BRIEF FROM COLOUR OF POVERTY
— COLOUR OF CHANGE (COP/C)
I. About the Organizations
Colour of Poverty/Colour of Change (COP/C) is a
province-wide initiative made up of individuals and organizations working to
build community-based capacity to address the growing racialization of poverty
and the resulting increased levels of social exclusion and marginalization of
racialized communities across Ontario. Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change
works to build concrete strategies, tools, initiatives & community-based
capacity through which individuals, groups, organizations - especially those
reflective of affected racialized communities themselves - can better develop
coherent and effective shared action plans as well as coordinated strategies so
as to best work together to address and redress the growing structural and
systemic ethno-racial inequality across the province.
II. The Role of Federal Government in Poverty Reduction among Racialized
Communities and other Disadvantaged Groups
As the documentation becomes ever more comprehensive and
irrefutable the gap between rich and poor in Ontario and Canada is widening,
but what is much less well understood is that the impact of this growing gulf
is being much more profoundly felt by racialized group members ( ie. Aboriginal
or First Peoples and communities-of-colour).
All too well documented are the numerous institutional, structural
and systemic racialized disadvantages as experienced by Canada’s First Peoples
( First Nations, Inuit and Metis ) – and as we are aware of such First Peoples
realities and lived experiences we stand in full solidarity with their
self-led advocacy efforts to redress the racialized exclusion. We very much
believe there are many links between such struggles and those of other
racialized groups - peoples of colour - in Ontario and Canada. However, given
the above we strongly appeal to our Federal Government to honour its ( and our
) Treaty obligations by fully acknowledging and respecting First Peoples claims
to self-determination and in so doing we also recognize that First Peoples
claims to justice are distinct and require a different set of Federal
Government strategies, comprehensive policy responses and real movement toward
appropriate revenue sharing and equitable funding arrangements due to First
Peoples ( First Nations, Inuit and Metis ) unique and specific historical
relationship with Canada.
Respecting peoples of colour ( ie. visible minorities ), a recent
report by the Wellesley Institute and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
confirms a "colour code" is keeping “visible minorities” out of good
jobs in the Canadian labour market. The Report found that visible minority Canadian
workers earned 81.4 cents for every dollar paid to their Caucasian
counterparts.
Based on the 2006 census, researchers found that earnings by male
newcomers from visible minorities were just 68.7 per cent of those who were
white males. The Report also confirms that such colour code persisted for
second-generation Canadians with similar education and age, though the gap
narrowed slightly - with visible minority women making 56.5 cents, up from 48.7
cents in 2000, for every dollar white men earned, while minority men in the
same cohort improved by almost 7 cents, to 75.6 cents.
In 2006, during the boom years, visible minorities had an
unemployment rate of 8.6 per cent, compared with 6.2 per cent for white
Canadians. Even more disturbing is that visible minorities were
under-represented in public administration, where 92 per cent of workers were
white.
The increasing “racialization” or “colour-coding” of all of the
major social and economic indicators can be gleaned not only from the
statistics on income & wealth, but also from any one of a number of
different measures – such as the inequalities with respect to health status and
educational learning outcomes, higher drop- out or “push-out” rates among
racialized learners, inequitable access to employment opportunities and
over-representation in low-paying, unstable, and low-status jobs in which their
rights as workers are often poorly or totally unprotected, higher levels of
under-housing and homelessness and the re-emergence of imposed racialized
residential enclaves and the increasing rate of incidence and ethno-racial
differentials with respect to targeted policing as Aboriginal and men and
women-of-colour are ever more over-represented in Canada’s jails and prisons.
All of these are products of the long-standing and now growing social and
economic exclusion of racialized groups from the so-called mainstream of
society.
Given such stark realities, it is imperative that political leaders
with all orders of government discuss the reduction if not the elimination of
poverty by referring directly to actions to address and redress the
increasingly racialized and otherwise differential character and experience of
poverty.
Canadians urgently need a comprehensive national poverty reduction
plan that integrates a broad range of universal initiatives, accompanied by
specific targeted measures to remedy the different underlying sources or
“drivers” of vulnerability that expose racialized – and other disadvantaged
communities – to disproportionate poverty.
More importantly, any national poverty reduction plan must
specifically name, address, track and measure positive change with respect to
racialized poverty.
Recommendation 1: The Federal government must take a leadership
role by acknowledging and addressing systemic barriers to inclusion as well as
persistent experience of racial discrimination. This should be achieved by
developing and implementing a national poverty reduction strategy with
targeted, time-specific and measurable mechanisms and goals and by adopting a
racial equity outcome measure and framework to systematically evaluate all of
its legislation, policies, programmes and practices as well as all its annual
and ongoing budgetary and resource allocation decisions.
III. Enhancing the Capacity of the Federal Government to Address Poverty
In this age of austerity, politicians of all stripes and from all
orders of government are trying to convince Canadians that governments have to
get out of the business of governing because of the budgetary “deficit’ they
face. Canadians are told, repeatedly, that the only way to address such
deficits is by cutting public services and funding for public goods, be it
public libraries at the municipal level, legal aid at the provincial level, or
childcare at the federal level. This is so, even as politicians themselves
acknowledge that services being reviewed for possible reduction and elimination
are “core services” that Canadians need to either maintain their basic health
and well being and/or to foster the development of an inclusive and democratic
society.
Yet at the same time, as Canadians are being asked to make personal
sacrifices in the name of deficit reduction, corporations and individual wealth
holders and high income earners are expected to share an ever more declining
portion of their wealth and profits through the continuing corporate tax cut
and the ever present tax loopholes of a system that is less and less
progressive in its nature. These tax cuts, or tax credits, are directly
responsible for the creation of such undeniable phenomenon as “the rich getting
richer and poor getting poorer”. To name just one proof of such growing
inequities, according to the 2006 census data released by Statistics Canada,
between 1980 and 2005, median earnings among Canada’s top earners rose more
than 16 per cent while those in the bottom fifth saw their wages dip by 20 per
cent.
The annual cost of the corporate tax cuts alone that have either
taken effect under the last two terms of Government or are scheduled to take effect
in the future will reach $14.2 billion by fiscal year 2012-13. If that fiscal
capacity was to be made available to the Government of Canada, it would have a
substantial deficit reducing impact in terms of support for important public
services that all Canadians need, but especially for those of our neighbours
and community members who are at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The ever decreasing tax revenue directly and negatively reduces the
capacity of the Federal Government to provide or fund programs that are
essential to members of the most marginalized communities in Canada. Programs
such as affordable housing, a national childcare program, skill-building and
income security programs for women and other disadvantaged communities, as well
as specific programs to bring about substantive equality, including the Federal
Court Challenges Program, etc. which have all seen their funding reduced, or in
fact have been eliminated completely.
As a further example of such inconsistent and incoherent economic
policies, the Caledon Institute has estimated that the Canada Child Tax Benefit
could be increased to $5,000 per child for an annual cost of $4 billion. It is
clear that the constraints on public resources at the federal level caused by
such ideologically driven and reckless tax cuts – those implemented and pending
– are in fact contributing to the effective withdrawal of the Federal
Government from all too many areas of critical public expenditure.
As racialized communities in Ontario ( as elsewhere across the
country ) are considerably over-represented among the poor, they are thus more
likely to have benefited from these public services, had they been properly
funded. Thus, the obsessive focus on tax cuts – for both corporate tax as well
as personal income tax – has resulted and will continue to result in a
differentially negative impact on these ever more vulnerable communities.
In fact last year the Scottish Government commissioned a study to
look at the impact of reduced public services spending on vulnerable groups.
Entitled the Equalities Budget Report, this evidence-based review was done by
the Employment Research Institute, Edinburgh Napier University. The overall
aim was to review and summarise UK and international evidence on the impact of
reduced spending on equalities groups ( what we in Canada might refer to as
equity seeking groups ). Emphasis was given to evidence on what has happened in
the past, although note is made of estimates of what might happen due to
reduced spending in the future.
Among other things, the main conclusions of the report were:
· Equalities groups are especially vulnerable to public spending
cuts as not only because they are well represented in the public sector
workforce but are also significant users of public services.
· Individuals can fall into multiple equalities groups, therefore
exacerbating their vulnerability to cuts in public services. Additionally
cuts in one area can impact on other equalities groups.
· The large variations within equalities groups should be
explicitly considered as certain sub-groups may be much more affected than
others (e.g. mothers compared to single women, or certain ethnic groups
compared to others etc.).
· Certain individuals will be especially vulnerable to any cuts as
both public sector employees and public service users.
· The effects of public spending cuts will be felt by those working
in and using services delivered by community organizations and across sectoral
boundaries.
As has been found to be the case in the UK is just as true here in
Canada – as the various austerity measures continue to take effect, members of
racialized and other disadvantaged communities will continue to bear the brunt
of fiscal capacity and public service cuts.
Recommendation 2: The Federal Government should not only reverse
some of the tax cuts that have been implemented to date, but should in fact
increase corporate taxation as well personal taxation for the higher income
tax brackets - so that more revenue will become available with which to provide
needed services and programs for all Canadians, and especially for those having
to live their lives in poverty – with inequitable life chances, life
opportunities and life outcomes.
VI. Tracking, Measurement, Indicators and Reporting on Federal Government’s Contributions to Poverty Reduction
Though it is very slowly changing, with the exception of the City
of Toronto, and with the all too inconsistent acknowledgement and measurement
of First Peoples structural and systemic disadvantage in certain contexts and
jurisdictions, there is a serious lack of data and research in many local
communities across the nation about the issue of the racialization of poverty.
For example, federal initiatives to increase take-up of Old Age
Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) are often cited as an
example of success in reducing poverty among seniors. But no one knows to what
extent this has benefited seniors from racialized communities. Nor do we know
if immigrant seniors from certain countries face any systemic barriers in
accessing this benefit, and whether those from racialized communities generally
have seen their living conditions improved as a result.
Specifically, the lack of desegregated data means the Federal
Government does not have a clear picture of who are indeed the poor and how
they are being affected by government policies and programs. Without such
data, the Government is also unable to calculate the “default” costs of doing
nothing, from an economical as well as social perspective.
As such, Colour of Poverty – Colour of Change would like to make
the following recommendation to the Standing Committee:
Recommendation 3: The Federal Government should collect and track
disaggregated data across all Ministries, Departments and relevant institutions
in order to identify racialized and other structural and systemic disadvantage.
With respect to poverty, we need to develop and use clear and common
definitions and indicators, in order to get a full and complete picture as to
who are the poor in this country, while identifying goals and specific
benchmarks and indicators on a cross-sectoral basis, to monitor the labour
market related differentials specifically as well as the progress of any
poverty reduction plan initiatives as they relate to racialized and other
historically disadvantaged and marginalized groups and communities.
V. Conclusion
Canadians expect their governments to play a critical role in
providing a safety net for all Canadians, especially those who need a helping
hand. Canadians believe in fairness and do share the collective sense of
responsibility that we owe to one another in a democratic society, founded upon
such principles as equality, respect for diversity and human rights. Fair
minded Canadians know and accept that, with rights, come responsibilities. As
part of these responsibilities Canadians are willing to abide by and contribute
to a progressive tax system, one that takes into account the ability of
individuals and families to pay tax, while imposing an appropriately weighted
obligation on corporations to share profits.
By focusing only on expenditure reduction measures in this budget
consultation without seeking input on how to appropriately enhance prevailing
taxation schemes, the Federal Government is denying itself insights into how it
might more creatively source revenue. Indeed we lose out on a great opportunity
to remind Canadians about the importance of public goods as building blocks of
an inclusive society, and the role of Governments in providing public services
so that all Canadians - regardless who they are or their current income status
- will have a decent standard of living and an equal opportunity to succeed.