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Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Social Affairs, Science and Technology

Issue 11 - Evidence - February 15, 2012

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OTTAWA, Wednesday, February 15, 2012

The Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology met this day at 4:14 p.m. to study social inclusion and cohesion in Canada.

Senator Kelvin Kenneth Ogilvie (Chair) in the chair.

[English]

The Chair: Honourable senators, I hereby call the meeting to order.

[Translation]

Welcome to the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology.

[English]

I am Kelvin Ogilvie, a senator from Nova Scotia. I will ask my colleagues on the committee to introduce themselves, starting with the deputy chair on my left.

Senator Eggleton: Art Eggleton, senator from Toronto, deputy chair.

Senator Merchant: Welcome. Pana Merchant from Saskatchewan.

Senator Martin: Hello, Yonah Martin from Vancouver, B.C. Welcome to all of you.

Senator Housakos: Leo Housakos from Montreal.

Senator Seidman: Judith Seidman from Montreal, Quebec.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We can have Senator Callbeck introduce herself as she sits down.

Senator Callbeck: Catherine Callbeck, Prince Edward Island.

The Chair: That did it: I just call the meeting to order and —

Senator Cordy: Everyone comes running. That is great.

The Chair: Would you introduce yourself, senator?

Senator Cordy: I am Jane Cordy, and I am a senator from Nova Scotia.

Senator Dyck: Senator Lillian Dyck from Saskatchewan.

[Translation]

Senator Verner: Josée Verner, from Quebec.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you again.

We have four presentations today. I will introduce the presenters as I invite them to speak. We determined that I would start from my left and move across the table.

This is the eighth meeting of the committee with regard to our current study on social inclusion and cohesion in Canada. We are dealing with urban planning today and its impact on the issues of inclusion or exclusion to particular populations in Canada.

I will begin by asking the Canadian Council on Social Development to begin, Peggy Taillon, President and CEO, who will give the presentation, and welcome Katherine Scott, Vice-President, Research, who will be available for additional questions.

Ms. Taillon, you have the floor.

Peggy Taillon, President & CEO, Canadian Council on Social Development: Thank you for inviting us to speak today. It is a pleasure to be here, and I have to say particularly in front of this standing committee whose work has been incredibly thoughtful and progressive. Many landmark reports have come out from this committee, so we are pleased to be here.

One report in particular, which I think is directly connected to what we are talking about today, is your In From The Margins report which is great, because it complements the issues we are talking about today.

As you mentioned, I am here with Ms. Scott, one of the most progressive voices in social policy today. I am pleased to share the floor with her.

I will give you more of a macro overview in my comments. In your package there should be a slide deck, and that contains more detailed information that we have provided with respect to the topic at hand today.

We are a country at a crossroads. I know we have heard that before and it may sound dramatic, but in many ways it has never been truer. Canada is changing in fundamental ways and, yes, change can be good. It is a marker for success, growth and progress. The big question before us is whether we are building or tearing down. So much is at stake and so many of us may be unaware.

Consider for a moment those who dismissed the recent Occupy movement, those who said it was not meaningful, did not have a cohesive message and was not about anything at all.

Perhaps as a country we should pay closer attention and dig into what has led to this unprecedented movement in the country and across the world. I know that Occupy is about all of us. It is about the fact that we have become a "have" and "have not" society, that the growing gap is our new global pandemic, and thus far our crisis response systems have been woefully inadequate.

The tension that has been bubbling up and has culminated with Occupy is about the reality that prosperity and opportunity will soon be out of reach, not just for those who have already been left out and marginalized, but it may quickly reach our eroding middle class: those who once believed their future was secure.

This is about people: people and their economic structures not meeting their needs; people and their governments not understanding their needs; and people bumping into systems not designed to meet their needs. This is about real fear that short-sighted policies are wreaking havoc with Canada's future.

It is about dismissing the troubling signal that we are at the brink of environmental catastrophe with 15-degree highs in Ottawa and across the country in November and December of this past year, thanks to our apparent fear of anything green.

This is about hitting the wall with rising health care costs and pressure on eroding social programs that almost guarantee there will be little left for future generations, and then we will blame it all on our elders. We should remember that longevity is in fact a marker of success and a goal of our social programs. It is about feeling unheard and the frustration that the fabric of our social infrastructure is crumbling beneath us, that much of what we grew up believing about our country may be more aspirational today than real.

It is about the fear of being left behind — left behind, imagine, in Canada. We have officially become a country where your postal code matters more than your genetic code. Poverty is literally making segments of our society sick.

It is inconceivable that in a country as well endowed as Canada, a country that prides itself in protecting and empowering the most vulnerable in our society, a country once heralded as a moral compass in the international community, may be becoming a country of myths.

Universal health care, the social quilt, peacekeeping, our Aboriginal heritage, the cultural mosaic, once all pillars of Canada's society, uniquely Canadian, once sources of great pride, today no longer reflect who we are.

Have we decided as a country that it is okay for kids to go to school without breakfast, to hide during lunch so no one will see that you do not have lunch and to go home at the end of the day not knowing if there will be a meal waiting?

After years of raising their families, working and contributing to communities and their country, is it okay for seniors to go without: to make choices between paying rent, heat or groceries? Where is the dignity in that? Is our shared Aboriginal heritage not something to celebrate? For so many, our rich heritage has become a life sentence to live in catastrophic poverty, conditions rivaling developing countries. Isolation, discrimination and hunger are simply regarded as a fault and not a symptom of discrimination. After fleeing persecution, war, torture and coming to Canada, going hungry and living on the social fringe is just part of settling into Canadian society.

Clearly it is time for a rethink, a renewal of Canada's social contract, and once again time for a big national conversation about what defines us today, where we want to go and how we will get there as a unified and cohesive country.

What does renewal look like? It is about fixing — not tweaking, but fixing — our systems and structures. Our post- war social architecture that we are working with today is antiquated. It does not reflect how Canadians live, work and play, and most certainly does not reflect the needs of Canadian families today.

This is about speaking the truth, starting with Aboriginal Canadians, where our systems are founded on colonialism, paternalism and — shall I name it — racism. It is almost ingrained in the structures and institutions. Systemic racism is in our government departments, our systems, structures and even within our legislative frameworks.

Until we reckon with this as a country, we are denying our shared heritage and holding back collective prosperity. It is about the obligations of government to ensure that fairness, opportunity and the absolute best start for every Canadian is once again part of who we are and how we relate.

It is about inclusion, opportunity, participation, shared values and shared prosperity, building on the successes and innovation in local communities. These are the things that tie us together. It can be as simple as having a library to walk to in your community or as complex as ensuring that all buildings in it are accessible to people living with disabilities, having programs that support new Canadians, creating good quality jobs and meaningful opportunities that lift people out of poverty. It is about ensuring the best start for kids and creating meaningful opportunities for the full participation of every Canadian, regardless of postal code, privilege or circumstance.

It is what defines us as a nation. It is a promise and an obligation that we make to our kids, each other and to our communities. It is the Canadian way.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you.

I will now move to Dr. Sandeep Kumar Agrawal, Graduate Program Director, School of Urban and Regional Planning, Ryerson University.

Sandeep Kumar Agrawal, Graduate Program Director, School of Urban and Regional Planning, Ryerson University, as an individual: Thank you very much for inviting me. It is a pleasure and privilege to speak with you today. I have been asked to talk about inclusive planning in Canadian cities as well as ethnic neighbourhoods, ethnic enclaves and social cohesion. I will address the above topics through three key points: first, the issue of representation and inclusiveness in city development processes; second, the myth of ethnic enclaves as a threat to social cohesion; and, third, an idea as a solution built around reasonable accommodation.

Let me talk about representation and city development process. One indicator of inclusiveness is the participation of socio-ethnic groups in decision-making processes of city development. This can take two forms. The first is to invite, solicit and facilitate expressions of interest and concerns of groups in policy making and implementation.

The second is to empower members of minority communities to become staff, managers and elected or appointed public representatives.

Contrary to popular belief, my studies indicate that large cities in Canada, as well as in the U.S., follow several practices to facilitate inclusiveness in city development processes. Some of these are providing translation and interpretation services in different languages, involving ethno-racial organizations in planning deliberations and appointing minority representatives to task forces and planning committees. Innovative measures are increasingly being used to involve stakeholders, such as meeting in small groups in people's homes, the use of Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media and holding design "charettes."

The empowerment of minorities through representation in city councils, planning boards or departments is increasing but not in the same proportion as the increase in the number of visible minority immigrants. For instance, visible minorities comprise almost 40 per cent of the population across the Greater Toronto Area, as an example, but they account for only 7 per cent of all municipal council members.

Breaking into the power structure is, however, largely a political process and not a city planning exercise. The electoral representation of minorities is subject to shifting political ideologies, socioeconomic conditions, as well as the organization of their communities.

Moving on to the second point, ethnic enclaves are the elephant in the room for inclusive planning. In media and political narratives, ethnic enclaves are viewed as places that divide cities along ethno-racial lines and impede social integration. These views have cast an aura of "problem" around ethnic enclaves, but my studies show this is seldom the case. Ethnic enclaves are more than just residential concentrations of particular minorities. They are also areas where minorities build community life by developing places of worship, institutions, services and businesses.

The various Chinatowns, Greek villages, Little Italys or India bazaars of Canadian cities are among the high points for visitors. Ethnic enclaves must not be confused with ghettos, which are the product of poverty, exclusion and physical blight. Most Canadian ethnic enclaves are not burdened with such conditions.

Cities are always organized in spatially differentiated neighbourhoods: rich here, poor there, young families in suburbs, seniors and singles downtown. The point is that spatial and functional differentiations by class, income, ethnicity, lifestyle or family type and activities are the organizing principles of cities. As long as these differentiations are neither imposed, nor act as a source of poverty and exclusion, they do not constitute ghettos.

Ethnic enclaves do not pose a threat to social cohesion. Contemporary neighbourhoods play a limited role in fostering social cohesion. Neighbourhoods have long lost the character of territorial communities of primary relations and strong neighbourly bonds. Modern social life is based on communities of interest, occupational associations, voluntary organizations and social networks that are spread all across a city.

A neighbourhood is at best a weak social organization of local interests. Social relations are mediated through children's schools, play groups, community programs and local services, sufficed to say neighbourhoods do not have a primary role in fostering a strong sense of belonging to a society.

There are a few strategies for combating the problems of ethnoracially distinct but deprived neighbourhoods. One is to promote mixes of low and middle income households and deconcentration of disadvantaged families living in poor neighbourhoods. Rent subsidies and home ownership tax credits are some of the tools used. Promoting infill development of market housing and businesses broadens the economic base of deprived neighbourhoods. The idea is to reduce the mutually reinforcing effect of concentrated poverty. Neighbourhood revitalization programs like Regent Park in Toronto are a good example. The point is that building intercultural bridges — geographic and social — is the strategy of integration.

Community based social development in poor neighbourhoods is another commonly used strategy. Toronto has a network of multi-service neighbourhood centres in places like Malvern, Thorncliffe Park, Fairlawn, Davenport and other neighbourhoods of immigrants. These centres offer youth counselling, job searches, establish language classes, seniors clubs, settlement assistance and after school programs.

All in all there, is no current public policy or tools to regulate the geographic concentration of ethnoracial groups in such places. Policy can affect people's quality of life through the provision of facilities and service as well as by land use, housing and commercial policies. However, it cannot prescribe who may or may not live in an area.

Coming to the third point about reasonable accommodation, how do we sustain pluralism in our cities and local policies without compromising and overarching goals such as sustainability, smart growth, fair housing, or even job creation? Put differently, how do we construct common ground to accommodate diverse interests, but advances general health, welfare and environmental sustainability? The strategy of reasonable accommodation appears to be the key in achieving this.

Reasonable accommodation is not frequently articulated in city planning, though it is recognized and even legislated in some sectors as a principle of public policy. It is incorporated in labour law and in human rights codes in Canada. Reasonable accommodation has a two-pronged approach. It allows modifications in an institution's rules, requirements and policies to accommodate divergent needs and demands of clients and staff, but sets limits of reasonableness in such accommodations.

In city development and planning processes, reasonable accommodation means the cultural needs of a community should be balanced against common interests of a city as a whole and the criteria of fairness and equity for others. The issues of ethnic enclaves, commercial areas and institutions in the urban fabric, and reconciling cultural interests — with overarching goals of sustainability, compact urban form, good design, economic growth and fair housing — remain to be addressed. A comprehensive set of policies defining the criteria and performance standards of reasonable accommodation have to be forged. It is necessary to establish both the scope and limits of accommodation as well. Current city development practice lacks the vision of an inclusive city. City planning policies —through the explicit strategy of reasonable accommodation — can bridge, but cannot level the structural inequities of class and race rooted in political and economic systems. Strengthening public education, increasing employment equity, fostering an open society and promoting political participation are the processes that promote social cohesion. Institutions where such activities are enacted — such as schools, places of work, governments, media, sports and arts — are the sites where social cohesion can be fostered and where investments of political will must be made.

Thank you for listening.

Alain Mercier, Board Member, Canadian Urban Transit Association: It is a pleasure to join you on behalf of the Canadian Urban Transit Association, or CUTA for short.

According to Statistics Canada about 40 per cent of Canadians do not own a car and according to Transport Canada, about 35 per cent of Canadians do not have a driver's licence. According to the Canadian Automobile Association, the average cost of owning, acquiring and operating a car in 2011 was about $20,000.

The cost of a year's worth of transit passes for unlimited use might average between $1,000 to $1,200 per year, depending on the community where people live.

By way of introduction, it is important to state that public transit has a broad mandate of the provision of universal mobility in Canadian communities. That mandate has numerous objectives including economic, environmental and social goals.

Transit is expected to keep urban traffic congestion under control, to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollutants, and of course to contribute to social inclusion.

Unfortunately, these objectives are not always entirely compatible. Our customers consist of numerous segments of our communities. Commuters may value fast, direct and frequent service. Seniors may prefer a bus stop close to home and ease of access. Students may need good late night service, and low-income residents are dependent on low fares.

While we try to strike an equitable balance between these objectives, there will be tradeoffs.

That said, I am here today to talk about the social access and mobility mandate designed to ensure social inclusion for those who do not have the ability to own a car. I do not mean the increasing share of Canadians who choose not to drive a car because of the lifestyle benefits that transit offers, but those who have no other option.

In that regard, public transit for this segment of society is an essential service. Many studies have shown that without public transit these people are excluded from employment and access to medical, educational and recreational opportunities.

CUTA developed a concept called Transit Vision 2040 — which is a blueprint for the next generation — mapping out how public transit can play the best role in optimizing access and mobility in Canadian communities. Key elements of that vision surround the creation of a Canadian transit policy framework and ensuring social inclusion. It is a challenge for all of us, but especially in small communities and rural areas as the population ages and people have increasing difficulty in providing their own transportation. In cities that is one issue, but another entirely in communities without public transit. There is a limit to the extent to which they can be expected to rely on family and friends to get them wherever they need to go: medical appointments, shopping, et cetera.

As I said earlier, balancing the economic, environmental and social objectives of public transit is always a challenge, but even more so when we look at how transit budgets are structured. If we provide discounted fares for seniors, students and other concession groups — all of which are justified for sound public policy reasons — this tends to be funded out of municipal transit budgets even though it is a social service.

The result is that transit is seen as losing money. In part, it is because we are expected to cross-subsidize the social service cost — without carefully assessing the benefit to users versus the benefit to society — against the extent to which the user or society bears cost for those benefits.

Another important dimension of the relationship between social inclusion and public transit is related to recent immigrants. In a recent report from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, based on a study undertaken for statistic Canada, recent immigrants were found to be much more likely than Canadian-born residents to use public transit to commute to work. This was proven to be true even after controlling for age, gender, income and distance to work.

In nearly every major city, except Toronto, newcomers were twice as likely to use public transit to commute to work. In Montreal, roughly half the recent immigrants commuted by public transit compared to only 20 per cent of Canadian-born workers. While there is evidence that these differences do diminish over time, accessible transit is fundamental to the quality of life of recent immigrants, many of whom simply cannot afford to own a car. For many newcomers, efficient public transit can be as important as housing. In short, the availability of public transit directly affects where newcomers can live and work, and enables them to connect to the community.

The concept of social inclusion is not that well developed in Canada. Most of the research is from the U.K., the U.S. or Australia. Much of that work is related to understanding poverty, which can be either absolute or relative. Absolute poverty refers to not having access to basic needs, whereas relative poverty is seen as not having access to the same resources as one's peers.

We talk about living below the poverty line and define that in terms of financial income or ability to afford basic necessities, but social exclusion can be equally severe if it prevents some people from participating in society to the same degree as others. To my knowledge, there are currently no widely acceptable standards to determine adequate levels of social inclusion.

In summary, we feel that public transit is a key ingredient to social inclusion. It is the only form of widely-available, universally-acceptable transportation. While it has many sometimes-competing objectives, it is clearly an enabler — an important enabler — allowing people who do not have their own vehicle to have better access to basic needs such as employment, education, health care and recreation.

The bottom line, ladies and gentlemen, is that improved public transit means a more inclusive society. In that context, our recommendation is that Canada needs a national transit policy framework built upon a partnership between all orders of government to provide the basic foundation of urban development and design, investment, tax policy, and research; and to optimize the role transit can play in ensuring the best possible levels of social inclusion.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

I now invite Dr. Caroline Andrew, Director, Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa, to say a few words.

Caroline Andrew, Director, Centre on Governance, University of Ottawa, as an individual: I am delighted to be here today. I am very honoured to be here today. I think you are dealing with an extremely important topic for the future of Canada. I think there is a growing sense, as was alluded to, that there is an increased exclusion and loss of social cohesion. I think that is — obviously, as you have been looking at it — a complicated subject, including economic changes, growing diversity, growing individualism.

However, what I want to particularly talk about today is inclusive design and planning for inclusion. I will use two examples from work that I have done for community-based groups across Canada. Most of my recent academic work has been in partnerships with community organizations and, very often, with local governments. I am a firm believer in that kind of partnership research.

The two I will talk about are two groups that focus on gender-sensitive perspectives on the creation of inclusive and secure communities for the full diversity of women and girls and, therefore, for the whole population. The two groups are Women in Cities International — Femmes et ville internationale — and the City For All Women Initiative, or Initiative: une ville pour toutes les femmes.

I will address the two questions of inclusive design and planning for inclusion. I did, on my diagram — but I did bring just one copy of the two documents, because I think they speak to the question. The first one is Women in Cities International, which is a very small Montreal-based group that does work both in Canada and internationally, and in an area where Canada has really been a world leader, starting from METRAC in Toronto — and we must highlight them — on the work of safety audits and on the work of public safety for women and for everyone.

The particular project I want to talk about is called Together for Women's Safety: Creating Safer Communities for Marginalized Women and Everyone. This was a project done in four communities across Canada — Regina, Peel, Gatineau and Montreal — working in each case with a women's organization and creating partnerships with the municipal government. Basically, they are doing safety audits, which is people going around and seeing what makes them feel insecure in the area they are looking at, then finding out who is responsible for correcting that, and in very many cases working with municipal governments and other levels of government.

I should say that this project was funded by Status of Women Canada, so that it is indeed a federal partnership, as well.

I will talk about what we learned, briefly, having worked with four communities: Aboriginal women in Regina, immigrant women in Peel, elderly women in Gatineau, and handicapped women in Montreal. One thing I learned is that going from the specific to the general was very useful. We worked with the specific group and then we brought the groups together, and it was wonderful bringing them together and having them realize how different forms of marginalization in public space could all be worked on together.

We did an evaluation and tried to understand what had worked and had not worked. Certainly the challenges are making sure that the real voices of individual women are being heard, and also that those real voices are being translated — that is not the right word — into ways that can be understood by the governments taking decisions and, as Mr. Agrawal referred to, the way decisions are taken. The challenges are also, of course, going from pilot projects to trying to lever it up into something more programmatic.

The second example is from an Ottawa-based group, a City for All Women Initiative, which is in partnership with the City of Ottawa and also with funding from Status of Women Canada — so, again, a role of the federal government — looking at what is created an equity and inclusion lens, which is — it is being implemented by the City of Ottawa — a tool for staff to realize how they can be better staffed by understanding the ways of looking at the needs of different sets of communities, all the way through the policy process, such as when you are doing consultations, when you are doing planning and program development, trying to understand how to work. The tool is quite easy to be used, and is accompanied — there is the tool, then training and coaching, so that the staff at the City of Ottawa can understand how they can enjoy work more, but they can also become better at reaching out to this very increasingly diverse population in Ottawa.

Again, I think the important things are the question of evaluation, of trying to look at what has worked and why what has worked has worked, and why what worked less well did not work so well. That has been a role, one of the nice partnership areas, between university-based researchers and community-based groups, because some of the evaluation component can be done very well by university-based groups looking at the work.

The main point I wanted to touch on at the end is why I think these examples are pertinent for the work of your committee and for the Government of Canada. I think that the importance of a gender-sensitive perspective — basically the "slogans" become "safer for women, safer for all," but I really think if you plan to try and make urban spaces safe and inclusive for the most marginalized of the population, you will indeed make them safe for everybody — safe and inclusive.

The importance of intersectionality is that we are not just talking about gender; we are talking about people who are handicapped, which is a huge question of how you move around the city. We are talking about age, gender, race, class. It is very much about intersectionality and the importance, to repeat myself, about rigorous evaluation, what works and does not work; about how we can build so that the program becomes increasingly useful and about how we can understand what does work in these very complicated questions of building inclusive spaces.

I want to end by touching on why I think this relates to the mandate of the federal government. Criminal law, public safety and crime prevention are all one area where, I think, this is important. We all know that if we can do prevention well, it is more economical and effective. These are very long-range, preventive pilot projects: joint jurisdiction on immigration and immigrant integration — and a number of the speakers have spoken to how important this is for these questions — urban Aboriginal strategy and the equality of men and women.

There is clear evidence that the fear of violence is stronger in women. That comes out in every study that has been done. The fear results in changes in behaviour that restricts women's participation in urban areas. The question is not the rate of violence, but the question of mode of behaviour. That means women do not go out at night and restrict their activities. Therefore, particular measures are useful, both in enhancing inclusive design, and, once you start looking at reactive questions about design, you then start thinking that it would be smarter if we were more proactive in planning and in planning cities that were from the very beginning more inclusive. Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you all very much. I will now open the floor to questions from my colleagues.

Senator Merchant: Thank you all very much. You have spoken to my heart, each and every one of you.

First, I have to tell you that I was born in Greece and that I came to Canada as a child. I feel very fortunate; I have been very lucky. I come from Saskatchewan, where we have a large First Nations population. We know of the divisions between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal that have existed for a long time. Unfortunately, we still have a high number, almost 30 per cent of our First Nations people, who are still poor.

With our current immigrant populations, we know that as of 2006 — and I read something that said this — four in ten new Canadians are also poor. This is what Canada is: a lot of immigrants and, in Saskatchewan, many First Nations and many young people in the First Nations community.

I saw something today on television where someone had done a study about how new immigrants felt about Canada. The people that they interviewed said that two things were very important to them. One of them was community participation; the other was helping others. I have seen that in my own community. In Regina, we have small Greek community of about 1,000 people now, but everyone in Regina thinks that we have a large Greek community because they are out there in public and they are doing many things for the community. They have huge fundraisers. It is the same thing with the East Indian community. They have a fantastic fundraising effort every year. Helping others and being part of the Canadian fabric is important to them.

I also work with immigrant women in Regina and I recognize some of the things that you said about transit, about fear and about enabling women to be part of the Canadian fabric. I do not know what, specifically, we can do. You have mentioned some things. What is it specifically? Can you highlight one or two things that would make a great difference to the way that people want to participate? Sometimes we hear some criticism about our multicultural model, yet that is very important — at least I have felt that in my life — because it gives you a sense of who you are. That is very important. If you feel good about yourself, then you can go out and do things and help others.

Although we have all these great ideas and people see us as a great role model for other countries, why are we still struggling?

The Chair: I would like to know who will try to answer that. I want you to focus your answer. We cannot have a long-ranging discussion here because I have a lot of senators on the question list. If someone can answer that succinctly or give examples succinctly, please do. Others will not join in unless they have a distinct, succinct addition.

Ms. Andrew: I think public transportation is absolutely crucial as a social inclusion. I would say public transportation and then I am all for funding things that emerge from communities by way of support. I am doing this top-down, here. Public transportation and, from the bottom up, which would be some way of supporting community initiatives and strengthening them.

Mr. Mercier: In my 30 years of working in transportation and working in Quebec, for example, with civic social development agencies, the importance of access to education, doctors and recreation are critical in an urban area. I will use an example.

Here in Ottawa, unfortunately, we had a strike that lasted for 53 days in the middle of winter. We heard from the population about the impacts of not being able to connect within the community. Unfortunately, when you have that kind of real social experiment, where mobility is restricted for a period of time, the reality is that you are able to see the impact on the population. People were not able to go to work or to school. That underscores that urban mobility is a critical factor in access to enrichment, either economic or social or any other type. That is a very important factor.

Mr. Agrawal: I will try to answer this question by talking about this particular neighbourhood in Toronto that I am currently studying. This is a neighbourhood called Thorncliffe Park, which supposedly has the highest number of PhDs concentrated in one place.

We asked, "Why have you come to Canada? Do you find it a welcoming place," and so on. Yes, they find it welcoming. They find that it is place which has given them peace. It is good for their kids, and there is a lot of camaraderie within the community, bonding and helping each other. The problem is access to jobs. Most of these folks are not unemployed; they are underemployed. The largest proportion of underemployment exists in Thorncliffe Park across the city of Toronto.

Katherine Scott, Vice-President, Research, Canadian Council on Social Development: I would stress the importance of consultation or community-driven engagement processes. Canada has been a leader in this regard, developing wonderful processes dating back easily 15 to 20 years and looking at ways to engage marginalized people who lived on the margins and integrating them into urban planning or community planning or social developments that exist. These are incredibly important local community initiatives that offer incredible range for people not only to engage and participate but also to effect policy and programs in their applications to different levels of government. Supporting local community social planning organizations as they work with different communities, I think, is an important recommendation going forward.

Senator Eggleton: Last week, in the Toronto Star, my city, there was information about the new census data. They ran two maps showing how people were gathering by income. In terms of Toronto, they showed the previous census data and the current. It is frightening to see the polarization going on in the city.

It has also been written about by Professor David Hulchanski at the University of Toronto, who will be coming to a future meeting, when he talked about three cities. He talked about the polarization of people with a fair bit of wealth in the core around some of our major transit facilities, the best infrastructure we have, whereas the poor are being pushed out, and the middle class is rapidly disappearing.

Back in the 1970s, the middle class was 66 per cent of the population of Toronto, and today it is 29 per cent and falling, whereas the low-income neighbourhoods have gone from 19 per cent to 53 per cent. There was very little of that at the time I was mayor back in the 1980s, but it is ever-increasing now.

According to the United Way, it is being ghettoized. Mr. Agrawal talked about the enclaves, and I would have used that language at one time, too, but now we are seeing more of what could be called a ghettoization in terms of people who are being forced into a lot of older buildings because of their income, and many of them are new immigrants who are being forced into this situation because of cheaper rents that might exist there. I believe there is a threat to the social fabric here. I would like to get your comments on that.

I would also like to get comments on inclusionary zoning because it is a land-use planning possibility. When I was mayor, I embraced this concept of inclusionary zoning as did mayors before and after me, by and large. We wanted to get developments going and we wanted to get 15 per cent for low-income people below the normal market rent, so you would not have people ghettoized into the public housing projects, which can create social problems; but that does not seem to be as prevalent today in Toronto, and I do not know about other cities.

Some of the things I talk about are Toronto-specific, but many other big cities, if they are not experiencing this now, will probably experience it. I would like your comments about the way Toronto is now mapping out and also on this question of inclusionary zoning.

Mr. Mercier: Even from the Canadian Urban Transit Association's perspective, as we are responsible for urban transit in terms of its promotion, one of the key messages we are learning is that urban mobility is really the issue from that perspective, and working for the City of Ottawa, we are seeing that, even in this city. One of the factors from an urban design and planning perspective and mobility is being able to connect some of these neighbourhoods that tend to isolate themselves both physically and socially, in other words, perhaps groups of immigrants or groups that tend to go into a micro neighbourhood. It is an element that we know is a challenge from a urban mobility and planning perspective, namely, how to connect those neighbourhoods that may be falling into that ghettoization and allow individuals in those communities to have access to those little neighbourhoods outside. That localized mobility is very important, and Canadian Urban Transit Association is questioning its own mandate in terms of how to help promote that mobility, urban planning and public transportation model that prevents that kind of ghettoization that we are seeing in neighbourhood pathways, all these things that are very important.

Mr. Agrawal: If I could talk more about your issue of ghettos and enclaves, the way we understand ghettos or the popular belief about them is a little bit different. Let us take the example of Thorncliffe Park. It is 75 per cent visible minority, 50 per cent recent immigrants and on and on.

I would not call it a ghetto just because immigrants are living there. There is no physical blight; it is mostly rental apartments, and they have chosen to move there because they are spacious and affordable. There are a lot of services and institutions in place. There are a commercial centre and three different places of worship and so forth.

A ghetto is where you see abject poverty, and it does exist in Canadian cities, but not on a very large scale. It does happen at the building level. There may be a group of buildings where you would see that kind of situation but not on a large scale.

Mixed land use and inclusionary rezoning is the way to go. My understanding is City of Toronto does ask for 20 per cent or 25 per cent of social housing in new developments. Whether that happens or not is a different question.

Senator Eggleton: That is the problem.

Mr. Agrawal: Right.

Ms. Taillon: On this issue, I do believe that inclusive zoning is a great lever and a great driver for this. However, there is a piece around stigma and how to engage the public around mixed-use zoning, inclusiveness and creating comfort. For all kinds of reasons, mainly ease of creating congregate living and social housing, it is easier to plan that way — put a bunch of boxes up and these will be the subsidized low-income. We know how it evolves, but there is a level of comfort in that for many Canadians, so there is a big piece about how to engage Canada in this dialogue to help them understand that it is to all of our benefit to rethink how we create our urban centres.

That is a big piece around this, and there are the inside-outside thinkers, the folks that do not need convincing as the evidence speaks for itself, but with the general public, I think a lot of work would have to be done there.

Senator Martin: I come from Vancouver where I see a lot of ethnic enclaves, and my daughter, her friends and I know where to go for the pho in Little Saigon or the best cappuccino in Little Italy and so on. I suppose some of the residential neighbourhoods in these areas could be viewed as ghetto-like. I guess I lived in one of those places when we first arrived, in an apartment, with many other families that were immigrants like our own family. It was a community and a springboard to move on to other places.

I am curious about these multi-service neighbourhood centres. I think the success of an ethnic enclave or these neighbourhoods is directly related to the development and maturation of an ethnic community to be able to provide multi-services or multi-ethnic services within that neighbourhood. I would like to confirm that with you, Mr. Agrawal.

I did not hear any of you talk about language, but I think we have lots of programs and service that I have seen certain ethnic groups tap into and able to access effectively. I think that is a bridge we need to build when seniors or smaller ethnic communities cannot necessarily access these existing programs because they do not have the kind of multi-service neighbourhood centres or leaders within their community to help them bridge. I think that is another key point. If you could speak to those two points, it would be very helpful.

Mr. Agrawal: Multi-service neighbourhood centres are one of the best ways of serving some of these deprived neighbourhoods. For example, Thorncliffe Neighbourhood Office, TNO, has been very active in deciphering the needs and wants of the community. It has been able to deliver a number of programs geared towards women whose husbands may work elsewhere — outside of the country, mostly in the Middle East — or kids who need some help with the English language and so on. In my opinion they have been very helpful for the community. However, as far as I know very few exist within the City of Toronto. The City of Vancouver has neighbourhood houses, very much along the same lines. They may not be multi-service centres but again, they have been very effective in bringing many amenities and services to various neighbourhoods. I think it is a model the government should definitely look at.

Ms. Andrew: I was going to add that the City of Ottawa has the Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres, or CHRC, which are across the city and do very excellent work. They have been very flexible about changing demographics and changing programs.

I would also like to highlight the federal government program, Local Immigration Partnership, in Ontario, which has been very much about trying to get whole communities to understand the value of programming. I know the federal government is now thinking about whether it would apply to other provinces across Canada. I think the Local Immigration Partnership has been a great model in trying to get everyone to understand the value and positive changes in the demographics of Canada.

Ottawa would be an interesting example of a multi-service. I think CHRC is an interesting model.

Senator Cordy: Ms. Taillon, you spoke about postal code mattering more than your genetic code. We did a study on poverty and discovered that you have a greater chance of dying young if you live in poverty than you do of getting cancer. Could you expand on that, as to whether that is what you meant?

You talked about obligations of government to ensure fairness. As a committee and as a federal government, what should we be looking to ensure fairness?

My second question is for Ms. Andrew. You spoke about the safety of urban areas under the gender lens. Can you give us some best practices? You spoke specifically about Ottawa, but are there other urban areas where things have been put in place under the gender lens? As she was saying, if it makes it safer for women, it makes it safer for everyone that is working. As a committee, perhaps we should look to recommend implementation to other urban areas.

Ms. Taillon: On the first part with your poverty study, you rounded it out really well. Social causal factors of ill health have a disproportionate cost to the health care system. I used to be a senior executive at the Ottawa Hospital before I came to CCSD. Our health system is really a sick system. It is set up to deal with what happens when you get sick and you need care. It is the back end. In Canada, we have not done a good job investing in the front end. We all recognize the wait time agenda has been successful. Multiple levels of government and providers have been involved. However, I think this is the wrong narrative to have with Canadians. We have said health reform looks like this: If you need your hip or knee done, you will not have to wait as long for it. The narrative we need to be having is that you should be doing everything you can to avoid having that hip or knee done. There many things you can do, and things we can do from an urban planning perspective. There are policies to support that. It is a complicated answer, but we come at health from the wrong angle. We are in this cycle of talking about health reform in the country but it is tweaking; not a fix.

I think the poverty study really spoke to the social causal, and that is what I was referring to in the opening address.

Ms. Scott: Following up on that, in terms of some of the work we have done, we did a study called Poverty By Postal Code. More recently, the United Way in Toronto released a study called Poverty by Postal Code 2: Vertical Poverty. It speaks to place, the impact of poverty on health, and the consequences of that.

I think it is difficult when you are looking at urban planning issues of exclusion, inclusion, discussions of ethnic enclaves. It is a question of choice and the degree to which people have choice. There is a large difference between new Canadians who choose to live in particular areas for a set of complex reasons, and those that have no choice. They are forced to live in areas that are environmentally contaminated because they are lower cost. You create cycles where one form of exclusion begets another, and around it goes. In this whole discussion of inclusion and cohesion, I think it is the degree to which Canadians have the opportunity and choice to pursue their life aspirations in their lives. Many poorer Canadians do not have those choices. You also asked a question about interesting examples. We could fill books about that, certainly on the neighbourhood literature out of the States and Europe. There is incredible work that has been done.

You are aware of the Club of Madrid group, and work they have done on their shared societies program. It is another interesting place to look. They look at a variety of things including: laws, regulatory mechanisms, how you encourage and set up local community consultation processes that are inclusive. Their concerns are around tension and conflict. It is a large group. It is a global group. However, I think there are a wealth of examples and best practices emerging that this committee can tap into. I would be happy to provide more contacts afterward.

Ms. Andrew: I was going to say the same thing. I would be happy to provide that. Several years ago, Women in Cities had good examples that were both Canadian and international. We had a competition of good practices. One of the problems is that often these are very local and being done by people who are busy. When they finish an excellent project they do not have time to describe it to anyone, so they get lost. I would be happy to provide the committee with more examples.

Senator Dyck: I am from Saskatchewan. I am First Nation and Chinese mixture. I grew up in an ethnic enclave — which we call the Chinese Café — in a small prairie town; not very many, so not an enclave. It was just one place.

What interests me with this study is the tension between the personal wish of someone could be called non- mainstream wanting to retain your identity and not be included versus wanting to integrate. There is a tension between the personal versus the public life. You want to have equal opportunity but at the same time, you also want to retain your identity. For my generation, we were not encouraged to maintain our identities. We were encouraged to lose our identities, become included in mainstream society and pretend you were whatever the mainstream was. That varied from small town to small town.

In a study like this, there are advantages to being different. We do not all want to be the same. As a country, what do we do? What are our Canadian values? Is there a role for some agency in starting a public discourse because we are constantly changing? As we encourage more and more people to move here, do our values change? What are our values? How do we communicate those and who has a role in defining them? Who will put up that discussion and the education so we start talking about it?

If we started doing that, the idea of social inclusion becomes part of your daily life and you negotiate those tensions.

Ms. Taillon: A national dialogue is really required. At the opening, when I said we are at a turning point in the country, I think we are for many reasons and one of them is: Do the values that we have held so closely for decades, are they still the same and are there some new ones? Our communities and the fabric of our communities have shifted.

I adopted my son from Kenya, so live with that every day — those sorts of questions. When you take a child from a place where they were hardwired to live, and from a continent, and bring them to another part of the world — another climate, another culture, it is really important to me for him to hold his heritage very close. There are so many things every day that happened to him that are about taking those away from him.

I think it must be something that we are more aware of. It goes back to what I said earlier about our systems and our structures not necessarily being wired in a way that reflects those things, respects those things, and encourages those things that make us unique, while at the same time tie us together.

As a country, and everything that has been coming out about Attawapiskat — I am from northern Ontario, and one of the things that became clear to me was, even how you are raised in your community, the kind of language that becomes normative and how you are raised in your family, community, and school can really be engrained in who you are. Often those structures within that encourage that. As soon as you move to another part of the country, it is reflected in a different way. Being more mobile as a country actually helps with that. Having shared spaces to talk this stuff out is important.

As Ms. Andrew was saying, community health centres, faith organizations, libraries and community centres are all places that you can actually do that, be the individual who is part of a collective, who has their private life.

That is a really important question.

Mr. Agrawal: The question that you asked, I would say it goes to the heart of what multiculturalism is. Dr. Qadeer and I have written that multiculturalism is a two-sided coin; multiculturalism works differently in a private domain, and works completely differently in a public domain.

In our private domain, we can pretty much do whatever we want. We can socialize with whomever we want, we can practice our religion, and so on and so forth, but when it comes to the public sphere, we have to follow the laws of the land; there is a Canadian etiquette and values we have to subscribe to. It works at two different levels and we need to recognize that.

Sometimes the public sphere does intrude into our private one and vice versa. The good example is how we treat our children. One thing that we must learn here in Canada is that we cannot spank our children. That is where the public law sort of intrudes into our private domain.

In a way, the public and private sort of go hand in hand and push each other, and that is what multiculturalism is about.

Senator Callbeck: Thank you all for coming and for your presentations. They were certainly interesting.

Ms. Taillon, in your brief you have a page that is entitled "building on success" and you say there are lots of successful innovations across the country, which, to read what you said: "Creating bridges between individuals, families and communities."

I would like to hear what, in your opinion, you think is the best example of that innovation, and then the other witnesses, too.

Ms. Taillon: She is the encyclopedia of this.

Ms. Scott: I will give you an excellent example of Canadian innovation that I think is world renowned and is topical these days.

In the 1960s, the overwhelming concern, certainly among community organizations and the like, was the significance of poverty amongst seniors. It was absolutely a tremendous coming out, and we were engaged in that time in a nation building exercise where we put in place three incredibly important — building on the OAS — seniors' benefits programs, which have proven to be, over those next 30 years, incredibly successful in lowering rates of seniors' poverty. In fact, we are a leader among all OECD countries in crafting an income security support system that blends government, business, and family resources to create a platform for seniors in Canada. Only a fraction — a small number, important still — live in poverty or in great economic duress.

I think that is an extraordinary Canada-made innovation that is heralded. I would say it is an incredibly important social inclusion policy. Do we have a more important social system than our income security system? I would point to that, Senator Callbeck, as a homegrown thing that we can justly be proud of and fight to preserve the integrity of that system for our seniors.

Mr. Agrawal: I was going to mention the same — the safety net that we have.

Mr. Mercier: I will give two examples of opposites, actually, where Canada has been a leader — certainly I am talking about urban mobility — and where we have been challenged, as well.

A perfect example is Canadian cities, which by and large have one of the highest modal shares of public transit in North America, as compared to the top cities in North America, which would be New York, Toronto and Montreal. Ottawa would be fourth. Canadian cities value mobility in their tax policies and their development to a greater extent than we see, for example, in the U.S., from a North American standpoint. That is a strong signal of what you can do right to help social mobility.

On the other hand, if you would look at one aspect that we have not talked about today, which is enabling those that have disabilities in our community, and having their access, one of the greatest challenges across Canadian cities today is how to provide specialized mobility for those who do not have the ability to leave their homes or walk more than five or ten feet.

In the United States they have — which largely came out of the need for civil rights legislation — the American Disabilities Act back in the early 1970s, which revolutionized the need of the federal government to be active in meeting the mobility needs of the American population. In Canada, we are a little bit behind that, and we are rapidly approaching the creation of standards — Ontario, for example, with its new legislation.

There are some opportunities for Canada to take certain stands in promoting mobility, certainly for that segment of the community, which, many times, certainly as operating a transit system, are viewed that we have work to do, and it requires tax policy and social policy to support that.

Ms. Andrew: I was going to say I agree with some of those big social innovations. I also think — looking at the area I was talking about — that Canadians have been extremely good on women's urban safety and it goes around the world now.

I was at a conference in Delhi last year of 300 people from 80 countries, and Canada is considered the leader in that question — two groups in Canada. Also violence against women, I think we have done — again, we have lots to do — but we have probably done better than most countries, and that is in relation to a whole complex series of things about Canadian culture and traditions, but I think we have taken that more seriously as a public policy issue.

As I say, there is a lot more to do, but we have been innovative in that area. Many of those innovations relate to the way Canadian history and culture has come together. I agree with the large ones about Old Age Security, but it is also interesting to see smaller kinds of social innovation. Multicultural liaison officers now work in schools, a program that was invented in Ottawa, in OCISO. It now goes across the country, but it was an Ottawa innovation saying that we needed to couple specific workers who knew about immigration with the school system. It is now a very successful program going into both libraries and schools.

There are examples like that, where the particular circumstances, sometimes local, sometimes national, have actually triggered innovative ideas. Where we are lucky, they are levered up and are extended across the country. Where we are not so lucky, they remain very local but they are still innovations.

Senator Seidman: I suppose we are now starting to touch on the type of question I was about to ask, which is a little more pragmatic. We have talked about inclusive urban design. I am sure all of us have seen seniors standing and holding groceries on a bus with no seat for them to sit down on. We have seen wheelchair-bound people having difficulty negotiating curbs in cities, and we have seen young female students who are fearful to walk home at night when they return from their classes. We have seen lots of other things, such as young families pushing strollers. We have seen many things that are not particularly kind in what you call "inclusive design."

All that said, in your opinion, what sort of changes are needed in the planning practices to ensure that cities are built to take into account these specific needs of seniors, young families, women, the disabled and immigrants? More specifically, because, after all, we are a Senate committee in the federal government, I would like to know very specifically what role you think the federal government has to play in all of this.

Ms. Andrew: I tried at the very end to talk about some of the points that I think relate specifically to the federal mandate. I think the whole question of how you do more inclusive urban planning relates partly to university curriculums and partly to who is teaching in universities and who is doing the curriculum. I think urban planning is something that is a profession.

I come back in part to the fact that I think the federal government has a role in supporting pilot projects. I remember talking to a CEO of a large municipality in Western Canada who said, "We are forced to be innovative." If I look at the two most classic services of urban government, police and fire, policing is all about domestic violence and the cost of police services. Gatineau gave some wonderful figures on that, namely, on the time spent over the last 30 years on calls. You can actually see the increasing costs because of the important, more serious investigation of these issues. Fire is related to poverty. He was saying that if I try to look at costs of public services, I am forced to be innovative. I would argue that the federal government, in partnership probably, needs to do something to make some of these pilot projects fundable because we know that city governments are in a difficult situation. I think some of doing the pilot projects and trying to see whether it is possible to show that better urban design, for example, ten years or fifteen years down the road and not one year down the road — we are always doing projects that ask for one year — has done something to the level of public safety of crime statistics. We often have to investigate it in such a short term that you are being asked a year later to determine the impact. A year later, you will not know whether a better-planned, large building actually had an impact on the place.

I do think that the federal government has a responsibility in certain of these areas to ensure that there are pilot projects sufficiently looked at over a long period of time to know what should be levered up and what should not be. That would be one area.

Mr. Agrawal: Regarding the question about inclusive urban design, urban planning, in my experience and observation, if you look at city planning policies, it is inclusive in nature. We have to keep in mind, however, that a lot of it is market driven. A city could have those policies in place, but it is the developers that have to abide by those policies, what the market demand is, and what the costs are. That is where the rubber hits the road. One needs to recognize that the government can do only so much vis-à-vis inclusive planning and design.

We talked about models such as multi-service centres, strengthening our public education system and ensuring that the curriculum is the same, whether that school is in an ethnic enclave or not. Access to jobs and equity in the jobs is much more important.

Public spaces, the design of them and spaces that are within the jurisdiction of a city or a province need to be designed in a way where encounters with peoples of different faiths and ethnicity could happen. That would afford such encounters to happen and for multiculturalism to flourish further. Those are some of the ideas.

Ms. Taillon: That is a great question. I think there is a lot in the basket for the federal government, for example, a national housing strategy, a national poverty strategy, having a national early learning and child care program, crime prevention and reintegration from prisons. These are all things that I think clearly fall within federal jurisdiction and have to be negotiated. There must be collaboration with the provinces and territories; that goes without saying.

In Aboriginal communities, the federal government has a very clear role there. There is lots of room, without getting into the curbs, which are clearly outside of your purview of responsibility.

Mr. Mercier: Canadian urban transit has presented to the government several positions. I think the number one position, which we recognize from the Federation of Canadian Municipalities, is that municipal tax programs by themselves are fairly regressive as a tax policy, and mobility in cities depends largely today on municipal tax contribution.

The Canadian Urban Transit Association has recommended three strategies to the government of the day. The first one deals with a long-term strategy for infrastructure financing. To achieve these goals require funds that will promote that urban design at the municipal level that we are all seeking.

Second, today we are seeking from the government a greater on the gas tax policy. That is, that there be dedicated funding for mobility out of the federal gas tax. That represents one-cent contribution towards creating mobility in Canadian cities.

The last item is the great equalizer, which is allowing employers to have a tax credit for paying employee contributions for public transit. It is probably not a novel idea but when you think about it, today you get your parking spot from your employer and there is no tax penalty, but if your employer pays your transit pass, you have to pay tax on that.

From that social model perspective, using the tax system and a steady stream of long-term stability of financing will achieve some of these goals that would allow greater mobility in Canadian cities, without the burden for certain members of our society.

Senator Housakos: Thank you, panel, for being here today. You are dealing with an issue that is obviously very interesting and complex. You have thrown in many different elements for discussion.

I have a couple of observations and they are in regard to immigration policy and the role that immigration policy plays in dealing with this issue in terms of enhancing poverty or trying to rectify poverty in urban centres.

My colleague Senator Merchant pointed out a stat that 4 in 10 new Canadians are living in poverty, and most new Canadians are living in the major cities of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. I read a number of studies confirming that perspective that a large number of new arrivals live in poverty.

Having said that, though, we look at today's economic context in Canada, and Canada's economy relative to what is going on around the world is not too bad. The unemployment rate is at a relatively low number compared to the global economic context. From my perspective, when I meet people from various boards of trades in my region of the country, the recurring theme is they keep saying, "Senator, we have a labour shortage. In this country we are suffering from a skilled labour shortage, and from manual labour shortages." I met last week with the President of l'Association des restaurateurs du Québec, who says, "We cannot find waiters, waitresses, bus boys, and short-order cooks," and so on and so forth.

It begs the question: Is our immigration screening process sufficient, and is it doing the right things in order to screen people and fill our labour market needs? I will tell you that I am a product of immigrant parents who came here in the 1950s when there was a huge flux of immigration to this country. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were a lot fewer social security nets than you have today, in terms of the country providing health care for immigrants, free education, and so forth.

One poses the question: Why did immigrants of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s seem to have been a lot less hit with the issue of poverty than new arrivals today? I go back to my original question: Is it because our policies are not responding to the needs of the marketplace and are contributing to the problem of poverty?

Ms. Scott: Canada is known internationally as having tailored its immigration system to select new Canadians or immigrants on the basis of the skill and talent they offer to the Canadian economy. In fact, it has been criticized in some fashion that it places too much emphasis on the economic qualifications.

With respect to your question regarding the high level of poverty in the newcomer community, newcomer Canadians are working, but they are working in jobs that do not pay adequate wages. It is important to clarify that employment levels among new immigrants are high. They are comparable to rates among Canadian-born people. It is not that new people are not coming to this country and working very hard in many jobs and the like; they are working in sectors and segments of the economy and in jobs and industries that do not pay well or that do not pay living wages.

That is an important thing to keep in mind, in particular when we are talking about one of the causes of poverty among new Canadians.

It is true that, 30 years ago, you could work and work hard and see progress in terms of economic mobility. New immigrants today do not have those same experiences, but it is less a reflection on the new immigrants coming to Canada. As Mr. Agrawal said, they are highly skilled and educated. It is more a statement of the jobs and quality of employment in the Canadian economy at this point in time.

I think it is a complex problem, but I would not want you to come away with the understanding that, somehow, it is through lack of participation and drive among new Canadians that they are experiencing these economic challenges; it is very much a structure of what is going on in the Canadian economy.

I appreciate that shortages are specifically targeted to particular industries. They are working. Governments are trying to aggressively match shortages, but I think the broader problem is that many new immigrants are saying that they have skills that are not recognized.

I do not want you to go away from this thinking that new Canadians are not working very hard. They are working very hard in the paid labour market for very poor wages.

Senator Housakos: I was not saying for a moment that new arrivals are not working hard. I am saying simply that maybe our immigration policy is not matching up the needs of the country with the people we are bringing in. That is all I am saying. We have in Montreal — and I speak firsthand for my city — qualified nurses and doctors driving cabs, yet we have a huge shortage of doctors and nurses in our public health care system.

Mr. Agrawal: When you spoke about labour shortage, I think the issue is: Which sector of the economy are we talking about? Most of the immigrants, especially new immigrants, find their first footing in the service industry, waste management industry, low-paying manufacturing industry, and they get stuck there for the rest of their lives.

As for other industries, highly skilled ones that require high education, I would say that the Canadian economy is such that it is not producing the same number of jobs as what the demand is. New immigrants compete with Canadian- born who are educated, coming out of Canadian universities. That is the fact of life. Then the issues are about credential recognition and the quality of education that they may have received elsewhere. Those who have gone through some of the bridging programs or mentoring programs, I personally find that they have actually done very well, in whichever sector you pick.

Someone mentioned about nursing and health sector, and I have recently done a study looking at South Asians, Filipinos, Chinese, Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and others. It is interesting that Filipinos, for instance, have found a niche in the Canadian economy in the health sector. They do very well — Canadian Filipino nurses, medical technicians, and so forth. That is where jobs are these days.

It is a mix of a number of things. Where the shortages are, who we are bringing — and we are bringing a lot of highly-skilled and educated immigrants — but we do not have the jobs commensurate to their skills and education.

Bridging and mentoring programs have done wonders in my opinion, but then there is a limited number of immigrants they can take, there are limited spaces at different work places, and so forth. I think that certainly needs to be addressed by both the federal and provincial governments.

Senator Housakos: This question is for Mr. Mercier in regards to public transit. Per capita, how well do Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver compare to other major metropolitan centres in North America?

Mr. Mercier: I can provide that to you in terms of spending per capita. The role of the federal government is significantly smaller than you will see in the U.S., for example, and that is quite clear. We can provide that information to your committee from Canadian Urban Transit Association.

Senator Seth: Thank you very much for coming. The amazing knowledge we are receiving has been wonderful.

I am going a little away from the topic. I am a physician, and I can see that the face of Canada is changing, getting more diverse and multicultural. I am telling you the practical point that I still see in my practice.

Do you think that education is a factor with restricting social inclusion? Particularly with immigrant women — the children and the husbands are basically fine — I see language barriers. They do not want to go out and learn English language as a second language, so they tend to stay in the house or restrict their social mixing. There are certain areas in Toronto where you will find one particular population living there, and they do not want to mix together. I am emphasizing the English language. Is there any way we can improve that area? They do not want to go to school. They ask me to write and say they have pain, to avoid going to school. There are schools where they can go to study second languages, but what else can we do to improve this?

Ms. Scott: One thing we can do for new Canadian women, low income Canadian women and single mothers is have a more comprehensive early learning and child care program that is universal. That is a great way to get women more involved in their community. It creates opportunities. Full-day kindergarten in Ontario is a poverty reduction strategy, as much as it is an early learning strategy. For women who were traditionally at home caring for their kids, getting their kids in the educational program at no cost at the age of 4 is a great opportunity. Part of it is that we know women still traditionally carry a significant burden at home with their families. Creating opportunities in that way is a big lever for women

I think it comes back to shared spaces. If new Canadian women are bringing their kids to school, are there opportunities for them to engage at the school? It is using different access points — libraries, school community centres, health centres — as a place to find other opportunities and connect to other communities. It is like having a number of different portals. Depending on where you enter — whether bringing your kids to school or going to a clinic — you find other resources and opportunities. We need to be better at integrating, I think.

Ms. Andrew: One quick example, there are some things about the federal programs that could be tweaked. For instance, there is much more accessibility to language classes in your first three years here. What often happened is that women stayed home in the beginning years because they were settling into a new country with small children. By the time they wanted to get into language classes they were no longer eligible for free classes because they passed the three- year point. There is some technical tweaking of systems. If you took a more gender-inclusive lens, you would be able to tweak some of those systems to ensure women have the access to the language classes that sometimes they did not take advantage of. Once they reached the three year make they would no longer be eligible for free language classes. There are some tweaking questions.

Mr. Agrawal: In my humble opinion, I think new immigrants should go through some kind of civic education training or language training, pretty much in the line with what is happening in some European cities. It is usually handled by a municipality. When an immigrant or immigrant family comes to a city, it is city hall that ushers that family takes them around and explains what their rights and responsibilities are, what the municipal government does for them, that they have the right to participate in decision-making processes, and that they can make a deputation in front of a city council. It does not happen in a systematic way in Canada. An immigrant lands at the Pearson airport, gets his passport stamped and looks for his friends or family to stay with for a month or two, and looks for a job.

It does take time, but I think there needs to be some federal program that takes an immigrant in a systematic way and explains certain things that happen here.

Senator Seth: That is exactly what I think. There should be more forced programs where they have to go. Some women never get out and they continue to stay. Some are young; they will not go. They will have some excuse and there should be some more enforcement there, I personally feel.

[Translation]

Senator Verner: I am a former minister responsible for the status of women, so I am very much aware of the programs you mentioned a little earlier. It makes me happy because most of the time, what you hear is criticism regarding programs that have been set up and their allotted budgets, not positive comments.

I would like to make a comment and hear what you have to say. Indeed, our society had to help women because, traditionally, they did not go to school, they married young, had children, and so on. Today, we know that there are large numbers of women in universities, and they have a higher rate of success, whether in universities or in technical colleges.

Of course, there will always be some work to do, new immigrant women will continue to arrive in Canada and will need help. But concerning the younger ones, do you not think that poverty among women is bound to drop because nowadays, women go to school and find good jobs? I remember we created a training program for women who wanted to get a high- level job, as a politician or a member of a board of directors, for instance. I like to think that in the future, because more young women go to school, we could see a reduction in poverty and exclusion among women.

Ms. Andrew: It is possible, but it does not take into account what I call "intersectionality," that is Aboriginal women, women with disabilities. The work we did with the group of women with disabilities in Montreal was a real eye-opener for me in terms of the extraordinary courage these women have. I saw the kinds of challenges facing a wheelchair-bound young woman with MS. A wonderful video was made, which shows, among other things, a woman wanting to meet with her children's teacher. She is at the bottom of a 15-step staircase, she is in a wheelchair, and she is unable to enter the school. One understands easily her anguish at not being able, as a mother, to enter the school.

I think we still have a lot to do. It is one thing to talk about women like me, who come from the middle class and have some education, but it is another thing to talk about "intersectionality," in other words, women who are marginalized on two or three levels.

Also, there are factors like fear. We know that fear makes women modify their behaviour in public. For me, it is important to take this into account. For a while, we considered gender to be the only factor. But it is more complex than that; we now realize that a number of things come into play. I am less optimistic than you when you say that things are going to change in the short term. Nevertheless, I think that there are a lot of things we can work on now.

Senator Verner: I never meant to say that everything had already been done, already achieved. Far from it. In my comments, I did not include, for example, women with disabilities or Aboriginal women living in remote places. I was not talking about them. I simply said that I was happy to see that, for reasons related to our Canadian or Quebec culture, these women were unable to access education but things were changing, that they were taking charge of their lives. And I think that, once they are able to take charge of their lives, they will be in a position, like you, to help others, that is, other women who have problems beyond just the gender issue. Indeed, today, it is not so much a gender issue; there are other factors.

[English]

Ms. Scott: I think young women are making incredible strides today and we see them in our universities and colleges. If you look at the data and income, for instance among young women as compared to young men, you see almost parity. It has been tremendous.

The thing is, when young women have children, then you start seeing the gap widening out again. By the time they are 40 or 50, you start seeing 70 cents on the dollar again because we are factoring in women dropping out of the labour force. It is still powerful in the data today when we look at that.

One of the things that struck me, in coming from Quebec, was the studies done on $7-per-day daycare in Quebec. One of the extraordinary things happening in social inclusion policy is that the availability of daycare has appreciably resulted in the reduction of poverty among families with young children and among children. It has facilitated the labour market participation of women, which has improved the economic standing of those families.

We are seeing gender parity in some regard in the economic standing for some groups of women and young men at this time. However, the whole question of children remains problematic and we do not a good job of care in this country generally, outside of your own province of Quebec, particularly on the early childhood question.

The Chair: In winding it up, Mr. Mercier, I was intrigued with something you said in an early answer with regard to the transit system effectively subsidizing a certain sector of the ridership. I am not quoting you exactly but I interpreted along that line.

The question arose in my mind as to how a transit system sets up its overall budget in a city and how the city as a whole looks at the issue of subsidizing certain ridership as to whether that is a recognized part of the social infrastructure of the city, or is it simply assigned to the transit system to make do somehow in terms of an overall system. I assume that a transit system can look at its overall system and determine what the cost per kilometre of client ridership is, or whatever. However, in your answer you indicated that certain groups in society need effectively a subsidy in order to be able to use it and become integrated into social opportunity, mobility, and so on.

Could you give me a glimpse of how the cost structure of a major metropolitan metro system would work?

Mr. Mercier: The reality is that it is a service that deals uniquely with cross-subsidization amongst its users. The majority of transit systems across Canada, and even the U.S. and around the world, function with a stratification of pricing policies that are largely based on age: young children, adolescents, students, adults and seniors. It is the topic of most transit agencies across Canada today about how to manage the fiscal model. In Canada, transit systems have become much more municipal organizations as opposed to independent ones. They are very much driven by policy directives of municipalities.

A perfect example would be urban reach. To what degree is transit a bus stop located near a residence or a place of employment? That would be a standard. What we face is this tension between the consumer aspect of public transit, which is the commuter largely in Canada; and the needs of the population, which is more the social service side. This, internally within cities, is a tremendous debate.

I am responsible for the City of Ottawa. For example, we have just put in place a policy of free service for seniors. One of the reasons there is to provide mobility for seniors as a way of reducing risk for seniors and car dependency. The accident rate increases with age. There are many social policies that play within municipalities. I do not want to make a statement there in terms of age, but we are constantly trading off one group's contribution to the public transit system against another group's contribution. The realities in all Canadian cities is that the urban taxpayer subsidizes a significantly higher share — that is, the inner core of the city — of the suburbanite in terms of contribution and tax policy. It is a difficult policy management arrangement for cities.

The Chair: Thank you all very much for being here today. On behalf of the committee, I want to extend our appreciation not only for you being here but also for the way in which you have answered the questions and opened up a number of insights into really important aspects of the study we have before us. There are several areas that we might have liked to have explored further, for example, Ms. Taillon, your example of the time spent in school by young children and the impact on young families. Those are real social issues. The reason for the hours of school may not be directly related to the service to any part of society but some other part of the structure that has negotiated those types of hours, and so on, but are part of a total integrated support service for young families anywhere, let alone in major metropolitan cities and other aspects. You have all helped greatly.

With that, colleagues, I draw the meeting to a close.

(The committee adjourned.)

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