty of losses to shelter their income. They do not need to buy any more, and, hence, the tax credit system is completely useless in today's economic crisis. For the next two years, the new system will be that HUD will be issuing grants in lieu of tax credits essentially moving back to a granting program rather than a tax credit mechanism.
I spent a year working with the vice-president of retail securities at TD Bank to try to design a tax credit for Canada because it was raised in the Conservative platform in 2006. A number of my clients said, ``Steve, can you figure how this can work so we can get ahead of government on this one.'' We basically tried to design a tax credit that would be implementable in Canada with two objectives: Can it produce affordable housing, and can we create an investment vehicle that could be sold into the retail investment market? If you solidified those two criteria, then you would have a product.
We were unable to come up with a program that would meet those two criteria. It would be extremely expensive to get the yields required for investors to buy into it. There are issues in the Canadian context. We do not have the same corporate culture or the same institutional framework. There is also a whole raft of intermediaries that market these items and work with the investors and non-profits. We do not have that layer in Canada. It took 15 years to build that system in the United States. It is not something you can simply put into a bill.
The Chair: That is interesting. We will hear more on that tax credit from Mr. Brown.
Mr. Brown: Thank you. I think Mr. Pomeroy has done a good job of covering the key points.
The point we were making is that private rental stock is a key part of the solution to affordability in the country. Much more rental construction was undertaken when the tax system was more favourable to residential rental construction, either through multi-unit residential buildings, MURBs, or what we might call funding programs at the margin, such as the Limited Dividend Program or Canada Rental Supply Program.
Therefore, any future policy discussion needs to look at that. We would agree with Mr. Pomeroy that the existing stock is being eroded either through conversions to condominiums and demolitions, et cetera.
Our point was that there were explicit measures previously in place and private rental stock is a key part; the social housing stock is very important, but it is only a small proportion of the total as others have mentioned.
I would also like to tee off on a couple of points that Mr. Pomeroy also mentioned, which were housing strategy as a code for funding and the prescriptive nature of current programs. A key reason why we have this complex myriad of programs that are very difficult to navigate is that they are prescriptive as Ms. Tanasescu mentioned; each set of programs has a set of rules and regulations. That is why it is complicated — no more, no less.
Mr. Snow has articulated a strategy, which I am almost in agreement with. As I understood his comments, the strategy would have the federal government providing a major funding role; there would be an increased commitment to the poorest of the poor; and the federal government would let the provinces and municipalities get on with business.
We have a program currently that reflects those principles, which is the old SCPI program, Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative, and the current Homelessness Partnering Strategy.
Whether we need a strategy or not, I simply think Mr. Snow articulated one version. There are others around. Implicitly what he was saying was to do away with the prescriptive, detailed nature of programs. I would agree with that. We have opportunities for consensus in the room today.
Again, the Homelessness Partnering Initiative is federally funded, local communities set the priorities and provinces are there to help if need be. In my 30 years of involvement, it is the best program that the federal government has developed. Therefore, I strongly recommend to this committee that they look hard at the HPI model as one possibly to emulate.
One key point that I do not think we have mentioned is the issue of innovation. Prescriptive programs do not allow folks on the ground to innovate. Innovation comes from ensuring that you can file a report that shows that you have met all the requirements. An enabling federal program — HPI is the best example at the present time — allows people at the provincial or municipal level to innovate and push the envelope.
That is what the federal government should want to see with scarce taxpayers' dollars. Therefore, set up basic ground rules, the foundation — as Ms. Regehr mentioned — broad principles, broad objectives, ensure it is fully funded — I agree with Ms. Regehr, that is where the capacity is — and allow the provinces working with local communities to detail community plans or priorities so that they are not a cookie-cutter approach, as the chair called it. This would provide the elements of a workable and successful program that allows people at every level to innovate.
I share Senator Segal's concern about the sense of urgency. As someone in this room that delivers all of these programs on the ground on behalf of Toronto City Council, buildings are falling apart; people need assistance now. Therefore, I would strongly encourage the committee to impart a sense of urgency into its final report.
The Chair: I will interject at this point with a question about tax credits. Some people tout that we need to involve the private-for-profit sector in rental housing. Is there room for the private-for-profit sector? How would you entice them to participate if not by tax credits?
Mr. Brown: The challenge of the rental market has been the same for the last 30 years. In most parts of the country, the market rents obtained do not match what we might call the economic rents that are required to create the unit, whether it is new construction or renovation. Since the 1970s, the issue has been how to bridge the gap between economic and market rent. One way is through the tax system and another way is to have specific programs that try to do that.
I recall papers being written in the 1970s stating that the disparity between the economic and market rents is the fundamental problem of the rental market. There are different ways to bridge that gap. Many of the original programs were very much funded at the margin. They did not fully fund operating costs for the life of the project, or provide an up-front interest rate write-down or capital grant or through the MURB system where you could divert costs. All of those have to be looked at. I cannot pick a winner today, but that is the fundamental challenge.
Mr. Pomeroy: We have to rethink the rental market entirely. In terms of what we have had for the last 30 years or so of large-scale corporate developers building rental product that served the marketplace. In the late 1960s, every province in the country adopted condominium legislation and created a whole new animal. Prior to 1969, the multi-unit building was rental. After 1968-69, depending on the province, the condo market began to set the parameters for economics of development. The rental sector has been unable to compete with the condo sector in terms of land and resources. We have to move beyond that. Most corporate developers have been building condo product because they can make a profit up front. Over the next few years, some of these condos will move to the rental market because developers cannot sell them all. That will simply be a short-term economic blip because of the current circumstances.
The decline in rental starts and the size of rental stock is no where near as dramatic as it should be, given the level of stock that we had. Small individual investors have become the primary providers of rental housing in this country. That is very much the way it is in the U.K. and in Australia, where their situations are similar to Canada's. They do not have corporate landlords and instead, individuals buy houses and rent them out. The way to stimulate the rental market is not to go back to the old days of corporate developers but, rather, to find a way to get small investors to invest in one or two units that will create the supply in a different type of system, which we need to rethink.
Ms. Tanasescu: I will try to explain my opinion of capitalism in two minutes or less. Your question to me was whether I viewed capitalism and poverty as milk and cookies. I see capitalism and inequality as milk and cookies. The fact that it is manifested as poverty in our society is historical and culturally specific. The reason has nothing to do with the way we run the economy. The basic division of capital and labour is fundamental to how the capitalist economy works. At the same time, government has a large role to play in the mediation between capital and labour. I see government's role as a way of humanizing capitalism. During the Industrial Age, governments became involved in housing because of the ravages caused by the lack of government intervention in the market.
Today across the world, we are seeing a replay of that 18th century experience. Forty per cent of the world's population lives in slums. In Canada, we are seeing a rise in the slum experience as well; and that is why we are sitting here today. Since the 1980s, our homeless shelters are reminiscent of the slum in Manila. Something happening globally is creating these conditions. Much of the evidence points to the way the market works and the fact that certain types of labour are paid less. It comes down to the basic facts. In certain urban populations, lower-paid workers have to compete with higher-paid workers for exorbitantly priced land. Inequality and lack of access to adequate housing are an international issue. That is where the role of the federal government is so important. We see international human rights movements because people recognize that across the globe they have this problem in common that must be addressed in their respective countries.
A major shift has occurred over the last 20 years, which your report outlines perfectly; namely, a retreat from housing and social investment in general. In the literature, it is referred to as a neo-Liberal shift in policy. That combined with global capitalism in its current manifestation has precluded some of the challenges that we face today. These challenges are beyond the power of one nation, one province or one city.
I will come back to your other question on the seven-day stay as our target for ending homelessness and ask: What can a city do in the face of these issues that are clearly beyond its own control? The city is the node of social, economic and capital flows in something that is globalized. The nation state has a role in mediating some of the impacts of those flows just as the provinces and the cities have a role in how they attract investments as well.
Cities can always mediate globalization at the local level. The 10-year plan allows cities to articulate their strategy for localizing and dealing with these impacts. Is the seven-day stay in the shelter enough? No, we do not want to see people on the streets or in poverty. What can we realistically do and promise to our fellow citizens that we are able to actually achieve? It is beyond getting people out of shelters. Our plan has prevention bits, such as reintegration into the community, treatment for mental illness and addictions, et cetera. It is always housing first, plus the other.
On your other question around poverty and whether we have a similar measure for knowing that we ended poverty, it comes down to these structural issues that are beyond our capacity to control. Certainly, we could do some things much better at the local level. Resources could be mobilized to end people's poverty today. We calculate how much income support people are eligible for versus how much they actually receive. If they were to receive everything they were entitled to receive, we would have no argument or reason to ask the provinces or the federal government for more funding. However, people are not receiving all that they are eligible for. Communities could coordinate that better and remove some of the barriers to basic rights, instead of trying to achieve more, such as guaranteed annual income, that would cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars. It is not realistic for a local community to do that. It would be realistic for the federal government to review the barriers and determine its role in enabling communities to coordinate better so that they can do more.
Some federal programs segment the local community even further. Mr. Brown mentioned this earlier. The complexity is bewildering and the onus on agencies is very difficult to manage.
The Chair: We are still proceeding on the questions from Senator Segal and additional comments you may want to make while you have the floor; next is Mr. Rob Rainer.
Mr. Rainer: I made the comment that we would like to see a national or pan-Canadian strategy on poverty by 2011. I qualify that by adding ``if not sooner.'' We have on our staff a PhD chemist who has spent much of his adult life in poverty. He is an interesting and intelligent fellow, but for a number of reasons, he found himself in poverty. He is always using the phrase that he wants to see the eradication of poverty ``by Tuesday.'' We would like to see the eradication of poverty in as soon as possible a time frame. We would like to see our organization go out of business. We have no interest in perpetuating our own organization around this cause. Let us solve poverty, if we can, and move on to other pressing challenges in our country.
The reality is that if we are talking about a pan-Canadian strategy that the federal government would hopefully convene and lead, that will require discussion, deliberation and cooperation from the other levels of government and civil society organizations. In our view, it is also important to bring in grassroots people living in poverty.
A considerable amount of consultation and dialogue has taken place over the past couple of years through the work of this committee and other Senate committees. I know that the Subcommittee on Population Health, which Senator Keon chairs, has had many discussions that intersect with these issues. Then there is the House of Commons Standing Committee on Human Resources, Skills and Social Development and the Status of People with Disabilities, the HUMA committee. Those deliberations have brought in the types of voices we have talked about.
If there were a commitment today or tomorrow by the current federal government to develop a pan-Canadian strategy, realistically that will take a number of months — hopefully not a number of years but a number of months — to get the strategy in place and for people who are involved in that process to feel that they have a meaningful input into the creation of the strategy.
The Quebec experience with the Act to Combat Poverty and Social Exclusion was initiated by a grassroots coalition of over 5,000 individuals who contributed input over a two-year period to frame what they thought an act for Quebec should look like. That was eventually picked up by the provincial government, or the national government as they would call it, and they eventually put in a law that was not exactly the same as what the coalition was looking for. The Quebec groups now involved in our campaign, Dignity for All: the campaign for a poverty-free Canada, have advised us to take the necessary time to think through what a federal plan would look like. Do that justice, so that the plan is thoughtful. It needs to be integrated, as I mentioned before, with provincial and hopefully territorial plans. Much thought, deliberation and care need to go into constructing a strategy, but that need not stop action from happening right away. The federal government could act today.
I know the government is acting in some respects, but it can be doing more, if you will, to gather the low-hanging fruit. This was the approach taken in Newfoundland and Labrador. They implemented a good process for public consultation to come up with a provincial plan to combat poverty. Within that plan, and even before the plan was created, the government recognized that there were things they could do virtually immediately, in some cases not costing any money but just making changes in rules and regulations and overcoming barriers and so forth.
A great deal can be done right away. We need not wait until a plan is in place before action goes forward. I would hope that would be the recommendation of this committee and the philosophy of the government.
Groups working on this issue at the federal level were frustrated by the lack of interest by the current government with respect to this issue. As an example, when we held a debate event in the federal election last October in Ottawa, we wanted to have a debate amongst the parties about poverty and inequality in Canada, and unfortunately we did not have the governing party at the table. We had the other four parties. That sent a signal that perhaps the governing party is not interested in talking about these issues.
The perception is, real or otherwise, that it may take a change in government before we see real, serious commitment to a federal plan. We are non-partisan. We would be delighted if the federal government would commit tomorrow to a federal plan. Taking into account all the evidence that has been heard today, not much more needs to be said. The time is now for action, as our Dignity for All campaign mentions.
The current government brought in a 2-percentage-point cut in the GST, which was roundly criticized by economists and many others as being an unwise tax cut that had the result of taking $12 billion out of the federal treasury. If the GST cuts were to be reversed even 1 per cent, then that would bring another $6 billion back into the federal coffers. You could divide that between housing needs and child care and early childhood development, another area that is crying out for investment. That is a low-hanging fruit. The federal government could admit their mistake, reverse the GST cut and immediately put those funds into those two areas, but I do not think it will happen.
Senator Segal: As poor people are the people who are the beneficiaries of that cut more than anyone else, I would disagree with that particular statement.
The Chair: Governments of any stripe do not readily admit mistakes.
Ms. Eberle: First, our market is flawed. Is it an income problem or a housing problem? To a large extent, the private housing market is working for most Canadians. Eighty-five per cent to 90 per cent of Canadian households are housed adequately in the market. I think economists would agree that there is evidence of some sort of market failure within the system. One of reasons for that might be the trends we see in terms of globalization, flows of capital coming into the country and distorting local markets. The question of whether it is an income or a housing problem and whether it is an income or housing solution, that is a chicken-or-egg situation. Pick your solution. The argument in favour of housing is that it is an investment and a capital good.
I want to touch briefly on the human rights question. I did some work on this a few years ago, although I am by no means an expert. We looked at it in the context of homeless policy internationally, and our question was put in a report that was never published: Is a rights-based legislation a necessary precondition to successful homeless policy? Our quick review of several countries internationally was that it is nice but not necessary. It is possible for governments to implement policies and programs that address, on a practical basis, those same issues.
I will now move on to what might be a possibility in terms of a national or Canadian housing policy framework. I would agree with Mr. Pomeroy, Mr. Snow and Mr. Brown that the Supporting Communities Partnership Initiative model is working on the ground; it can give kudos to the government and perhaps propose an expansion that would include housing programs, for example. It has a framework. We might need more of the enabling tools in terms of housing policy.
Mr. Pomeroy is right; the code for federal involvement is funding and resources. Housing is an expensive good. We all know that in our personal lives.
One of the things that SCPI or the Homelessness Partnering Strategy has done is to bring players to the table that were not involved before. If you look at some of the homelessness tables around the country, foundations and private-sector people are involved. Local governments are definitely on board. They are struggling, I have to say, to bring this into their current bailiwick in terms of their capacity to actually deal with housing issues. For example, I am now working on a project for the city of Dawson Creek, a little town in Northeastern British Columbia that wants to develop an affordable housing strategy. Some capacity issues exist that I think a national strategy could address.
Mr. Seymour: Thank you for the question. I want to approach it by addressing the earlier comment by Ms. Eberle about the market. She says that the markets are working 85 per cent to 90 per cent of the time. Well, the Aboriginal community is in that 3 per cent that is beyond that. As a consequence, it is falling out.
We have tried to pinpoint it to make it clearer. The best way we can describe it is to say that systemic racism exists in these situations, whether it is on the market side or on the social programming side, or both. It is evidenced in the facts. The co-op program was started pre the Urban Native Housing Program. The take-up by the Aboriginal community in relation to the populations of the Aboriginal community was significantly lower in the co-op movement. No one can understand that. We have theorized that it has to do with the cultural and social backgrounds and differences therein.
I come to housing from various moments of inspiration. One such inspiration was when I attend the corner's inquest of a homeless man named Alan in Vancouver. He was found drunk at the corner of Hastings and Main. It was obvious that he had passed out on the street. The ambulance was called to bring him to the hospital. Anyone in that state should have gone to the hospital. For whatever reason, the testimony by the ambulance driver was that this man did not want to go to the hospital. We all wondered why. He preferred to go with the police to detox, where he was regularly watched. They had testimony that he was checked every 15 minutes from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. The institution watched him die for six hours. It was unbelievable to witness that we would have an institution that would check someone and watch to see when he would die. The last person could not be found. He died somewhere around 11:40 p.m. They could not find who was supposed to check to see whether he was still alive at 11:30 p.m. He was homeless, too. He was homeless, like most of us — as I was at the time. We could not get into an apartment rental because we were Indian. Is it because there is racism coming from the community, or is it that once we are in the community or in a rental unit, there are social issues that stem from that?
We are a delivery agency that grew out of the government's reaction to market racism. We developed the Urban Native Housing Program. I want to commend it to you. It has been extremely successful. It creates a social network and a social infrastructure that is delivering and sustaining itself even to this day.
We discovered that there was an ability to recognize a shared need because of our shared background and that we could be culturally sensitive and responsive. From that, the whole National Aboriginal Housing Association evolved and became a champion for targeted funding, with specific Aboriginal delivery, to ensure that the social, educational, linguistic and cultural sensitivity were addressed at the same time as housing. Housing, first, yes, but being culturally sensitive to the needs of the people is important.
We must find a way to make the apology, which is coming to its first anniversary, not become a hollow apology but be the launching pad to doing something for all of that whole generation that is affected by it. I would suggest that someone go back and reread some of that discussion from the royal commission and why that must occur.
I want to support Mr. Brown's comment a few minutes ago. The one person at the table here who is adamant that there is a need for a national housing strategy is suggesting that the federal government come to the table with money. That is what we believe, too. We believe that the way to deliver that situation is to bring the parties together, particularly the provincial and federal governments, with national organizations such as CHRA, the National Aboriginal Housing Association, the co-op movement, et cetera; and to include the social ones such as the national Aboriginal friendship centre. We need to bring them all into the same room to understand how to work and to build upon this notion. It is not a matter of right; it is a matter of what Canada do we want to see? Do we want to see a Canada that has the type of poverty that comes from the international community that Ms. Tanasescu described to you?
With respect to the question about how you build one, the answer is that the feds can come with their solutions and delivery. I support that concept, provided that the Aboriginal community has the recognition that the only way to get out of it for the next foreseeable 10 or 20 years is to have an Aboriginal social investment in the delivery of housing, with collateral support for the social deprivation that has occurred as a result of federal government policy.
Ms. Regehr: The senator gave me two choices for an answer. What do we think about income security? Does it mean, A, that people get to live a little better while still in poverty, or, B, does it mean getting out of poverty? I want to add C and D and say ``Yes,'' to all of the above. The A part is to live a little better in poverty. That answers the discussion that you were having about the urgency of some particular things.
To quote another statistic from our postcard series, depending on which jurisdiction you live in, there are people on social assistance in this country, single individuals who are required to live on an income that is 24 per cent of the poverty line. That is insane. That is crazy.
I want to link that to an anecdote. One of my colleagues brought in a clip from a local newspaper. It was a story about ``Rodney,'' who is a divorced dad living in poverty and having a tough time. The line that struck her from the article was the reflection of a comment. We are not sure whether Rodney might have said this or whether it was the reporter who said, ``It might be okay for Rodney to be hungry, but it is really not okay for his children,'' who do not live with him any more, ``to be hungry.'' We were wondering why it would be okay for those children's dad to be starving. Who does that help?
Already, many things are really wrong in the system. There are many points here, but the idea we often have is that single individuals are not entitled to aid. If you have family, then it is all right. If you have kids, then it is warm and fuzzy, and we can deal with it. However, single individuals are considered to be people who made the wrong choices, and they are ``lazy bums.'' That is just not right.
The Working Income Tax Benefit, WITB, increases are one of the things that can address those things in an immediate way to bump some of it up a little bit.
Obviously, the ideal and the longer-term solution is about getting people out of poverty, so that is the B; obviously, yes. With respect to C, there needs to be an element of prevention. One of the populations with the highest risk of poverty in this country is lone parents. During a period of divorce, almost all lone parents go through this cataclysmic disruption in their lives where their incomes are all over the place. Many lone parents, after a period of several months, manage to get over that and build their own lives. However, too many, because they have no other resources, fall into the welfare system and then face the hurdles of climbing all the way back out again. If you can prevent the fall in the first place for many people, you would be doing wonders.
The D part of the answer is about stability. It is not just the amount, it is the stability of your income. At last week's conference in Calgary, an anecdote related to this question was given by someone who works with lone parents to help them get higher educations. You have lone parents who manage to get into university; they are trying to get ahead; they get student loans and child benefits; and they end their semester. The student loan funding only covers the school period, so then they have to reapply for welfare, which means going through another system of finding an income, changing child care arrangements, going to the bottom of the list again and not being able to find child care. That lack of stability and the constant disruption again sets people backwards. The stability of income matters as well, so that one does not have to constantly reapply and go through different sets of rules all the time.
If I might be permitted, I have two other points. One is linked to the question about innovation.
A wonderful story was told by one of our members at the last council meeting. As someone who has worked a lot in Africa, he equated living in deep poverty with someone who is up to his or her neck in a swamp. In that situation, you do nothing. Your goal is to do almost nothing because any ripple is liable to drown you or attract the alligators. That is the situation in which most people on welfare are living. That inertia precludes innovation and efforts to get ahead because you are often knocked back down, sometimes further.
My last comment is about capitalism in the market or — as many of my feminist friends call it — the tension between capitalism and patriarchy. The reality that we ignore and cannot seem to get a handle on consistently in policy terms in Canada is that the market is not the whole economy. More economic activity goes on at the household and non-profit level that is not part of the market economy, and that is the part that is most essential to human beings and to social development. We ignore that at our peril. That is a large part of why we are in the financial crisis we are in right now.
Senator Cordy: The problem is, when you are listening, you have a few notes and then your mind goes all over the place. Where will I start, and what will I say in two minutes or less?
Thank you all very much. This is an incredible discussion, and it will be helpful to us in writing our report. As you have seen from the discussions around the table and what we have heard, when you talk about poverty, it is hard to focus on one issue because so many things that are involved overlap.
Ms. Eberle commented that housing is the anchor. That is one of the things we have looked at. If you have an address, then at least you have some dignity. That is a good starting point. It is hard to separate it.
It concerns me that people are in the homeless or poverty cycle, and they do not get out. As Senator Segal mentioned earlier, Tom Gribbons from Saint John, New Brunswick said that we seem to give enough money to make people live better in poverty, but they are still in poverty. There is no springboard to getting people out of poverty, for a whole range of reasons. They have food and a place to live, but there are many other things required so that the cycle of poverty does not perpetuate itself.
I used to be an elementary schoolteacher in my other life. I could see those things happening. You had 5- and 6-year-old children, and you wanted their future to be so much brighter than their parents' future. That gets back to many aspects that you mentioned today, such as education, child care and a whole range of other issues.
Ms. Regehr and a number of you have mentioned that we have put a large sum of money into housing, particularly. I will stick to just the housing part of it. We have put in a great deal of money, and I am not sure that we are seeing great results from it. In 1989 the House of Commons unanimously passed a motion to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000. However, there is no such thing as ``child poverty.'' Children live in families, so it is family poverty.
Everyone who voted for that motion had the best of intentions, but here we are 20 years later. We still have families and people living in poverty. We have spent a great deal of money, but we have not had the outcomes. We have had differences around the table as to whether there should or should not be a national strategy, but everyone agrees that there must be a national plan. I am not sure that we have outcomes to follow.
Mr. Pomeroy said earlier that Australia has outcomes that are measurable. We get into the whole provincial-federal jurisdiction thing here. The provinces do not want the strings attached. However, from the federal perspective, we want the strings attached because we want to ensure that the money does not go into general revenues, that it goes into the pot for which it was intended. Would it work if we had outcomes? I do not think we have outcomes. Would it work so that it is not just a scramble in the twelfth month of the fourth year, with someone scrambling around figuring out what we have done so that it is ongoing, open, transparent and measurable? Would that work so that the money we are spending is spent well and that people have springboards out of poverty?
My second question deals with the Aboriginal file because it is strictly federal. No one can say, ``It is not my responsibility.'' It is strictly a federal issue. Mr. Seymour made a great comment. He talked about the different needs as well as how needs can change. He gave the story about building the home for the single mother, a four-bedroom house, and as time went on, she did not need the four-bedroom house. When these changes come to the individual, how do you ask them to leave that house unless you have something better for them? That whole issue is really important.
I had the opportunity a year ago to visit a seniors centre on a reserve in Manitoba. The staff there were incredible. They were so good. The day before, I had been to a seniors home in another part of Manitoba that had its own cafeteria, its own chapel and every electronic gadget imaginable for the patients. They had bells across the room so that if an Alzheimer's patient tried to get out, a light went on or a whistle went off. The good thing about the seniors centre for Aboriginals was that it was one of the very few seniors centres on a reserve in Canada. That is a whole other issue. There were tiles missing on the floor. I saw a plan for a big seniors development on the wall that had been there for at least 15 years. Government after government announced and re-announced, but nothing had happened. When you talk about housing needs, I certainly have full understanding.
I am also interested in the urban housing needs for Aboriginals because we tend to look at housing needs on-reserve, but the same as every other segment of society in Canada, our young people are moving to the urban areas.
What is the availability of housing for Aboriginal people moving to the urban areas?
The Chair: Your first question about measurable goals and outcomes and such is a general question. Then you have more specific ones relevant to Aboriginal needs to which Mr. Seymour will respond.
With respect to the provincial and territorial governments, what coordination or relationship would you recommend to ensure that programs and policy are mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting? Regardless of whether we have national or ``pan-Canadian,'' as Mr. Rainer would say, strategies, what about the relationship here? How do we ensure that these things are all worked on together and coordinated? That is one of the big problems that exists today.
Then, of course, there are the local communities where many of the solutions come from. It should be from the ground up. What relationship would you recommend amongst the local and provincial policy programs and initiatives? Do we need things such as the urban development agreements that we have in Vancouver and Winnipeg, where you have an agreement between the three orders of government and how they might work together?
As much of your questioning had to do with the Aboriginal question, I will start with Mr. Seymour.
Mr. Seymour: I thank you for that. I wanted to address that issue as well as touch on some of the other ones.
With respect to the notion of an Aboriginal targeted strategy, we must recognize that out of the Urban Native Housing Program, we got the development of what we refer to as social infrastructure. That must be supported because that social infrastructure can do the proper analysis, which is addresses the third question. When your third question refers to local communities, we would like to think that you are including Aboriginal communities in those local communities, where you can address the issues of cultural sensitivity, cultural support to other organizations and other aspects such as you see in Calgary, and also to have the ability to analyze and deal with the social inertia or that ``frozen'' nature that Ms. Regehr mentioned.
We are undertaking a study to look at that success and have found that our measure of success does not come from the generation that gets housed; rather, it comes from the generation that is housed as children and grows up in those surroundings.
We have design features that we had to sort of sneak by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, CMHC. For example, we have larger-than-normal laundry rooms so that we can put up a plastic barrier to cut off the laundry room and have in there classes, daycare and all of the informal training and social training that needs to be done. As a consequence, everything is there, from tutoring classes to prenatal discussions, so that women can have proper pregnancies and avoid fetal alcohol syndrome and all the social problems that come with living on the street and having to survive or go missing. Look at the percentage of missing women. That is a product of on-the-street stuff and what you need to do to survive on the streets, and sometimes you do not survive.
One cannot do that from a national perspective, but it can be done with a national strategy where resources and people are brought together. With respect to bringing people together, the Senate can put in its report that there be a mandatory meeting of the ministers of housing and perhaps adopt the Australian model of four or five years. The communities should be brought together in between the years, as well.
It also important to have the Aboriginal community recommend that the Government of Canada invest in that social framework. That would include investing in the National Aboriginal Housing Association so that we can bring the members together because we currently live on no funding. We have not been able to have the level of conferences that CHRA is enjoying being partly funded by the Government of Canada. We get nothing.
I am saying invest in the social structure as an instrument or mechanism to ensure that the policies and programs that are developed in the collective are proper and responsive to the needs of the Aboriginal community at the local level. Let the community at the local levels develop the strategies necessary to effect change and social development.
Mr. Brown: On the Aboriginal side of things, I want to support what Mr. Seymour has been saying throughout the meeting.
We did our first survey of homeless folks in Toronto in 2006. Over 20 per cent of all homeless people in Toronto were Aboriginal. It is very much a national issue, urban, rural and First Nation. We support what Mr. Hill and Mr. Seymour have been saying in that regard.
In Toronto, based on that statistic, we said that we will take 20 per cent of all our HPI funds and target them to alleviating issues with respect to Aboriginal homelessness. We took the finding to influence where we targeted our scarce resources in Toronto. We worked closely with the Aboriginal community in Toronto to develop some very helpful initiatives.
In terms of Senator Cordy's comment that a great deal of money goes into housing but we are not seeing the benefits, we need to celebrate some of the successes of previous investments and current investments. I think, with respect, it might not be quite right to suggest that we have had all this investment and no outcome. Many successes have happened under the HPI program with respect to homelessness, best practices and promising practices. In Toronto, for example, 29 per cent of all rental housing in the city has been assisted one way or the other. All of these programs have built the City of Toronto.
It has been major city building. If you look at many of these beautiful non-profit and cooperative communities across the city, that is the result of federal and provincial investments. As part of this, we must celebrate those successes.
The key challenge is that the investments have just not been at the level or scale that we actually need. For example, following up from Mr. Rainer's point about what we could do quickly, the federal government could quickly double the investments into HPI. The program is there; it is running; it is successful. It is not much money compared to other investments being made at this point in time. It is the scale of investment and funding that I think is the challenge for us.
The other two questions about federal, provincial and municipal orders of government working together, from where CHRA sits, it is all about collaboration and partnerships. If I may read into the record — I will hand a copy to the clerk — CHRA's recently released policy position on homelessness, I can do this in one minute or less. It articulates quite well how the federal, provincial and local communities can work together.
The overall declaration is that Canada urgently needs a comprehensive national housing strategy that includes ending homelessness as a top priority. We have six principles that govern the policy position: national strategy, housing first, more housing now, essential supports and client-centred and shared responsibility.
In terms of how we all might work together, CHRA notes:
1. The Federal government shows leadership in ending homelessness as a national problem based on an ongoing and sustainable funding framework.
2. The Federal, Provincial and Territorial governments work collaboratively with local communities who will, in turn, work with key stakeholders to set priorities for the use of federal funds.
3. Provincial and Territorial governments show leadership in enabling local communities to end homelessness.
4. Municipal governments continue to work with community leaders to foster collaborative efforts among community-based organizations and government agencies, in order to develop comprehensive action plans that reflect local circumstances and capabilities.
As I mentioned, I will pass this on to the clerk. There is other content in here. It is very much about collaboration and partnerships. The one criticism I have heard from some provincial officials — not in Ontario — about the recently released stimulus funding is the fact that provinces were asked to cost-share and match the national initiative but had no input into the setting of priorities. That articulates the things that need to change. If you are asking provinces, municipalities and others to put in money, then presumably they will have a seat at the table to set priorities.
In terms of the local level, we use a slogan to govern the way we work at the municipal level in the City of Toronto, namely, ``Home is where it starts.'' That is an absolute foundation.
I will leave you with one fact about the finances because if anyone asks me what my three priorities are this year, they are funding, funding and funding. The amount of time that folks such as myself and community agencies have to spend around the country managing these on-again, off-again programs, let us get that predictable, ongoing sustainable funding so that we can spend all that energy innovating better client service and better service delivery.
Right now in Toronto, the City of Toronto is the majority funder of affordable social housing and homeless services. The City of Toronto puts in 44 per cent of all the funds. The federal government comes next at 26 per cent and the provincial government at 23 per cent. That does not quite add up to 100 per cent because the 905 areas in Toronto are asked to contribute to our coffers as well.
Twenty years ago, it used to be the federal government that would put in 75 per cent and the province 25 per cent. It is quite clear that things need to rebalance toward the federal government returning to not a new role but just its previous role of being the majority funder of these types of initiatives.
Mr. Shapcott: Senator Cordy, you hit what is the heart of the issue here in terms of housing and homeless policy, poverty policy generally. You used the words ``outcomes'' and ``open transparency'' and so on. People generally want to know what the federal government is doing. What are the results? Is it making a positive difference? Is more needed? If so, how do we spend it? Over the years, some of the groups I have worked with, as a way of dramatically illustrating one aspect of this, have shown up at federal-provincial-territorial ministers' meetings and built symbolic houses out of press releases issued by federal and provincial governments on all the work they are doing on housing and homelessness as a way of underlining that, while the communications people are very busy, perhaps the reality is not as clear.
I want to focus on three major federal funding streams that touch on housing and homelessness. It is important to hit on all three of those because it gives rise to some natural recommendations. The first is the affordable housing initiative which, in its current generation, was launched in 2001 with the signing of the federal-provincial affordable housing agreement between all the provinces and the federal government. There are separate, bilateral housing details with each. Initially, the federal government put in $1 billion; and the provinces and other parties, municipalities and developers and so on, were expected to put in $1 billion for a total of $2 billion. In 2005, Parliament authorized an additional $1.6 billion for affordable housing. However, when that was allocated a year later by the government, it shrunk a bit to $1.4 billion in a series of affordable housing trust funds.
In September of last year, the federal government announced a five-year extension of these three programs: the Affordable Housing Initiative; the federal Residential Rehabilitation Assistance Program, which is a housing renovation program for low-income homeowners and for landlords with low-income tenants; and also the federal Homelessness Partnering Strategy. It was $1.9 billion over five years.
Going back to the Affordable Housing Initiative starting in 2001, there are two appendices to every bilateral deal signed between the federal government and the provinces. The first is called the accountability framework. It requires that each of the provinces produce an annual audited financial statement and a performance report that details the number of units, if it was housing supplements or some other vehicle the provinces were using to deliver the affordable housing dollars; average ownership costs, in the case of the affordable homeownership program; average rent costs, et cetera. It is a requirement that there be annual detailed reports.
Second is a communications protocol that says that everything under these programs is supposed to be public, open and transparent. I have a very keen relationship with the people at the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. I make monthly requests; and since 2001, exactly zero, none, of the annual performance reports or audited financial statements from any of the provinces or the federal government have ever been released out of that program. Openness and transparency are important. We need to know how the money currently in there is being used.
However, under the Ontario Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, we have, in the last couple of days, received information from the federal-Ontario portion of it. We just started to do the analysis of it, so I would be happy to share our analysis at a later date. We have found that the 1,000 units under the rental portion of the Affordable Housing Program that were developed in Ontario in the 2007-08 fiscal year at a cost of roughly $100 million, of which the federal government was in for $26.5 million, were on average about $100 below private-market rents.
In answer to the question about the outcomes, this is not very affordable housing. It managed to get a little lower than the private market, but not much lower. Is it good enough? No. We have to look at whether this program is really delivering affordable housing. Those questions are important questions.
I want to do a quick checklist, and I would be happy to fill in the details later of where the federal government has a specific role in this.
I want to go back to Statistics Canada. With the greatest respect to Ms. Eberle, I want to raise the yellow flag about the statement that 85 to 90 per cent of Canadians are well-housed. That may be true, but we simply do not know. The reason we do not know this is because we do not collect decent statistics.
The census of 2006 reports that 24.9 per cent of Canadian households are paying 30 per cent or more of their income on shelter, which is one of the standard measures of affordability. Statistics Canada has, in the last few months, acknowledged that 1.4 million people — by their estimate — have been left out of the census. Other people who are more statistically minded than me, including officials at the City of Toronto and elsewhere, think that the number of people left out of the census is much higher. Typically, they tend to be lower-income and homeless people. That figure of 24.9 per cent, or 1 in 4 Canadian households, could well be higher.
Many jurisdictions do a much better job, so I do not want to belabour the point of Statistics Canada, but Statistics Canada needs to be given both the mandate and the resources to do a better job.
I want to get to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which is our national housing agency and has a long and proud history. In late 1998, the federal government introduced amendments to the National Housing Act, which significantly reoriented the role of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation away from its traditional role as an agency that focused on the housing needs of low-, moderate- and middle-income Canadians to being a commercial entity. It focuses on mortgage insurance, which is a lucrative practice for it.
In the submission we delivered on Tuesday to the House of Commons HUMA Committee — a copy of which I filed with the clerk — on page 7, we have notes from the latest five-year report of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. It reports that the number of households it will be assisting over the next five years will drop from about 625,000 households to 580,000 households. It reports that, at the same time, its overall spending on the Affordable Housing Initiative, which is the federal government's main program, will drop to $1 million for all of Canada by 2013. On an individual basis $1 million is sizeable amount of money, but for the federal government, $1 million, practically speaking, means the program is gone.
However, that same year, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation is reporting that its net income — that is after you take away its expenses — the money it will be putting into the bank, will be close to $2 billion. CMHC is running a significant surplus, and we think that needs to be reinvested.
I want to move to the Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, HRSDC, and National Secretariat on Homelessness, set up in 1999 by the federal government. I know Senator Eggleton was at the cabinet table with his colleague, Claudette Bradshaw, from New Brunswick, who is a wonderful, warm, generous, larger-than-life person, and very dynamic. I would put her up against Phil Mangano from the United States any day of the week. The initial vision of that was to do exactly what the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness does. They identified that 19 federal agencies and departments had some piece of the homelessness pie. Minister Bradshaw's responsibility as federal coordinator was to bring it together and bring some coherence. Sadly, that has not happened. It is not Minister Bradshaw's fault. I think there were some structural issues and so on. However, the vision that there be a federal coordinating presence has never been realized in the same way that the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness provides a structure right in the White House that links together all the main U.S. departments.
The other federal entity that needs to pay more attention to housing issues is the Bank of Canada. If there is one thing we have learned from the recession — and we will have many lessons to learn — it is that the bubbles in house prices are something to which the bank should be paying attention. It is not just housing advocates saying that, The Economist magazine and others are saying it also. If you look at the U.S., the U.K. or Spain, the problem is that the central banks there were looking at inflation in commodity prices but not at inflation in asset prices, including housing. They missed the housing balloon until it burst, to the detriment of the entire global economy.
We think the Bank of Canada needs to have the mandate, just as it now monitors inflation, but it should be monitoring home ownership prices and raising the alarm bell.
I wanted to raise a red flag, a strong caution about the Low Income Housing Tax Credit scheme in the U.S. This scheme is about 20 years old and there has been a lot of history and numerous congressional hearings about this issue. In its first iteration, it was widely viewed as being one of the least efficient tax programs in the United States.
Efficiency in tax terms means, of the dollars flowing through the program, how many get to the intended purpose. Congressional hearings in the first few years of the program showed that 50, 60, 70 cents of every dollar were going to the brokers who were organizing these complicated tax deals between corporations that wanted to buy tax credits and low-income housing developers that wanted to get the money. It was the broker, often a lawyer or accountant. No offence to lawyers or accountants, but they managed to do well out of it but accomplished very little. The U.S. government has rewritten rules to tighten things up, but it is still inefficient. Still as much as a third of the dollars are going to the brokers rather than the housing.
The consensus among people who care about tax policy, such as TD Economics in their 2003 housing report, is that it is not a very efficient mechanism. If you want to stimulate investment in private rental housing, if you want to stimulate affordable home ownership and so on, you should use direct vehicles rather than trying to use the tax system. It is not an efficient way to do it.
In the United States, the main compliance and accountability mechanism for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit is not the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development; it is the U.S. tax authorities. They have many tax inspectors who are fully engaged trying to figure out about these complicated deals to see if the money actually emerges. That is a big red flag about low-income housing tax credits.
In terms of the various federal entities that I have mentioned, I am happy to fill in more details about these programs.
The final comment I wanted to make was around these three national initiatives; the Affordable Housing Initiative, RRAP, and the Homelessness Partnering Strategy. I want to underline a theme that has emerged today. Both the RRAP, which is the housing renovation program, and the Homelessness Partnering Strategy, HPS, are based on a community-up model. The federal government works with competent local entities, either municipalities or other community entities. They define the issues, and the federal government then supports them. Those programs are widely considered to be successful, though not funded well enough.
The Affordable Housing Initiative, AHI, especially, the latest version in the recent federal budget, is highly prescriptive. The money must go to seniors' housing, people with disabilities and social housing repair. I have no problem with any of those priorities, but what about everyone else with housing needs, such as the Aboriginal people off-reserve — who do not get a penny out of that — or families that are not senior families or that do not have disabilities?
We have the federal government, in its most recent budget, with the Affordable Housing Initiative, going against what it is doing in two other programs, RRAP and HPS, which is saying that they will support the program and back them up. However, with AHI, they are saying that they know what is best, and they will tell you.
The Chair: Thank you. You may get another crack at the floor, but if you or others do not get a chance to say everything you want, we will be happy to have further submissions in writing.
Ms. Tanasescu: I fully agree with Mr. Shapcott's points around the need for the local community to determine how the money is spent and priorities are set. At the same time, when you talk about the need for outcomes and whether that is really key, I think it absolutely is. Mr. Shapcott said that you hit the heart of the matter. I wrote down that you hit the nail on the head.
This is our first year of becoming an entity for the federal government for HPS funding. Our plan is based on outcomes. Performance management is critical to how we demonstrate that we are reaching our goals to the community. That is how we sustain momentum. We justify going back to the government for more public monies by showing that we are delivering to the public the goods we promised.
As we are taking on this new role with HPS, we find that some of the reporting does not focus so much on outputs, such as how many clients you see in a day, et cetera. They are not asking the right questions of the people who are spending the money. A coordinating body would be very powerful working interministerially from a holistic perspective because poverty and homelessness span across departments. The key outcomes should guide federal investment in housing and homelessness. Communities would apply the money to their own ends and deliver the programs in locally appropriate ways while meeting federal evidence-based goals.
Innovation happens locally but also at the federal level. I do not think we should discount that all wisdom has to come from the ground up. Important wisdom happens at this level with people standing back and observing the patterns across communities. Because we are in the trenches, we do not have the luxury of doing that. I am the research manager for the Calgary Homeless Foundation, but I am one person. The federal government has resources through Statistics Canada, Health Canada and various other national bodies. The policy expertise and the rigour of research that the federal government can bring to these social issues will be far more impactful than anything we can muster at the local level, simply because of the scope of the issue. That is another role for the coordinating body, to disseminate information and provoke communities to do better work. Communities that are not challenging themselves to end homelessness and to deal with other issues that they could with the current resources should be provoked to use more innovative approaches.
How do you disseminate that and negotiate that with communities? The HPS is great framework. It is already in 61 communities. Relationships have been established with entities that are leaders at the local level. It is a great way to leverage and build on those relationships. You should definitely support the coordinating body across ministries.
Mr. Rainer: I want to return to the human rights theme. I thought I heard Mr. Snow suggest that housing may not be considered a right. In fact, under international agreements, that is exactly what it is. The right to housing is established in international law.
Part of the challenge with housing is that the right to housing in Canada has not yet been strongly recognized by our various levels of governments, nor, perhaps, the courts, although I think that is starting to come along. It is the recognition of the rights that enables the claiming of the rights. That is why it is so important that there is clarity around the rights that Canadians have with respect to housing, food, clothing, et cetera. These are under international law, but it is somewhat vague as to how they are being treated domestically. That is in part because economic and social rights, as a category, lag behind acceptance. Civil and political rights are more accepted in our society, although economic and social rights have the same standing internationally. They are indivisible.
Part of the challenge of society is to give full recognition to economic and social rights, as we do to civil and political rights. We would not accept denial of the right to vote, and we should not accept denial of the right to housing, food or other forms of economic and social rights.
On federal-provincial coordination, we suggest that there be an annual convening of the feds, the provinces and the territories with civil society and with people living in poverty around this topic. We had a very lively social forum in Calgary two weeks ago. It was pulled together on a shoe-string budget by the Canadian Social Forum, and it was a great event. That could be scaled up and supported annually with the feds playing a convening role.
As a footnote on the human rights theme, there has not been a federal-provincial-territorial meeting on human rights in 30 years.
Further on the role of feds relative to other levels of government, the idea of a commissioner for poverty elimination as an office through which some objective, independent and regular reporting on this important subject can be given is a mechanism of accountability. The National Council of Welfare has done good work to show that jurisdictions that have made progress on poverty have been able to do so in part by having stronger accountability mechanisms built in. We would not see this office costing much money, but the bang for the buck would be significant because we would finally have an individual or office to which the public could turn for objective, independent and regular reporting. Part of the reason we have not made progress to date is because we have not had strong accountability in place.
With respect to community action and so forth, a tremendous amount of activity is ongoing at the community level. It is virtually all very commendable, but the evidence is not yet in that those community-based efforts are bearing the results we seek. That is in part because the efforts are still too new. It may take years to decades to see these results. Calgary has a lot of leadership at the community level and the Vibrant Communities initiatives have great projects happening in many cities in the country. This is all well and good, but the results are still pending.
I heard the other day, unofficially, that there has been a 20 per cent increase in food bank usage over the past year. That suggests that, despite everything that is being done at the community level, forces well beyond community control are influencing poverty and homelessness outcomes.
Community-based initiatives are very important, in part because they provide a forum for dialogue, raising awareness and overcoming myths, stereotypes, attitudes and so forth. That, alone, justifies it. We might suggest that a role for the federal government would be to help scale up those efforts. We do need to scale up these community-based efforts. It is great that we have Vibrant Communities and a handful of other organizations doing some wonderful things at the community level, but it does need to be scaled up.
I suggest that the federal, provincial and territorial governments create a fund to help support community-based efforts and give stability to the NGOs that are doing much of the work.
In terms of Canada as a whole, if we want to see nationwide progress on this issue, the feds are the single-most important player. They simply must be at the plate in a much more determined, serious and engaged way than they have been to date. Federal leadership remains the objective. For that, we require individuals in government or outside government to ensure that that leadership is coming to the fore.
Ms. Eberle: On outcomes, that is a good point. One thing that people involved in the homeless and housing sector could be doing is better celebrating successes. The Homelessness Partnering Strategy in HSRDC does require reporting, as Ms. Tanasescu said. I am not sure if they have yet rolled up the community-based reporting that was required. I participated in the Metro Vancouver Homelessness Community Plan Assessment, which certainly include some good measures. As Ms. Tanasescu said, some were more output based.
The thing to remember, then, is that that is a capacity issue. Doing outcome measurement is tricky, expensive and time consuming. You need to know what you are doing. It has to be done, and I totally support it, but there is a capacity issue there that could be addressed in any federal programming.
The other thing I want to talk about is the federal-provincial-municipal role. The federal government needs to have the leadership and enabling role, and that has to do with resources. We need to involve all levels of government, as well as other stakeholders, private sector and non-profit. The value of local decision making has been recognized by folks around the table, and that needs to be supported and enhanced. Again, it comes down to long-term, stable funding from the federal perspective.
I would add a word of caution. A somewhat decent working relationship exists particularly with HPS and RRAP in terms of the federal-provincial role, at least in British Columbia, which is what I am most familiar with. The most recent round of spending initiatives has raised some hackles with the funding but no contribution to priorities. It might have set things back a bit in terms of relations on the federal-provincial side in housing.
I will quickly draw your attention to something we have not addressed too much today. I would encourage the committee to look forward to where we are going as a society. Some changes are occurring in Canadian society that need to be recognized and taken account of in our planning of housing policy in the future, and one of those would be the immigrant housing experience. We are becoming a nation of immigrants, and we may need to take specific aim at that in any sort of housing policies that we put forward. I echo Mr. Seymour's focus on the Aboriginal situation. Those two areas tie in again with the federal role because immigrant policy is federal and Aboriginal is clearly federal.
The other area I would draw attention to as an emerging issue is rising energy costs and the implications for affordability of home heating and transportation. We need to consider that as we look forward as well.
The Chair: Thank you. Mr. Seymour has had to leave for a flight, but we did hear him at the beginning of this round.
Mr. Hill: Mr. Pomeroy put it well when he said that ``strategy'' is the code word for additional resources. I agree with Mr. Snow that, if we are talking in terms of the federal government providing additional resources to address some of the problems with housing and homelessness, then have a few guidelines around that so that we can work on a cooperative basis. That would probably be a good definition of what I have in mind when I speak of a national housing strategy.
Increased growth in homelessness has occurred since the cap on the social projects funding back in 1993, and the waiting lists have grown immensely as far as the urban native housing corporations are concerned. When a federal strategy is developed, it would behoove Canada to recognize the fact that over half of the urban population now is made up of status Indians. Probably a quarter of them grew up in urban areas, and a quarter probably moved recently.
Speaking in terms of rights, Canada must recognize that we have a right to have Aboriginal control over Aboriginal housing. They have to also recognize, as do the provinces, that cultural differences exist between the First Nations, the Inuit and Metis peoples compared to the mainstream peoples.
The feds have to recognize that we do have long experience in delivering successful housing programs through our urban native housing corporations, and we have the skills to go along with the experience.
It must also be recognized that just because we leave the reserves, we do not lose our status as Aboriginal First Nations people or whatever, and if we are living on-reserve, we do not usually run into discrimination until we leave the reserve. That is where the problems start, and significant problems arise from that particular aspect.
Restrictive policies need to be considered. I will give as an example the requirement that if an urban native housing cooperation saves money by being frugal and astute in its financial dealings, then they have to give the surplus back. In Ontario, it goes back to the municipalities. Here, we have to give the money back to Ottawa. We are not allowed to reinvest the savings that we generate into more housing. The policies have to be flexible enough, and it has been stated in the general context that it should be not prescriptive but serve as a foundation for future development and support to help address the housing needs that exist.
I thank you for the opportunity.
Mr. Snow: I will talk briefly about a topic Mr. Shapcott mentioned, which is housing bubbles, the artificial inflation of housing prices in a given region. One of the things not mentioned too much in the initial committee paper last summer or today was the discussion of why it is that the private markets are responding the way they do, why it is that housing as a general indicator has become so much more unaffordable in certain municipalities as opposed to others, and what some of the factors are affecting this rapid growth of housing bubbles in particular municipalities, not just in Canada but around the world.
I point out again that there have been significant studies that talk about how land use regulations are creating an artificial scarcity of land in certain municipalities. Many of these land use regulations are policies that some people, including myself, are fond of and fond of the results that come from this. We can talk all we want, and we can fund affordable housing for people of low income, but when we are looking at it in relation to the normal market rents, we have to look at the factors that cause market rents to go up and make housing less affordable for everyone else and raise that barrier higher for people who then need money for affordable housing.
I would stress that the committee look at some of these studies and some of this evidence suggesting that local factors are a big driver behind the increase in private housing prices, and that makes housing far less affordable and hurts the people of the lowest income the most. While we do not like the sounds of it because we are big fans of smart growth and all sorts of different types of zoning, we have to accept the reality that there is a significant chance that much of the rise in housing prices, and therefore rental prices and a rise in people who cannot afford housing as precursor to homelessness, has much to do with these land use regulations.
If we are really serious about combating affordable housing and homelessness from another angle, we need to take these ideas seriously, even if it means opening up land use policies for municipalities. Many people are not fond of that idea.
Ms. Regehr: At this stage of the game, there is not much to add. I would just like to give my own reinforcement for key things that I have heard that are very important for the council.
The point that was made by several people about the mandatory bringing of people together and the funding for that is absolutely critical. It was talked about in Calgary and at the Universal Periodic Review on human rights as well.
There simply are not spaces and places to talk about poverty issues compared to the health sector, for example, where there is research, funding, conferences and so much happening. The larger social development field, especially poverty related issues, are really starved lately. That means bringing everyone together, different levels of government and different sectors of society. Obviously, it also means the much harder job, as well, of finding ways to engage populations who are themselves experiencing poverty. It is not just inviting them into the way government does things and expecting people to give them what they need on their own turf and under their terms. I think that is important.
The idea of scaling to need is absolutely huge. Canada has constantly been criticized for — and even I had questions listening to some of these things —having so many programs and talking about how much money we put into things but rarely saying what percentage of the need we are addressing. Who will this amount of money help? It is the 5 per cent of the people who are homeless, the 10 per cent of the people who cannot afford to feed themselves or the 20 per cent of people who need a training program. Then we are left to criticize the other 80 per cent of people, who cannot get into the program, for being lazy. You have to look at scale. Do not have a program that is only resourced to address 5 per cent of the need and claim it is a good program that will solve something because it will not.
I am intrigued by the issue that people raised about talking about successes, playing that up and celebrating them. I think there are many successes of which we do not know. We cannot celebrate them because we cannot find them. We do not know about them.
People go through programs and once you are out, you are gone. You no longer exist. A cohort in my generation is the product of much better programs in earlier stages in this country. My children are the beneficiaries of my being able to access those programs; yet, no one counts those anywhere.
We need to know about what has worked in the past. Maybe sometimes it is about returning to what we did well and not trying to reinvent the wheel. Finding the successes is very important.
With respect to accountability, we need an outcomes focus. We need to know what people are being held accountable for. We need a coordinating body to ensure everyone knows what page we are on. We need regular convening of things because life changes, circumstances change. When results come in, we need to evaluate them. We need an independent audit and a stronger external accountability function that is not just dependent on governments providing the information that they want to tell us at any given moment.
The Chair: I will bring this to a close. I will not begin to summarize how I feel this has all developed. I heard some very key things, and you have all provided much food for thought. It is very much appreciated.
It is an input that is coming toward the end of our study, but not the end of our work; we have a report to write. It is certainly valuable input to have at this stage — whether we have a national strategy or whether we even call it that, or a pan-Canadian strategy and how prescriptive or non-prescriptive it is. In any case, those are interesting inputs. Thank you for being a part of it.
We do have an opportunity to engage further on an informal basis, as we have lunch. If you can, please stay around for that. I know some people have left and others have to leave because of flights to catch. Thank you for coming to the table today and participating in this very valuable discussion.
(The committee adjourned.)