Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology
Issue 25 - Evidence - June 14, 2007
OTTAWA, Thursday, June 14, 2007
The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 10:55 a.m. to study the multiple factors and conditions that contribute to the health of Canada's population, known collectively as the social determinants of health, as well as to examine and report on current social issues pertaining to Canada's largest cities.
Senator Art Eggleton (Chairman) in the chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology. Today, we will be considering the questions of poverty, homelessness and housing.
[English]
As we continue our study on these issues, I want to point out this is work being undertaken by our entire committee but relates to studies being done by two subcommittees. Our first subcommittee deals with population health, chaired by Senator Keon, and it is looking at the key social determinants of health. The second subcommittee deals with challenges facing our major cities, which I chair. Poverty, housing and homelessness are issues common to both subcommittee studies.
We are building upon previous work that has been done in the Senate on the matter of poverty; most notably the 1971 report headed by Senator Croll and the work of Senator Cohen who wrote a report in 1997 called Sounding the Alarm: Poverty in Canada.
We are also building on the work being done by the Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, chaired by Senator Fairbairn, dealing with the issue of rural poverty. That study was initiated by Senator Segal.
There much work being done. There is a solid foundation that we are building on in terms of these critical issues facing the people of Canada.
Today, we have two witnesses: Jan Donio, Vice President, Information Services and Operational Change Management of the United Way of Greater Toronto. The United Way of Greater Toronto is an incorporated, non-profit charity focused on improving the long-term health of the Toronto community. Of course it is an organization with which I am well familiar. It runs Canada largest fundraising campaign in support of 200 social service agencies providing a vital network of support. A volunteer board of trustees of leading community members governs all United Way decision making. The board oversees how donor money is used, shapes their strategic vision and plans and monitors organizational performance.
[Translation]
We also welcome Ms. Michèle Thibodeau-DeGuire, President and Executive Director, Centraide of Greater Montreal. Centraide of Greater Montreal (Centraide) is a member of the United Way/Centraide Canada movement and serves the population of Montreal through a network of community organizations and projects.
Centraide promotes voluntary social involvement, develops community action and builds caring communities.
[English]
About 500,000 people in Greater Montreal are helped each year, thanks to the projects and agencies supported by Centraide.
We will start with Ms. Donio. As our clerk has mentioned to both of you, we are looking for a five to seven-minute summary and any recommendations you may have on how we might proceed in dealing with these issues at the federal level.
Jan Donio, Vice President, Information Services and Operational Change Management, United Way of Greater Toronto: Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I am here representing the United Way of Greater Toronto, UWGT, and Frances Lankin, who regrets she was not able to attend.
Perhaps it is best to start by quoting Ms. Lankin:
We know there have been enormous changes in Toronto neighbourhoods. Our challenge is to ensure that Toronto's neighbourhoods, particularly in high needs areas, can build upon their strengths to improve the quality of life for residents.
This is what guides our work at United Way of Greater Toronto, and we hope will influence the deliberations of this committee.
I shared with you a number of reports that we have produced around this issue; significant research that is well recognized throughout the country. A Decade of Decline examines and documents the growing income inequity in the City of Toronto. Yes, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. We look to a time when we can say the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting richer.
The Poverty by Postal Code report documents the concentration of neighbourhood poverty in our city — as you drive through Toronto, you can see significant concentrations where poor people live and have a lack of services, infrastructure and support needed to have a prosperous life. The maps from that particular document show that those neighbourhoods are actually in our inner suburbs — the suburbs where many of us grew up in the 1960s. We will talk a bit about why that is, what that is doing to our particular city and how that is indicative of what is happening across this country.
The Strong Neighbourhoods Task Force report entitled Strong Neighbourhoods: A Call to Action. . . 2005 and the quick and easy reference to our UWGT Neighbourhood Strategy will allow your researchers and you to see what we see as some of the solutions moving forward. You can look at the 13 priority neighbourhoods that we are focused on now. There are 92 poor neighbourhoods in the City of Toronto — 92 neighbourhoods where poor people are getting poorer and where their infrastructure and support is totally inadequate to be prosperous, successful citizens in our country. We can only focus on 13 of these neighbourhoods. That is where our money will take us now, but we are hoping that the initial investment will pay off as those neighbourhoods become successful and can help others, and we can move across the city. We are hoping that this committee will help us address some of these inequities.
Also, I have included the map of what we call the media-reported shootings of 2005, a year that has come to be known in Toronto as "The Year of the Gun." Those neighbourhoods, you will see, are similar to the neighbourhoods living in poverty. That, to us, is a clear message.
When we looked at poverty by postal code, we did not really know what that research would show us except that we wanted to see if there were geographic disparities across our city. It was sad to see that the poverty neighbourhoods had grown from 15 in 1981 to 92 in 2001. That is not the direction we want the growth in our cities to be going in. There was a 100 per cent increase in the number of children being raised in poverty neighbourhoods — a 100 per cent increase in our future being raised in that environment. In fact, in terms of our new immigrant population, there was a 362 per cent increase in the number of immigrants living in poverty neighbourhoods between 1981 and 2001. These are the people who are helping to build our future, and this is the situation that we are bringing them into.
Our census data in Toronto showed clearly where the problems were and where we needed to focus. Our sense is that there are long-term consequences for people growing up in this kind of environment. We know what that is. We know that children from lower economic levels do not succeed as well in school and do not have the kind of healthy environments that we would want them to have; and to think that that perpetuates in the neighbourhood makes it even more frightening. We believe no Canadian should ever have to worry that their neighbourhood will become a neighbourhood in the year of the gun ever again, and that is what we are aiming to destroy.
The poverty is located in the inner suburbs, so how did this happen? In the 1960s, as the car came into our lives, we built these wonderful suburbs with the belief that people could drive everywhere, and the middle class occupied those suburbs. As they became more affluent and began to be more mobile, bigger suburbs grew farther out, and they were attracted to those larger houses. At the same time, downtown city cores became more vibrant and more expensive to live in. Just because we see a downtown city core becoming more vibrant does not mean that there are less people living in poverty. It simply means they are living somewhere else in the city, for the most part. Where did they move? They moved to low rents, to those inner suburbs, to those areas we built in the 1960s with very little infrastructure and no sense of history. These people were only there for low rents. Those same communities started to attract our immigrant population, because when one is new to a country one needs to be in a location that has low expenses to help with the transition to the new country.
Geographic inequity started to become a marker in our city, not because urban planners designed it, rather because we do not control urban mobility patterns. As a country, we need to identify those areas and to articulate and demand that resources be put in those kinds of communities where poor people are living, so that we can create a different level of neighbourhood support for their lives.
When we looked at what our role would be, we looked at where other people were working. At this point, we want give our strong support for the work that is being done in terms of guaranteed income. We believe that is a fundamental right among citizens and that the work being done there will help to address the core or root issues that are affecting these peoples' lives. We are excited about the efforts to engage on a national housing strategy and a national housing agenda, because we believe that employment and housing are critical to establishing a fair playing field for these people living in poverty.
We would like to note that regional economic development councils and agencies have been established across the country, and we look forward to one in Southern Ontario that would help us deal with the shift in the manufacturing industry that is seriously affecting these people's lives. We hope this committee could reflect on that as a point that may be worth noting as we move forward.
I think we all believe that neighbourhoods are safe, healthy environments where citizens are engaged. They offer stable employment, attract business and celebrate inclusiveness. They are where citizens can figure out how to address their local issues. That is the foundation on which we are building, and that is the foundation that we hope all Canadians will have an opportunity to experience in our great country.
When we decided to focus on neighbourhoods, we were thrilled that the federal government announced a program called Action for Neighbourhood Change, ANC, as a pilot project. I want to put five stars beside this one — Action for Neighbourhood Change.
In the five communities that are currently working in this area, we have been able to make marked progress in neighbourhoods because of this funding and we, as the United Way, were able to work with the federal government and a neighbourhood in our city to make a significant difference. We selected Scarborough Village as the site for our ANC project. If you are thinking about a village, do not, because none of the citizens there would ever refer to it as a village. It was a very sad community to walk through. When we started working there, the kinds of names we would hear the citizens call their neighbourhood are not names we would want to repeat here, but they showed the lack of positive morale and positive interface in the community. It is typical post-war suburbia: A bunch of little bungalows renting for small amounts of money now where people can live, and in that area, a significant number of high rises have thus developed. It is a receiver community. Often new immigrants live there for a couple of years to get their feet on the ground, and, if they are successful, they are able to often move to other locations.
The challenge with rebuilding neighbourhoods is that the results are long term. It is not easy. It took decades for these neighbourhoods to move into decline, and it takes decades to rebuild them. It takes the engagement of citizens in understanding the issues, in helping them to articulate what they would like to see in their community and in mobilizing the resources for moving forward. Working with some local citizens, businesses, schools, faith communities and service providers, we have been able to make significant progress in this neighbourhood.
We watched a park that was known for the amount of drugs sold on a daily basis. It was a no-go zone for children. We watched it turn around. If you went there today, you would be thrilled to see families with their children playing. In fact, if anyone comes in to do anything illegal, the families feel empowered to take that person on and to encourage them to move on, because that is not what that park is for.
We have watched them grow gardens and, interestingly enough, integrate cricket into their culture. It is not a culture of hockey and baseball; it is a culture of cricket and soccer. We have seen them get community involvement in developing their cricket society and engaging and teaching youth.
We have seen the South Asian Women's Group and the Bengali Social Club find space. It was there; they just did not know they could use it. Now these groups are meeting together and co-hosting events; so it is not about just creating groups that can operate in isolation, but creating that sense of neighbourhood.
The services in the community are breakfast clubs, parenting classes, homework clubs, youth lounges — all the things that we would often see in middle-class society are now there. They are building on it, and there is a strong sense of hope.
It is a neighbourhood on the road to recovery. As they now celebrate their second community festival — without any help from the United Way, because they figured out how to do it themselves — we feel they are well on their way to being a vibrant community.
Our colleagues in Surrey said it well about their community. Because of the ANC in Surrey, they believe their community will never be the same. We can say that about Scarborough Village; and we believe that is where government funding needs to go and that these are the kinds of differences that we need to be making.
The challenge around this is that much of it depends on urban infrastructure. They did not have the space; they did not have the buildings. They did not have access to the resources needed to have the infrastructure to be able to have meeting places, parks and celebratory events where they could engage and talk about their issues around a park that was a no-go zone. To turn it around and meet with businesses and social service agencies is expensive and takes time, but it is money well spent.
We strongly recommend that this committee look at ANC seriously and that it not be a pilot project. It should be seen as a fundamental right for our poor communities to access this fund, to engage them in building their communities to be stronger and more vibrant, engage them as citizens in our country.
We are starting with 13 communities. As we did with the first, in ANC, we are now trying to raise funds for the other 12, to find donors and places in our community where we can collaborate and engage to do the same kind of work. How powerful federal money as matching money would be, as it was in ANC.
Again, there are 92 communities altogether; there is a long way to go. There is much work to be done, not only in our city but in all cities across the country. We believe that to establish our work in neighbourhoods, to build on engaging citizens where they live, that that is where our work needs to really be focused, as is shown in the research from the United States and Britain.
The statistics and data in our reports are shocking and sad. As a Canadian, it embarrasses me that we have let the situation deteriorate to this level. A committee such as this is exciting, in that it has the ability to make recommendations so we can turn that embarrassment around to become celebration, inclusiveness and, in fact, vibrant communities.
It is our hope that we can work with you in partnership, that organizations such as the United Way can partner with government to make Canada a better place, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
The Chairman: Thank you very much. Those are certainly some alarming statistics that you have cited this morning. This year of the gun, I hope we are not seeing another year of the gun in Toronto. It certainly is a very difficult situation at the moment.
Let us move on to Centraide du Grand Montréal, Michèle Thibodeau-DeGuire.
[Translation]
Michèle Thibodeau-DeGuire, President and Executive Director, Centraide of Greater Montreal: Mr. Chairman, you asked us to talk about our work in the fight against poverty and to concentrate specifically on homelessness and housing. You also asked us to talk about our collaboration with municipalities and the challenges that we encounter. I will not repeat what Ms. Donio said since she has described the problems faced by Canada's two largest cities very well.
Montreal differs from Toronto in that poverty has remained in the city core. We have not seen the exodus that Toronto has. This means that community organizations have been in place for several years, giving an established social network. This is perhaps our advantage, one that Toronto will need to rebuild.
I will not dwell on the problems. With a population of 3.2 million people, the fact that, as the chairman mentioned, 500,000 people receive assistance makes it easy to imagine what sort of environment we live in. The situation is the same: the more fortunate people are more fortunate and those who are on the margins are marginalized even more. This is dangerous. Social peace depends on social cohesion. In a society with fortunate and less fortunate people, it is critical to ensure that no one feels excluded from the system or placed on a garbage heap, because when they do, they have nothing more to lose.
The foundation on which we are building — we do it with the City of Montreal and the department of public health among other agencies — is the system of issue tables that we have in each of our communities at risk. We have 32 of these communities at risk in Greater Montreal, mostly on the island of Montreal. Centraide of Greater Montreal covers the island of Laval, the island of Montreal and the south shore. Without doubt, most are on the island of Montreal.
So we have 32 issues tables funded equally by Centraide, the City of Montreal, the department of public health and the government of Quebec. We have operated this way for 15 years. This is how the projects that I am going to tell you about really started.
We have a project in one of the communities linked to a movement found all across Canada called Vibrant Community. In Montreal, we have put a lot of effort into the community of Saint-Michel, our pilot project. It is our Scarborough, if you will. Saint-Michel has a population of 55,000. I have brought you some information on this project, which has allowed 60 different partners to come together. Again, I will not repeat Ms. Donio's words, but it takes a huge number of partners to revitalize a community: the police, the schools, governmental agencies, local elected officials. Everyone is part of the solution.
You know that in Quebec, things are very decentralized, especially in Montreal, with zone controllers and elected city officials. It is a problem, but in another sense, it is an advantage. When we need access to the parks in order to revitalize them, everything, from dezoning to safety issues to premises loans, is done with the city.
I will give you an example of a little project in Saint-Michel that I find very touching. We are well aware of the problems of "taxing" among young people. The schools and the police have joined forces with the neighbourhood moms. The schools have given them safety vests and the police have showed them how to take the children to school safely — they form a kind of chain.
They have walkie-talkies. You cannot imagine how proud these women are to help the children and take them to school, and how happy they are to get out of their houses, to feel shut in no longer. This is just a simple example among so many others.
Work is being done to help people find jobs, decent housing, to provide young people with appropriate places to meet and enjoy themselves. Unfortunately, drugs, prostitution and violence are all too present in these communities at the moment. We want the feeling of a village.
To give you another example, Saint-Michel is home to the Cirque du Soleil, yet the street that leads to it is dreary and unattractive; there is nowhere even to have a coffee or read a newspaper. We need to attract businesses of different kinds.
So the project that we participate in — and Centraide is a kind of leading partner — aims to bring everyone together. For almost 15 years around the issues table, we have been working on projects like "Vivre Saint-Michel en santé" that we jointly fund with the city, the government and the public health department. There are some very creative projects and approaches.
I think that the role of government is to be aware of what is happening, aware in a way that means that its decisions do not disrupt the local dynamics. The first step in the solution is the decision to get involved, you know. So the problem of homelessness, for example, will not exist in 15 years if solutions are found today. Of course, we know that there will always be runaway kids, the world can never be perfect. But it is still critical that we stop repeating the same mistakes.
If you would like copies of the documents — they are in French — I will be happy to provide them. These are the only documents that I can offer you.
[English]
The Chairman: Yes, we would appreciate the documents. I might add that I am happy to hear that, in spite of the major challenges that you face, you both have pilot projects — Scarborough Village in the case of Toronto, and Saint-Michel in Montreal — that are helping to alleviate the problem.
In terms of the United Way of Greater Toronto, what year did the Action for Neighbourhood Change pilot project start?
Ms. Donio: It started three years ago.
The Chairman: Is it just the one project that you have?
Ms. Donio: Yes. It is my understanding that there are five cities participating and that we are one of the five.
The Chairman: Have you talked with federal officials in terms of where to go from here on this? Do you have any understanding whether the pilot project will become permanent or not?
Ms. Donio: As you can imagine, Ms. Lankin has been talking to federal officials because of the success of this project. At this point, we understand that all of the evaluations are positive in terms of the work that has been done across the country. However, we are not certain that it will go forward as a full program.
The Chairman: How much money was spent on the Scarborough Village project? What did it provide?
Ms. Donio: In total, we have probably spent a little over $2 million.
The Chairman: Is that all federal money?
Ms. Donio: No. It was partially federal money as well as some of our own United Way money. Also partners, such as school boards and others, invested more in particular program areas. Primarily, it provided some leadership development for those in the neighbourhood who wanted to see a change but did not have the skills to bring their fellow neighbours together. We did a comprehensive inventory of the physical and social assets in the community and then worked with the groups that were brought together to address what they have and what they would like. Then we put the action plans in place to mobilize the assets, physical and social, that they wanted.
We found space, cleaned the space up and rented it. We provided opportunities for them to learn to hold meetings together, bring groups together and identify common issues, whether South Asian or Bengali. Much of it was capacity building; for citizens to take their neighbourhoods back.
The Chairman: Do you feel this has been a good pilot project worth seeing in other neighbourhoods in Toronto and other places in Canada?
Ms. Donio: I welcome you to the Scarborough Village festival this summer, and you will see a safer neighbourhood and people participating in their community, which is the foundation for where we need to go.
The Chairman: Good for you.
With respect to Montreal, we have heard we need national strategies, political will, resources and goals and timetables to be able to reduce poverty. An example of where we did not do that was perhaps the 1989 House of Commons resolution to eliminate child poverty. No one set a goal, timetable or any resources to do it. Consequently, we are no better off today with child poverty than we were at that point in time.
However, there are two cases in Canada where provinces have set specific goals in terms of poverty; one is Newfoundland and the other is Quebec. I wonder if you could comment on the goals, timetables, et cetera, of the Quebec government with respect to poverty, how they are assisting in Montreal and how you work within that framework, if you do.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: I do not feel I would be a good person to answer that. This has been an ongoing discussion. We do have an anti-poverty law. Most groups would say you should put your money where your mouth is. There is still much to be done, but at least there is a will to do it.
In Quebec, we have a social structure that has been very strong. The CLSC Métro is unique to Quebec and has been there for a long time. We have been focusing on helping babies from the very beginning. We have child care for $7 a day, which is very important.
However, housing has been missing — and this is federal jurisdiction. When the federal government cut back funding, that hurt tremendously. Much of the problems we are now facing are as a result of that. If people cannot have affordable housing, they will be in a horrible mess. Most of their money will go toward rent. They cannot feed themselves properly. How will they be able to help their children through school with the stress they live with? When people are hungry, they will not sit a child on their lap and read a book; they are wondering how to feed this child.
There is a responsibility there that has been put aside without thinking of the long-term impact. This is a major issue.
Senator Callbeck: You mentioned the pilot project in Toronto where you get everyone involved in rebuilding the community. Of course, the secret is getting people to participate. How did you do that? In order to do that, you must have leadership. How did you identify the people who could be leaders and develop their skills? You mentioned leadership development. Would you elaborate on that? I would also like to know about the age group. Are all ages participating?
Ms. Donio: I will start with age group and move into leadership, because age group is easier to answer.
Initially, we found that new parents were first in wanting to be active. Their dreams for their own children were at risk. We found an age group of late 20s to early 40s. We found those people because the project actually funded community development workers to go into the community to have a dialogue with citizens and identify those who wanted to come together. As we brought them together just to discuss their issues, and as they identified issues about their parents living with them and employment, we had regular meetings, just as dialogues for citizens, and built on that group.
We can now say that we have sports programs for the youth, as well as some arts programs and programs for seniors. They are new. They have taken a few years to develop. The strongest is still around parents coming together. These were parents who did not feel welcome in their schools and needed to develop some skills in terms of knowing how to enter a school and make requests for their children. We found that was a good building block in that particular community.
How did we identify leaders? We hired people who knew that community to go and work there. We put the office right in the community, and we found space where there were often people socializing, close to where people would practice their faith, for example, so it became known to them. As we did that, we found, certainly on the faith front, all different faiths had leaders leading their own faith with strong leadership skills. Working with them and the school, which could identify parents who had the courage to cross into the school and make requests, we could identify a core group with which we could do leadership development.
We are fortunate in Toronto to have three great universities. York University partnered with us to develop a leadership development program, a certificate program. It is so important for these people to feel the power of a credential. They have not normally felt that in their lives. York is way across the city, and they would never get there from Scarborough Village, or seldom, but we were able to bring in the program, sponsored by credentials from York. It gave a great deal of credibility to other community members that these people were developing new skills that they could share.
Senator Callbeck: How long and how extensive was the leadership development program?
Ms. Donio: Our leadership development program is a significant component of capacity building. We do it in other communities, not just in Scarborough Village. In Scarborough Village, we actually tailored it to their particular needs. Our program operates over a few months. It is a leadership development program that the school already ran for business leaders. We tailored it to community development leadership, which has a different focus but has that same legitimacy to those who are participating.
Senator Callbeck: That is wonderful.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: I will add something that might interest you. We have developed a program called Bridging Leadership. We find that the biggest challenge to the people who lead our coordinating table, neighbourhood tables, is getting everyone to agree on what is important and what they have to do. It takes special skills. In Montreal, with the help of universities, but also with other people, we have developed a program. I told you we have 32 coordinating tables, and 18 of them are now in the process of getting this training. It is done over one year in three blocks of one week. We take them off-site for a whole week at a time, three times, and they learn and develop these skills. They have now completed their second full week. We hear now that everyone wants to go into this process. It is incredibly challenging, and one needs special skills.
Senator, you know exactly what it takes to get people to agree on things. You have to lead from behind. These are the skills that we need to help our leaders develop.
Senator Callbeck: I have one question on your presentation on Montreal. The paper says the proportion of people receiving social assistance went from 18 per cent in 1996 to 13 per cent in 2002. In other words, it dropped between 1996 and 2002. What explanation do you have for that?
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: The working poor are not included in that group. Where is this?
Senator Callbeck: It is in a document from the Library of Parliament.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: Poverty has changed its face. We are now conducting in-depth research on what poverty is today. It is very different from what it used to be. We have over 300,000 people, we were told, who work and are poor and must go to get food at the end of the month. People who work for minimum wage and are the sole provider are getting half of what they need to be at the poverty level. They must work between 50 and 60 hours a week at that salary to be able to cope. Something is drastically wrong. That might be an explanation.
The Chairman: The statistic is at the top of page 3, and it relates to those on social assistance. You are quite right.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: They do not get any assistance.
Senator Munson: I am concerned with suburban and urban ghettos. You talked about the training of young people. They can play cricket and do what they have done, as new Canadians coming into Canada, to make themselves comfortable in their own environment. It seems to me that while the outreach programs there may be positive and good for that particular community, we are missing something called Canada in outreach programs in terms of what it is. They come to a new country, they are living in a new country called Canada and they are Canadians.
Young men and women are in suburban and urban ghettos, but they are new Canadians and should be part of the other mosaic, which is called Canada. We may still have a tendency to put people into blocks, and telling them they can be comfortable inside a narrow scope. Are there outreach programs to reach beyond that?
Ms. Donio: You have identified an important issue. Our experience and the research have shown that we need to start where the people are. We need to engage them in what they feel is important to them and feel powerful around that. As they do that, we imagine that the next step is their feeling capable of engaging in more of that outreach work. The issue that they are now facing in their community is to create their own parenting programs. Initially, they were trying to create parenting programs within their own Bengali organization and now they are trying to create parenting programs together with the influence of all the neighbours, many of whom are immigrants and many of whom are not. We feel that the richness from breaking down those silos and bringing them together engages them in the next step of development. There is much room for outreach programs of that kind. We would want to see that in a healthy neighbourhood index. There is no such thing in Canada. Perhaps this committee would consider that we want to resource our cities to develop that index, and that type of outreach would be part of it.
Senator Munson: Several weeks ago, the chairman and I were at the annual meeting of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities. I found an interesting presentation by Philip Mangano, the executive director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. There was a business component that he talked about. He talked about Mr. Bush's plan a few years ago. He talked about a Republican conservative president working with 362 liberal Democrat mayors across the United States and how they have been able to decrease homelessness over the last three or four years by engaging business within the community. He is saying that all the do-gooders and the wonderful people who do great work, as you do, which I support wholeheartedly, are maintaining what is happening. In other words, it is not decreasing in any way, rather it has become an industry where people sit and collect welfare and live in that environment; it becomes a generational thing and moves along that way. I am somewhere in the middle on this.
For the inner cities of Montreal, would it be to the advantage of business to be in and playing and working at the same time with Centraide or other organizations to alleviate some of these issues? I would like to have an overall position.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: You have to be with these people to understand that it is not a comfortable situation, wondering if they will be able to live a decent life with their children and offer them the minimum. No one likes that. It is not comfortable at all. The vision that drives us is that we are convinced that all of us together can build caring communities where we will be linking people together.
Our society has become so fragmented, everyone is on his or her own. We are trying to rebuild networks where people will care for one another, where neighbours will take care of each other, where people will not hide. We have not seen the beginning of the problems we will have if we do not do something. Mothers cannot care for the babies born in those neighbourhoods. This is a problem. We just see the problems now of the teenagers. If you think we have problems now, just wait.
This is not a nice-to-have thing, and no one likes it. Without listening to those who are living the problems, we will not find solutions. Those who have resources, power and influence have no idea how to do the right thing. Those who know what is needed are those who live the problem.
If we put people who have resources with those who know the answer, you would need a translator. They do not understand each other. They look at each other as though they want to kill each other. This is probably the role we have. People in business trust us because they have seen us; they know we understand them, because we raise the money. We are in contact with them. However, we are also in contact with the people who live the problems, because we are with them every day. This is the role that the community has given us, something called the United Way.
Everyone has a piece of the solution. Government has a piece of the solution, but civil society also has a piece. This is what we bring forth. It is important to understand the role each of us has and understand the problems. I can tell you no one likes it.
Senator Munson: Are you winning that battle?
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: I believe so. I was sharing with Ms. Donio a study that will be coming out. I should not be saying this in a public broadcast.
Senator Munson: Sure, you should.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: There is a comprehensive study now being conducted with 15,000 children in Quebec, those from poor neighbourhoods and others. The results will be out in the autumn. My understanding is that we will find that the children from the poor neighbourhoods have been doing, as far as the teachers have found, extremely well compared to those who have not had special support because they were in the poor neighbourhoods. It will take time, 10, 15, 20 years to fix. It took 100 years to undo, so let us take the time to fix it well.
Ms. Donio: United Way has business at the table. In communities, you must realize much of the business is predatory. The largest growth in business in most poor communities is cheque-cashing places. One needs to be cautious. We want to ensure we have the right business with the right intent at the table. We are with you, and we could not have done Scarborough Village without business at the table.
Senator Fairbairn: As a committee, one of the issues we have been working on along these lines is that of literacy and how it haunts our population. As you were talking about regenerating these areas and the kinds of activities that you have, particularly with the adults, is this an issue that you bounce up against daily? How do you deal with it?
Senator Keon: Can you both describe how you organize? What is your nerve centre? What is the pull to the centre of gravity of what you are doing? What structure and function do you set up in a community when you walk in to, for example, Scarborough Village? Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire, you have analogies also. How do you go about setting up your communications system and your social networking system?
Senator Cordy: I also would like to know when you are setting up communities — Scarborough Village and Saint-Michel are the examples — you said unfortunately some businesses tend to be predatory, such as the cheque-cashing businesses. Do you look, for example, at grocery stores in the neighbourhood so that people are not buying groceries at a corner store and paying twice the cost? Do you also look at services such as transportation — bus routes in these neighbourhoods — so the people can get from one area to another for services?
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: Literacy is definitely one of our important focuses. Many agencies we support are addressing this issue.
How do we start? We need readiness. Saint-Michel was a quarry a long time ago, and it then became a dump. It was the only open dump in North America; 1,000 trucks a day would dump their garbage there. The people got together, and they were extremely angry. They succeeded in having it closed, and the Cirque du Soleil came to that area. There was a readiness; there was a group that was angry.
We identified that place, first because there was already a group formed with a leader. Our leader, similar to Ms. Donio's, had been, for the past 20 years, a head of the CLSC Métro. He had just retired and when he learned what was happening, he returned. He knew everyone.
Senator Munson: The CLSC Métro is the health agency that takes care of people.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: Yes. In regard to the grocery stores and transportation, this is a major issue that is being addressed. How do we get these larger grocery stores to come? They will not come if they cannot make money. Somebody will have to bring them back.
Transportation is costing these people too much. Another thing for those very young families is that they cannot put the cart in the bus. They have had to change the regulations.
It is all these little details that will make a difference. The people in Saint-Michel have got together to do what they call group buying; they buy cheaper and they buy in bulk.
Ms. Donio: Literacy is a challenge. Whose responsibility is literacy? Is it federal, provincial or municipal?
Senator Fairbairn: That is a very good question. It is everywhere.
Ms. Donio: Yes, but as one of my bosses used to say, who goes to sleep at night with the red dot and wakes up in the morning really concerned that we have not moved the yardsticks. We have literacy programs that pop up; they are funded and they are great and they close. There is no sustainability or strong integration.
Someone needs to take this on because literacy is the fundamental issue that holds these people back. Their challenge is how to find it; it is by luck. It is just by good fortune that they figure out where it is. It is a critical issue to our success in neighbourhoods.
When you talk about the pull, the structure, we are very process-driven in this field. We do not go in with any particular mindset about what has to be in that neighbourhood, except that citizens need to be more engaged and that we need to increase the number of assets of that community. It can be physical assets, business assets, such as the need for a grocery store; or social assets and educational assets, such as the need for a university program offered in the community because the people cannot get over there. It is that process that drives us; we do not go in with a preordained set of deliverables.
It is often frustrating for government bureaucrats in this age of accountability. Did we get the grocery store in within a year? No, but citizens are now able to read so they can actually create the document they might present to someone to make that happen, or create a co-op or something similar. That is a challenge for us in that regard. I highly recommend, with any funding, that it is about the legitimacy of the process that will produce the outcomes.
We, at the United Way, are becoming what we call "impact organizations." In an impact organization, it is not about the outcome, it is not about the fact that we fed 10 people; it is about the fact that we really identified the critical social issue and created movement on it on a policy level, as well as delivering services. Our process fits into that overriding set of principles.
As we get down to the question of attracting the right things to the community, we believe that to have an asset map of the neighbourhood and have the neighbours look at that, as well as asset maps of other neighbourhoods that are more profitable, more successful, will help them then imagine what they need. They will articulate groceries, and they will move first to a co-op; or one person, who has a car, shops for many. Because we are now bringing them together, they can resolve the issue. They will learn how to make a report that they need buses in their neighbourhood when there is a transportation hearing, for example. However, again, it is more long term.
Senator Cordy: You both addressed the issue of immigrants. In your presentation, Ms. Donio, you said that the poor visible minorities have increased 62 per cent between 1981 and 2001. Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire, you suggested that if we do not make changes now in terms of poverty, we will have real problems.
We have seen what has been happening in France. The first generation, I believe, is willing to say they will live in poverty because they are moving to a new country. While it is not necessarily an expectation, it is something they must agree to live with; but when second generations are still poor, we start having problems.
I am wondering, because both Toronto and Montreal are home to large immigrant populations, how do you change that? What impact does this have when you are dealing with poor neighbourhoods, where, for many of the people, neither English nor French is their first language?
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: In Côte-des-Neiges, there are 160 languages spoken. You can imagine the challenges people have — the difference in culture. The kids become translators for their parents, and normally this is very difficult for the man to accept.
I am overwhelmed by the quality of the community agencies that actually cater to these people. There are miracles happening every day in how they actually get people together. In our agency, we have been investing in an approach that we call accessibility. We have identified children, zero to five years of age, as a major priority, and also the immigrants, especially in neighbourhoods where everything was French and white. How do these people organize?
We have been supporting the agencies so those who needed the skills could develop the skills, to be able to address whoever came. It is still a work-in-progress, but there is something happening that is good. Those who are having the most problems are the visible minorities. The Black community is the one that is most at risk in our neighbourhoods.
Ms. Donio: In Toronto, this has become a fundamental issue as the immigrant population grows and the number of languages often spoken in a classroom is as many as the number of students there. For me it is a bigger issue. There is a policy issue around language rights that is not really clearly defined in this country. If I have a right to engage in the language, then there should be programs available to enable, help and support me at a community level.
We say we are English and French and that is great. However, it then falls to the school systems and other institutional structures, and the voluntary sector is left picking up those who do not fit into those various places, which are often mothers. A number of schools have had some great initiatives funded by places such as Human Resources and Social Development Canada, HRSDC, and Heritage Canada, but they are short term and dependent on funding year to year.
This is a long-term need. People need to be able to embrace and engage in the language in a way that empowers them to be effective in society. We tend to fund them for a year to develop basic skills, but then at home they are really using their native language to communicate, and we do not fund them for the next level and the next level. There is a level of engagement that falls to a number of groups without clarity of direction of who owns that particular component.
In Scarborough Village, this was a huge issue, and the way we resolved it was through community-based translators. People move to communities to be associated with other like-minded people. Therefore, we engage the person who has been there the longest and has the best language skills to help with the translation in citizen group meetings, which makes them slow and rather methodical, but we need to meet them where they are at. However, there is a piece missing. I have not thought about it much, but it feels to me that there is a gap in this issue.
Senator Munson: In its 2007 budget, the Government of Ontario introduced measures tailored to assist low-income families and individuals. I would like your observations on those measures. Have they improved the situation?
Ms. Donio: It is rather recent in terms of a budget announcement being able to create a significant difference, but we do believe there are programs and initiatives coming out that will significantly support the education side. For example, first-generation students who want to go to university and college will now have greater financial support and opportunities. We believe there is much good news there, but it is a little early at this point to see the impact.
Senator Munson: I am on another committee so I am mixing issues up with immigration a bit, but we will be doing a study in the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights about immigrants and children of immigrants and the difficulty for them to get work, whether it is in a city or in another place. Is that something you have detected within your work in Toronto — and perhaps in Montreal — that they have an education but are bored because they cannot find work?
Ms. Donio: One grows up in a poor neighbourhood and does not have the network that is often relied on when one finishes school to gain employment opportunities. In addition, one has not seen a parent necessarily model all the behaviours that are required to be successful in a work environment. It is a challenge. If we could now give the infrastructure and build the networking capacity among neighbourhoods, it would shift and change. It is an issue we do not have data on, but it is worthy of gathering evidence on, so we could determine where to go as a collective.
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: This will not be news to you, but just recognizing their skills so they can work in the field they know more about is a very important issue with people who come from elsewhere. It is an issue that requires much thought. There is some work in that area, but I do not know if we are dragging our feet on that.
The Chairman: Poverty, housing and homelessness have been issues for a long time, but in the last few years some different trends have entered into it. Can you tell me what trends you see in those areas over the last five years?
Ms. Thibodeau-DeGuire: The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There are so many people writing now about this. I had the opportunity recently to meet with John Helliwell and Robert Putnam. They are putting their fingers on very important issues of society. I hope we put our energy and resources in the right places. I am not sure we are using our resources the best way possible. Governments have huge amounts of resources, but individuals also have many resources; it is their time, their passion, and they can change much through that.
For governments, it is supporting what is coming from the grassroots and being careful not to do things that would break what is starting. All we have been talking about is very fragile, such as getting people to work together and trusting each other. We know what trust is all about. Without networks we cannot do anything. It is not one person who does something. The government must try to understand what is happening, take the time to understand well and see where the help is needed.
The Chairman: That is a good message.
Ms. Donio: The data shows there are very serious trends. First, if we look at the median income in Toronto and then we look at the median income in poverty areas, the difference has grown significantly. Where perhaps the gap used to be 15 per cent, it is now 30 per cent. As that gap widens, hopelessness and the sense of not belonging starts to increase. I feel that is a very significant issue, and we want to keep our pulse on that data.
Second, there is a huge shift in the sense that we are finding some of the promising solutions. We are building them. That is an exciting trend. We need to escalate that; we need to celebrate it; we need to engage other communities in it, and we need a place where those of us who are struggling to build that can dialogue and enable to help our federal government move further along the line. That is a very positive trend in moving forward.
The third trend is an interesting one in terms of youth. We have more children in poverty than we have ever had before. We have more violence than ever before. I am a researcher, so to hypothesize that those two things are connected would not be too farfetched; it needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.
The Chairman: Thank you very much to both of you. You have been most helpful to us in our examination of these issues. I want to applaud what you both do on behalf of the committee. You are struggling against some very big statistics — as you have cited — and some very big human problems, yet you are doing wonderful things in that connection. My best wishes to you both.
The committee adjourned.