SCYR Committee Meeting

SUB-COMMITTEE ON CHILDREN AND YOUTH AT RISK OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RESOURCES DEVELOPMENT AND THE STATUS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES

SOUS-COMITÉ SUR LES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DES RESOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, April 27, 1999

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[English]

The Chairman (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.)): I think what we're going to do, if I may, is to begin the meeting on the understanding that there are many, many committees meeting this afternoon and that we will be joined by colleagues as they are able to do so. But we have enough, I think, to move ahead.

Before formally welcoming Judith Maxwell from the Canadian Policy Research Networks, I just wanted to say a word about a colleague of hers, who was known to some of us, Suzanne Peters. Now, the genesis of this subcommittee was a meeting of the entire HRD committee that was held June 14 of last year. It was a four-hour marathon on the readiness-to-learn measure and community mobilization around the measure. We asked Suzanne Peters, who headed up the family network part of the Canadian Policy Research Networks, to do the job of summarizing the testimony of about 30 witnesses at the end of the session, and she did a magnificent job. I had met with her independently earlier that year to compare notes and see how we might work together.

As probably everybody in the room who's interested in policy issues knows, Suzanne died recently, tragically. But I wanted to acknowledge our debt to her, because she really launched us on the path that formed this subcommittee. She made a huge contribution to the subject closest to our hearts, which is the future of Canada's children. So I did want to say to her associates how much we valued her contribution and how much we miss her.

Now I have the pleasant task of introducing Judith Maxwell, who is a friend of long standing—I don't use the word “old” any more—and who, like many sensible people, is a Nova Scotian. For those of you who remember these things, Judith was the head of an institution that was sliced and diced, so to speak, by a previous administration. But she has proved herself to be an extraordinary policy entrepreneur and has created this unique organization, this network, which she might want to say just a word about, for those who may not know about its characteristics, before she gets into the subject of the work her organization has been doing with regard to children.

So I welcome both of you and invite you to make some opening remarks.

Ms. Judith Maxwell (President, Canadian Policy Research Networks Inc.): Thank you, Chairman, and thank you very much for your tribute to Suzanne Peters, who was greatly loved by all of us who were her colleagues. This project I want to talk to you about today was very much her inspiration and one of the many legacies she has left us at CPRN.

I'd like to introduce my colleague, Elisabeth Richard, who is director of corporate and public affairs at Canadian Policy Research Networks.

We call it CPRN for short. It is a non-profit organization with charitable status whose mission is to create knowledge and lead public debate on social and economic issues that are important to Canadians. Our goal is to help make Canada a more just, prosperous, and caring society. We've organized three networks on family, work, and health. We operate as a virtual think-tank, with connections across the country to policy-makers as well as to researchers in many different institutions.

Today I'm going to talk to you about a project conceived by Suzanne Peters called “Best Policy Mix for Children”,

[Translation]

"Best Policy Mix for Children." This program was largely implemented and funded by private foundations, including

[English]

Laidlaw Foundation, Lawson Foundation, Atkinson Charitable Foundation, and the Hospital for Sick Children Foundation.

The three provinces and two federal departments also participated very actively.

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The work of this project is very much focused on policy research. So what we're doing here is building on the foundations of theoretical and empirical research done by others, such as the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and also by the extensive research of the national longitudinal survey of children and youth, which has been funded by HRDC.

What you have at your places is a deck, as we call it, a presentation that summarizes the main findings of the research program to date. I don't plan to go through this as a formal presentation. I will make a few opening remarks about the project in general, and then I would be pleased to respond to any questions you would have about any of the ideas you see displayed in the handout.

The main building blocks for this project include five major items. First of all, during 1997 Suzanne Peters did an extensive consultation with Canadians on their values and preferences with regard to the policy mix that would make their community ideal in terms of healthy child development, and there is a discussion paper in production now that summarizes those findings. So that was understanding what Canadians need.

The next step in the research has been two major studies on international comparisons of policies, values, and outcome. Those two studies have been published, and we have copies here with us. One is by Shelley Phipps and the other is by Kathy O'Hara. The findings from all of this work are summarized in the handout.

The third component of the work is interprovincial comparisons of policies, values, and outcomes, and that work is still in progress.

The fourth component is a focus we've put on identification of positive outcomes for children, with the notion that Canadians need to shift their focus toward a positive vision of what we want for children. We shouldn't measure progress by reducing suicides or teen pregnancy but actually by what we can see as the major markers of healthy child development.

The fifth component is an analysis of the governance and accountability regimes for children's policies, looking at six provinces, and that too is still in progress.

What we are proposing to do when we finish the work, which will be fairly soon, is to prepare a synthesis report. This will also include a set of policy directions or a policy framework, which I hope will help to inform the policy debate here in Canada.

What we can see from the work we've done so far is that the evaluation literature on policy interventions with regard to children and families is not all that helpful when you're trying to formulate public policy. That's partly because that literature is predominantly American literature focused on the economic and social conditions of that country and on very highly disadvantaged children and families, of which we have some in Canada, there's no question about that, particularly among aboriginal populations. But in fact those research results do not speak to the broad issues of public policy for children and families. The other limitation of that literature is that it focuses on one intervention at a time. So it will look at a head start program in one town, learning readiness in another, or health interventions in another.

What we can see emerging now from the literature on the NLSCY is the complexity of factors that affect child development. We find poor children who are thriving and we find rich children who are not. We know that income is really important, but we also know that parenting and secure attachment are essential and that they can be buffers from many disadvantages or hardships that children face for other reasons.

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We're also beginning to see evidence that community also matters, that a family living in a supportive community with good public services, a whole vast gamut of them, from day care to schools to recreation to parks, and so on, will be able to support a much better quality of child development than that same family in identical circumstances would in a community that did not have that infrastructure. This notion that the community matters came through very strongly in our consultations with Canadians in 1997 around their values and preferences.

Over the past 25 years we've witnessed a major transformation in family life. More than 60% of two-parent families now have two earners, and the incidence of lone parenting has almost doubled. However, the policy environment for children and families has not adapted to this new reality and the pressures on families have increased exponentially, with the resulting risks to the health of the children and probably the health of the parents as well. Our work is still not sufficiently advanced for me to come forward with a great dissertation about what we should do about all this, but I do hope that the summary of findings and our discussion today will help to inform the work of your committee and that our final report, when it does arrive, will help to shape public debate going forward.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I look forward to the discussions.

The Chairman: Thank you very much for opening it up. As you say, the deck you've provided gives a hint of many of the issues that you made brief allusion to.

Let's begin right away.

[Translation]

Ms. Gagnon, would you like to ask some questions now, or would you rather wait?

Ms. Christiane Gagnon (Québec, BQ): I will ask a first question. You have said that a better social security net, a universal net, would contribute greatly to reducing poverty. The government controls certain social policies such as employment insurance and the Canadian Social Transfer, which it gives to the provinces so that they can implement certain social measures for the citizens. How do you analyze this way of operating? What happens to the measures that the provinces have implemented to fight poverty or to your recommendations when there are government funding cuts? Have you not noticed any contradiction in the federal government's actions in the past ten years, whether it was led by the Conservatives or the Liberals, who did almost the same thing? We have faced growing poverty over the years. I come from Quebec, and I know how difficult it is to implement real measures to help the general public and those most in need.

[English]

Ms. Judith Maxwell: There's no question that the economic hardships generated both by the market and by the cuts in government spending have aggravated the situation of children and families, and we have seen a remarkable increase in poverty that reflects both those pressures from the market in terms of the increasing inequality and from the cuts in the safety net.

I think the most important set of issues we have to face going forward is how we adapt that safety net in ways that are most responsive to the needs of children and families. What we can see from the information I've laid out here is that, first of all, the best source of income for a family is earned income. In other words, having a job is the best social safety net, if I can put it that way. But then you get into situations where it's not possible to find a job, and one wants to ensure that the social safety net is working well.

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I think the work we've done on the international comparisons is very informative. Among the countries for which we have measures—and not many are in that category—we see the most positive outcomes for children in countries like Norway and the Netherlands. Norway and the Netherlands have very different philosophies about policies to support children and families.

The Netherlands is really what we call the breadwinner model. In other words, they support one-earner families. That's their preferred model, and they therefore strongly support if women are going to work, that they work part-time. They have quite a low rate of full-time work for women. But they do have a lot of child-centred policies, which are provided to a certain extent by the state but also by employers. So the child care system is relatively well developed, but it's financed through a payroll tax and therefore is a function of the labour market.

Norway has a very different philosophy of public policy, focused on gender equality, that tries to make sure that men and women will have equal responsibilities both in the home and in the workplace. It has an extraordinarily flexible package of support systems that support either parent who wishes to stay home or to work part-time, and so on. It has a very strong support system.

As far as the income supports are concerned in those two countries, though, their foundation stone is a universal family allowance. I think one of the big distinguishing marks between these countries in Europe that have very highly developed policies for supporting children and families is that they do not have the very high degree of targeting that Canadians have introduced, and they therefore do not risk the situations where a family will fall through a gap in the safety net because they don't quite qualify for this particular program, or they've reached the threshold, around $25,000, where another dollar of income is fully taken away and they're stalled by the way in which we've tried to control the costs of the programs.

We hope there will be more resources available for that kind of programming in the future.

I don't think income support is the only component of the best policy mix, but it is important that we look at some of these models in other countries, which are more focused on child-centred approaches and provide a fairly even support system across the board for children without trying to target the program in ways that can lead to inequality.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: I would like to have some clarification. When one of the spouses or a single mother does not work, it must nevertheless be protected by an income security system.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: It is interesting to note that in Norway, 16% of single-parent families are under the poverty threshold, whereas here, in Canada, the rate is over 60%. In those countries, women who finish up single are not penalized. They can take advantage of income support programs, and the state guarantees that they will receive a financial contribution from the father.

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: How do they measure the poverty threshold? If it is lower, is it because they do not use the same criteria? There are a number of ways of measuring the poverty threshold. Is their analysis similar to ours here in Canada?

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Ms. Judith Maxwell: It is difficult to make comparisons because there are a number of services and benefits that may not be monetary. I agree that there are probably different ways of assessing poverty. Nevertheless, we can state that, in general, single-parent families in Europe are better protected than those in Canada.

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Do you have a comparative analysis of steps taken by the various Canadian provinces with respect to the social safety net? For example, Quebec has adopted a family policy and early childhood policies, even though it is finding it difficult to maintain them, for lack of money. When the federal government slashes budgets, we feel the repercussions at the provincial level. It is difficult to improve a program that we have implemented when we are receiving less money than we expected.

We are explaining the situation that exists in Quebec, while other parliamentarians from other provinces are telling us how things are happening in their province. We are perhaps not paying enough attention to what is happening in Quebec.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We are currently conducting a study of comparative policies that have been implemented in six provinces. It will include a summary of income security, labour, family and child protection policies. We know already that it will note many differences. This study has not yet been completed, and I have not yet received the summaries. If the committee is interested in receiving a copy of the study, I could send you one as soon as it is completed.

The Chairman: When will it be completed?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: In June.

The Chairman: Thank you.

Libby Davies.

[English]

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Thank you. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to go through this, so as you were speaking I was trying to race through your bars here. But there are a couple of things that jumped out at me.

First of all, when you talk about what interventions help and look at potential models for family policy, it strikes me that when you talk about the most effective income sources, you say employment income is best by far. I would certainly agree—good employment income. Part of the problem is that so many women are in really crappy jobs, with low wages, part-time, and so on. Then you kind of go down the list.

We've had a lot of debate at this subcommittee about social supports, and particularly about the child tax benefit. The child tax benefit, of course, is a targeted program attached to the child; it's not universal. We've had all kinds of debate about what I think some of us consider to be its serious flaws.

So I'm interested in the fact that here we have a model that outlines the hierarchy of the kinds of interventions that are the most positive from your research and findings, and yet it seems from a federal perspective the government is taking us in a direction that is probably the least desirable. I wondered if you could comment on that. In your opinion, is this a conscious decision that's come about as a shift of public policy in Canada? How do we begin to reverse that? That's one question.

Second, going down to the potential models for family policy where you look at the gender equality model as a child-centred model, again there's a big debate going on about one-income earner or two-income earner families and the income tax system. I think we should have a progressive income tax system. But how do we create that level playing field in terms of women having choices at home or at work so that we do have a child-centred model? Is that something you think we should be dealing with through the income tax system? If so, what kinds of ideas do you have for actually pursuing those kinds of options?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Let me deal with your first question first. While I've given you the hierarchy here of four different income sources, ranked from best to least good, if I can put it that way, the worst of all is welfare. That would be the fifth one, if there was more room on the slide. So what we see happening in Canada now is taking children off welfare, which I think is a very positive way to go, both by giving the family more choices and by giving it more stability.

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Let me go on from there. I think if you have to do things incrementally it makes sense to, first of all, take the children off welfare and give them a benefit they receive whatever the family circumstances are, as long as they're still poor, so that the money can go with them if they decide to go to work and that sort of thing.

But what I would dream about—and if you'll permit me, I will dream for a minute—is that eventually we would be able to make that child benefit much more generous than it is now and not have this difficulty we've had at the beginning, where there's been this substitution from welfare to the national child benefit, which a lot of citizens have found difficult to understand and would obviously rather have seen the child benefit be added on than having the substitution take place.

It seems to me we can move in the direction of making this more and more in the direction of a universal benefit, even if it's not fairly paid to the richest families, but would be available to more and more. Thereby we can still actually think of ourselves as climbing the ladder. Getting them off welfare is the first rung on the ladder, and then you move on from there.

Ms. Libby Davies: We seem to be going down the ladder, though, rather than up the ladder.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We went down the ladder way back in the late seventies, which is when we first began to tinker with the family allowance, if I remember correctly, and lost the child exemptions. We're going back a long way in history. We made the system meaner and meaner for a couple of decades, and it seems to me we've now at least started to turn the corner, but we still have a long way to go.

On your second question about taxes, I have to start by saying to you that I'm not an expert on taxation. But it seems to me that where we need to centre the public policy debate is not in setting up inappropriate competition between one-earner and two-earner families, but to look at the way we treat families with children and families without children. The system no longer recognizes, as it did at one time, the costs of raising children. We have many estimates now of the cost of raising children. There was an article in L'actualité a week or two ago. We have another estimate that's been made by the Caledon Institute, and the costs of raising a child are very substantial. And while people have children out of choice, there is also clearly a societal benefit from the fact that people do make this extraordinary effort to bring a child into the world and to bring the child to adulthood. So I would rather see the debate focused there as we deal with the tax issue.

The Chairman: Carolyn Bennett.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett (St. Paul's, Lib.): Thank you.

I was interested in the potential models for family policy because my concern has been that some of the models are based on social engineering. The government prefers a certain way and therefore you put incentives in to have the mothers stay home because you've decided that's best.

I think I'm always more interested in child-centred approaches in terms of what actually is good for kids, and the issue of choice. Certainly in my practice I watched a lot of families make a decision to go back to work, but it was because of the community response in order to get into a better neighbourhood with more resources, or to have a backyard instead of the balcony. There was a child-centred reason why the woman went back to work. And I think that's been lost in a bit of our recent debate.

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But when I look at Norway and the Netherlands, I'd like a little bit of an explanation as to why in a breadwinner model they're only giving 16 weeks of maternity leave. Is this part of that? They don't actually want people to do this; they want them to quit and stay home, whereas in the gender equality model you give a choice, and in a more child-centred model you have much more generous maternity leave.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes, I think that's the main distinction there.

I wouldn't call the models we've identified, though, as being social engineering. I think what you can find is that they are deeply embedded in the political philosophy and the core social values of those countries.

Kathy O'Hara did the study and she looked at eight different countries. We found that in all of those countries there was a profound ambivalence about whether mothers should work. It seems that the work/family trade-off is a troublesome one in all of the industrial countries we've looked at, but in spite of that ambivalence, some countries have decided to go ahead and adopt a philosophy that seems to be generally accepted in the country.

In the countries that have a philosophy of a very strong role for the state, you find that the policies are very generous to the children and the families. In other countries, particularly in North America, but to a certain extent in the U.K., where there is much less of a sense that the state should be active in this area, the ambivalence drives you to non-policy or to highly targeted policies. So there is a complex array of factors that seem to lead to very different outcomes.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Third-wave feminists are not happy with my generation. They think actually we're nuts to have been working this hard.

If you were going to dream in technicolor, again, and because child care slots tend to be full-time slots and all of those things, is there a way we could create a more flexible approach, where it would be easier for women to work part-time, particularly when their kids are very young?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: In Germany, which probably had the strongest breadwinner model of the countries we looked at, looking at the tax system, looking at the way benefits like maternity benefits and so on were structured, and looking at social services and so on, you could see a consistent philosophy all the way through. There was a very strong support system for part-time work in the breadwinner model.

Then if you look at Norway, where actually a lot of women do work full-time, if there is a social engineering element here, it has been the pressure to create triggers for men to take more of the responsibility at home. They have something called flexible working time, where they use a time account. So you can have—I forget what the final limit is, but let's say it's a year of paid leave, which either parent can use. You can use it to work 20% of the time and spread it over five years, but you're still getting the equivalent of a year, or you can work 20% the first year and move up to 40% and 50% as the child matures. So it's a totally flexible account and you can spend it the way you want. Either parent can use it. So one could stay home one year and one the next, but the family gets one allotment. I guess the allotment is per child.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: I had some patients where the woman took the first six months off and the dad took the last six months off. That would work in an account like that. They would get their one year of leave.

My other question would be this. Should there be a separate plan for the parents of children with disabilities?

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Ms. Judith Maxwell: I'm not an expert on this issue, but it seems to me that if we really believe in this notion....

We took the elderly off welfare way back with a guaranteed income supplement, and more recently we've taken children off welfare. Probably the next step would be to take the disabled off welfare, in which case you would have an equivalent to the national child benefit that would be focused on the disabled. Again, it would be neutral as to the choices the family was making about whether to work or not. It seems to me that these principles can be applied across quite a wide range of key groups in society where we feel there is a collective responsibility.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Thank you.

The Chairman: I have a couple of questions. First, have you completed your value study of what Canadian families want, or are you still in the process?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: We've finished the work. The discussion paper is in production now.

The Chairman: Without prejudicing the publication and all that sort of stuff, what would you say on this? If you posit these various models, the breadwinner model, the gender equity model, and the choice model, what is it looking like for Canada at this stage? I'm guessing choice, but I'm not a betting man, being so Canadian.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: There's a very strong message in that work, that people are really struggling with the work/family balance, and that's where they really want help. Across the whole income spectrum, that is a preoccupation. People are stretched to their limit, and the stretching is the time problem, it's the access to child care that they can really count on, and then there's the balancing of the economic and social calculus, if I can put it that way.

There's strong consensus across a bunch of things that are described here in terms of what families need—that's at the top of the second page. These are the things where we found a lot of consistency in terms of different groups visualizing the best policy mix for healthy child development.

There were real differences of opinion around two issues. One is whether or not there should be income support for mothers or parents who decide to stay home. That basically seems to split 50-50. It really is a place where opinion in Canada polarizes.

Another place where people are really struggling is that they believe strongly that people who lack income should have income support, that there should be a last resort system, but they're very concerned about creating dependency. This is a thread that we've seen in the public debate. People are still struggling with that. They recognize the fact that we have as a collective responsibility the requirement to make income support available, but somehow it has to be constrained in such a way that it really encourages people to get off this income support as soon as possible. This leads to what I call fundamental contradictions in the way we think about these issues, because we think a lone parent should work and we think a lone parent should be with her children, and we think both those thoughts at the same time.

The Chairman: By the same parent.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: It's one of those situations where people have not reflected enough on this fundamental contradiction, and they haven't gotten to a more resolved state in their thinking. They haven't really deliberated on it, and therefore I think those contradictions are haunting people in policy-making positions, because it's hard to know which way to move.

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The Chairman: Where does that take us? Does that say there has to be a job of social learning by the entire population to better understand these things? I'm sure that would be a good thing to make us better citizens.

There's this third model, the choice model, that presumably would cost quite a lot of money. They're not Norwegian; they're not Dutch. Is there a nice neutral country out there that does this third thing?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: France is the choice model. It is very child centred. The gender equality model, kind of by accident maybe, is very child centred as well. The parents can drive through their own choices, but the best interests of the child seem to be at the centre of things.

The Chairman: What I'm getting at is if the committee's going to travel to France...no.

Ms. Maria Minna (Beaches—East York, Lib.): Dream on, Mr. Chairman.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Maybe you should just go to Quebec.

The Chairman: Of course.

If this government is moving toward the notion of a children's budget for the millennium, is the state of your work such that you can give some early indications that might guide the direction of the choices? Is your timing such that you can be helpful in that process, should it come to pass?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes, we're already engaged in pulling the threads together and creating the frameworks. We will be in active discussions with the research team and with people in the policy-making community to get their input, as we sort through these findings. Our hope is that we'll have something to publish in the fall.

The Chairman: Mr. Jackson

[Translation]

followed by Ms. Gagnon.

[English]

Mr. Ovid L. Jackson (Bruce—Grey, Lib.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

Just a quick question, because I know Christine wants to get on with it. We have what we call strength in diversity in Canada, but the problem is how does it reach everybody? We have the Quebec model and the Ontario model. Do you have some ideas, when you're looking at the country with your six comparatives, about how we will deliver this thing in a meaningful way, so it actually reaches everybody?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Some of the initial findings are coming out of the provincial comparisons. One of the things we did was compare the outcomes in the NLSCY by province. You see very wide variations in outcomes for children from one province to another. So that gives us two strong messages.

First of all, it suggests that there probably should be more diversity in provincial policies because they're responding to rather different circumstances. There's the fundamental socio-demographic situation of children in families, and also the political philosophy of that region. As you know, there are quite wide differences from one region to the other, in terms of their thinking on supports for children and families.

The other really fundamental question we are still grappling with is the sense that every child is born a Canadian, and somehow we need to think about ensuring that every one of those children has the opportunity to achieve her or his potential. So we're talking about equality of opportunity and the notion that a child born in Newfoundland and a child born in Saskatchewan should have similar chances in life.

We have a model now, which is the national child benefit, where we're creating a floor of income that goes to all poor children.

Ms. Libby Davies: Not those on welfare.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: The substitution effect, I agree, is a serious problem. But there is a lot of scope for provinces to do their investment and their reinvestment in a fashion that meets their priorities. As I said earlier, the priorities will be dictated in part by political philosophy and in part by what they see as being the needs of their particular population. Therefore, how do you square the circle?

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I don't think there are strong levers to make guarantees or square the circle in the short run. But if, going forward in the social union, there is a genuine commitment to monitor real outcomes for children, we will have accountability mechanisms in place that should lead to learning across jurisdictions—understanding better what works in one place and figuring out whether that might apply in another. We would therefore have a better chance of leading to convergence in the longer run.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: You took the word “convergence” out of my mouth. So it might be happening and the social union might be the place where it harmonizes.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: But of course much depends on how robust that social union framework turns out to be. What we can see in our interprovincial comparisons is that some provinces are beginning to use outcome measures as their own accountability mechanisms. Given that the NLSCY is a national database, there is the potential for them to turn to measures that are actually somewhat comparable. So there's reason for optimism there, but I don't want to underestimate how long the road is to get to the place where we have the accountability mechanism that really works, and the convergence in policy.

Mr. Ovid Jackson: Thank you.

The Chairman: I'm aware that Mr. Lowther has to leave shortly. He has a quick question, I think.

Mr. Eric Lowther (Calgary Centre, Ref.): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I was just looking at the last page of this particular document. There's a quote there that “72 per cent of women with children under 16 work full time, which is high by international standards”. I've seen a number of stats that would drastically conflict with that. What is the source for that statistic?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: It's from Statistics Canada. I can get you a more precise source than that after the session.

Mr. Eric Lowther: Okay. Thank you.

The Chairman: Ms. Minna.

Ms. Maria Minna: We're discussing changing the programs for children. We're looking at a national children's strategy. There are discussions about a paper that's supposed to be released some time with the provinces—federal, I presume.

Because there's a great deal of talk of measuring outcomes, I guess my biggest fear is that we could take the easy route, the short route, which has happened in the past to some degree, where the measurement is an end in itself. Then what do you do? If you use the wrong measurements and they're not sensitive, you could actually be setting yourself up to not only fail, but also to stigmatize some young people and some families and set up a whole problematic thing.

Before we even devise a measurement, should we not devise or develop a framework of fundamental values and policies we want to see—a blueprint—in a children's agenda, whether it's child centred, whatever model or value system you want, that needs to be implemented or crossed? Then you establish some sort of monitoring or measurement to see whether this plan is working or not and how it's being implemented.

So those are my issues. I'm worried we may do it the other way around, because a lot of the discussion seems to be around measurements, with not enough around the other at this point.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I agree with you completely about the importance of what you measure and getting your values explicit and out on the table. Then we need to determine, if this is what is important, what we need to measure in order to know we're making progress on what is important. Getting the cart before the horse is really important. That's why we actually did this work of defining the markers for healthy child development around five different headings: physical well-being, learning readiness, secure attachment, social engagement, and smart risk taking.

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We're not saying these are the only ones or the right ones; we're saying we brainstormed these with a group of experts and they're there for people to decide whether or not they like them and whether they'd like to amend them in some fashion. But the values have to come first and then you measure, you're absolutely right. Then, even when you measure, what you can tell is whether you're leading or lagging in where you want to be, whether you're making progress or not. But in order to figure out why you're leading or lagging, you're then going to have to go down inside to understand the real story through evaluation research or through direct contact with children and families in some way so that you understand.

It could be the policy framework that's making the difference, it could be the economic situation, it could be what we call the social capital, the quality of the community in which people live—it could be any of a dozen things. Even the measurement itself tells you what questions to ask; it doesn't give you the answers. Nonetheless we haven't had that in the past, and there's been a tendency for people who were defending policies to say, we're doing fine, we spent x dollars. And this is actually not a measure of doing fine.

The Chairman: That's an output model.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: So it is an important transition to go to measuring outcomes. It's also a difficult transition, and it will have to be used respectfully by all the players if it's going to really make a difference for children.

Ms. Maria Minna: Thank you.

The Chairman: Christiane.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: A year ago, I started looking into how much money was being invested to help children and underprivileged people. I ran up against a wall, and it was very difficult to obtain figures and to know what the departments were doing in this area. I'm under the impression that there is no coordination and that each department acts on its own to establish the programs it deems necessary or beneficial for the minister who has responsibilities in these areas.

Having determined that, I thought about the idea of appointing a poverty commissioner. He could get much more involved in looking at the assistance underprivileged families and poor children receive, as well as in analyzing the long-term rather than the short-term repercussions of all measures taken. In politics, we're only here for a short period of time. A government might well want to do many things, but you never know when it will have to relinquish the reins of power. This poverty commissioner could fall under the Auditor General and be accountable to all parliamentarians, including the opposition members.

Often, the opposition only partially agrees with these programs, because it hears from the people in the field. We must come up with a more effective formula, because to date, too much money is being spent unnecessarily. I wonder if even our committee will be in a position to come up with some good solutions, because I think that a much more detailed study should be conducted, and we should also examine what is happening in the provinces. When the provinces have already established structures and put aid measures in place, the role of the federal government should be to help the provinces meet the needs of their people.

You talked about social union. To me, it does not seem to be a good agreement for Quebec, because it enables the federal government to decide, after three months of discussions, what programs it wants to implement. We all know what happened with the millennium scholarships: they never wanted to listen to Quebec, which already had its own grants and loans structure.

If the purpose of the social union agreement is to flout everything that is going on in Quebec, I do not think that it will be useful in examining what is happening in the other provinces. The provinces' jurisdictions, as well as the programs and structures they have created must be respected.

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Regardless of the committee's decisions, if we do not respect the jurisdiction of the federal government and the provinces, the people who are the most in need are the ones who will suffer.

[English]

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I agree with what you're saying in terms of the lack of coherent information that makes the comparisons across jurisdictions. For a non-profit think-tank like CPRN to have to go out and raise money in order to put together what is a relatively simple inventory of the kinds of programs I described for you.... We could only do it for six provinces, because adding in the other four and then the territories would have doubled the work. We just didn't have the resources to do it.

Of course, what we've done will be very up to date for the summer of 1999, but it needs to be updated on an annual basis if it's going to be really useful to parliamentarians like yourself, to researchers, and to policy-makers. But because we are so decentralized in this country, we are very reluctant to give a mandate to a commission, or a third party or even a secretariat to first ministers, to collect this information and have it there as a public good to be used by all who are interested in a subject area. I think we shoot ourselves in the foot when we insist on a governance regime that does not permit the sharing of information that is so essential to good policy debate.

I can testify, because we actually did a small feasibility study on this a few years ago, that there is an incredible demand for the very kind of information you described among community organizations, social advocates, provincial government officials, and federal officials. But we don't mobilize. To be honest with you, we could do a feasibility study, but the government are the owners of that information, and if they don't take ownership of the problem and do something about it, nothing will happen and we'll flounder around with inadequate information until they decide to bite the bullet.

[Translation]

Ms. Christiane Gagnon: Our subcommittee is studying children and young people at risk, whereas the finance committee is studying family taxation. It seems to me that we are all working in a vacuum, although the objectives of our studies are interrelated. Some groups and families appear before the finance committee and present information, while we hear from other witnesses who talk about taxation, the child tax benefit and other measures relating to income security. I don't think there is enough interaction between the two committees. I realize that members must leave and that we might not have enough time to make the right decisions and have as much as influence as we wanted to.

We are perhaps more interested in the social science side of things as well as the impact of these measures on society, while they're interested in the fiscal side of things. I do however think that we should be able to influence each other and share the information we have gathered. In Quebec, a group is preparing to table umbrella legislation on poverty and has approached the Minister of Finance to explain what is going on. If we do not establish this link between reality on a daily basis and finance, we will just be paying lip service to these issues.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes, okay.

[English]

The Chairman: I totally agree, specifically on the point Madame Gagnon just made, which is clearly that when we have two subcommittees looking at kids, it occurred to me, as well as the researchers, we really need to work in far greater proximity with each other, sharing witness lists, perhaps having a joint meeting to see what we're up to so that we're not.... You are probably going to be invited by them too. This coherence should begin at home with us.

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Do you have an intervention on that point before we go to Ms. Davies? Yes, go ahead.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: The question was around the secretariat piece. I guess my question is, can the social union work without a secretariat that actually looks at all the things you're looking at? And if the social union is to report to Canadians on a regular basis on how we're doing on these things, and we're to get away from Big Brother checking up on whether the provinces are doing things correctly because it's viewed to be much more that all levels of government report to Canadians on how we're doing, how can it function without a secretariat or a policy or a measurement piece, in terms of what we measure, how we measure it, and making sure it's being measured in the same way in various places?

I think you've been extraordinarily helpful to the social union process. But in this next phase, should we as parliamentarians be pushing for more of a formalized secretariat for this? We've only got three years to prove that this works, so how can we help make sure the robust social union you hope for is there?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I think eventually, if we're going to have a real commitment to this joint management of the interdependence in social policy, there will be a need for secretariats, for more machinery.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Just to go back to Christiane's point about a poverty commissioner, in effect you would need a secretariat that looked at poverty, kids, and health, and you would end up with—

Ms. Judith Maxwell: But as soon as you start to multiply all of those things, there are a lot of people who get very upset about creating a new order of government, so it stalls. I think it has to be an evolutionary process, given the opposition there is to formalizing this too much—creating this new order of government.

I think in the short run it can be handled in two ways. One is through a task group of officials working for a ministerial council. They could then, I would hope, be freed up from their day-to-day jobs so they could work on this in a more intensive way. Another possibility that is opened up in the framework agreement is that there would be a third party who would be mandated to begin to move the file forward.

Now, because we are preoccupied with the children's file, we would probably put that forward as one of the first candidates for this kind of treatment. I think first ministers, or the ministerial council, hopefully with a mandate from first ministers, are going to have to make choices about where they're going to invest, what sector is going to lead. This innovation has to occur at a sectoral level, it seems to me.

Would it be health? Would it be children? Would it be—

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Disabilities.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: —disabilities? There are a number of candidates, and probably, given the fragility of the structure, there are a limited number that they could proceed with in the short run. So everything has to be seen at this point as a building block. What you'd like to do is choose your best bet, because you want to have a successful building block that will launch the next step.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Do you get any funding from the federal government?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes, a lot.

Ms. Carolyn Bennett: Do you need more?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Yes, always.

The Chairman: Do you think the taxes are too high? Never mind.

Ms. Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies: Yes, I wanted to come back to something you spoke about earlier, which is this terrible contradiction we have when we say we want to emphasize the choice of parents to stay at home and raise children, while public policy seems to work in the opposite direction of pushing people into the workforce when maybe they would make other choices.

To come back to the child tax benefit, I really do see it as just a terrible contradiction that everybody falls into. You yourself said the goal is to take children off welfare. Right? And in the hierarchy, well, it's leading to something better. But it seems to me that what we hear a lot is that if you're poor and you're on welfare, somehow you're a target; somehow there's something wrong with you. We've got to give you the incentive to get back into the workforce, even if it's a low-paying job. In fact, what we'll do is we'll subsidize the marketplace; we'll provide a subsidy. But if you're at home and you have a spouse who works and is making a good income, well then, you should have choice and maybe we should change the income tax system. I mean, the contradictions are just terrible.

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Ms. Judith Maxwell: I agree.

Ms. Libby Davies: So if we're to provide a real choice or a level playing field, as you talk about, which I think is a very good thing, then if you are a poor, single parent, which means most likely you are stuck on welfare—if you're affluent, presumably you don't have as many difficulties with those choices—how do we provide that supportive environment, in the face of things like the child tax benefit, the message of which is, over and over again, you're the problem? We have to find the incentives to get you off and in fact put you into a low-paying job. I just don't think we've really grappled with it. We haven't yet had our discussions about what sort of agenda we lay out, but it's there, staring us in the face. How do we provide that environment, particularly for low-income single parents, if they want to have that choice? They should have that choice too, surely.

Ms. Judith Maxwell: Well, I have to tell you that I agree with you that those contradictions are there and they seem to be very deeply embedded in the Canadian psyche, because in all the focus groups and community discussion groups we've had, it kept coming back. It's out there in the public debate. And the real question is...well, there are two questions.

First of all, in a public policy sense, do you go against that and just make a choice that you're going to go in a certain direction, or do you feel constrained by it? The other is what kind of deliberation or reflection do citizens really need before they come to understand how punitive this attitude is, and how inappropriate it is if they are, as they should be—what you and I might argue would be the appropriate focus here—focused on the health of the child?

As far as the Canadian child tax benefit is concerned, I think it has to be recognized as a step in the right direction, because the mother will always have that benefit for the child, whatever her choice. Hopefully we can do better than that in coming years by improving the terms of the tax benefit.

Apart from that, we did a little study in British Columbia looking at how 25 families were dealing with these work/family tensions. About half the families were on income assistance and about a third of them were lone-parent families. It was quite interesting that there were several of these lone-parent families that were thriving, even though they were on income assistance. One of the conditions that made that happen was that there was the flow of income. In British Columbia, at the time of the study in particular, there wasn't a tremendous amount of pressure on the mother to go out to work. The children were preschoolers. Also, it was a thriving family situation because the grandparents were very much a part of the lives of those children. So there was emotional support. There was a chauffeur, if you needed a drive somewhere. There was babysitting. There were all kinds of very tangible supports for the family. The income support was essential to the mother, but so was the extended-family support.

• 1645

One way of cutting through the contradictions you've described so well would be to actually focus on some of the community support and the service supports that are essential to the success of families, even if we couldn't break through the political impasse. You could make it easier for that mother to go out to work if a lot of the other supports were in place.

The Chairman: Perhaps part of the anguish and turmoil comes from the fact that we confuse employment policy with social policy. What makes it more confusing is that on the social policy side—and you've said it—an earned dollar is the best kind of dollar for a household. So we kind of attach a very positive value to employment and the way in which the dollars flow in. But we haven't really reconciled the two polices.

In this productivity debate we can see there's an ultimate reconciliation because a higher quality population will be a more productive population over 20 years. But in the short term, where the choices seem to me more stark, it seems to me that's one of the sources of confusion. It seems to be an employment policy more than a social policy, the way Libby's put it. That's sort of an observation on your comments.

Going back to what Christiane was saying, what's characteristic about this issue from a structural point of view—and there is a really good book right beside you there—is it seems to have the characteristic of a late twentieth century problem, like homelessness or global warming. It's horizontal within government—I have a piece of research that shows there are 16 departments with 35 programs that deal with children. But it's also one in which the nineteenth century distinctions, constitutionally—I won't dare tell Madam Gagnon whether they're good, bad or indifferent, but I have my own views.... But it's also one where we have a kind of clearly marked distinction between what the province is supposed to do, what the federal government is supposed to do, and maybe what communities and parents are supposed to do. All of that is just a total mismatch with the structure of the problem, which says we all have to do it.

If we get into the issue that children are strictly a provincial matter, it doesn't work because it's much too complicated. All of the factors that would go into explaining and moving things along encompass both the horizontal and the vertical, if I can put it that way.

How, in your work—and I think you're well-positioned because you're a third party outside the system—do you come up with a unified field theory that pulls it together, both horizontally and vertically, and then allows you, given that degree of complexity, to start talking about indicators and outcomes and accountability—in about 30 seconds?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I can tell you how we do it in a microcosm. A great deal of the work in this project has been done with the support and advice of an advisory committee that includes the vertical and the horizontal, from the community to the federal government, across disciplines and institutions—researchers from the academic world, social advocates, officials from federal and provincial governments, etc.

In a microcosm you can get a lot of different voices in the room, all of them very concerned about issues around children and families, and you can have a very constructive dialogue. We're also working on this paper called “Governance and Accountability for Child and Family Policies”.

The Chairman: When will that be ready?

Ms. Judith Maxwell: I don't think it'll be published before July, but we will have a background paper we will be able to share with you before then.

There you can see the collision between the vertical and the horizontal very strongly. You can see that in each jurisdiction there's an effort to deal with it. Some provinces now have integrated all the child-serving ministries into one. Others have created coordinating mechanisms. They've created advisory councils that have the global view to give advice to the legislature or advice to a minister.

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They really are struggling with this. We have this explosion of governance models, which is fascinating to look at. Where it's all going to take us I haven't quite figured out yet, but maybe by the time we finish the paper we'll have some suggestions.

So I think it's a very present issue—in 30 seconds. We will try to give some discussion to that in our final report, plus the federal-provincial.

The Chairman: I think that's been very helpful. It has really been a very rich presentation, full of very helpful comments all the way through.

If I may ask your indulgence for one minute, members of the committee, you will have in front of you a document that has been prepared by the researchers, which I would ask you to take with you and think about. This is really where we've been and where we might be going. If you have comments, you can get them back to me or to the researchers for next week. If we can add a bit of time at the end of our witnesses next week, we'll talk about it.

Ms. Libby Davies: I think it's much better if we discuss it. I mean, if we all sort of forward comments—

The Chairman: Oh, no. We're going to talk about it, if I could ask your indulgence, at the end of our session on Ontario and Quebec next week. We have Fraser Mustard coming in and

[Translation]

two witnesses from Quebec, who are—

Ms. Sandra Harder (Committee Researcher): Jocelyne Tougas and Daniel Tremblay.

The Chairman: Ms. Gagnon recommended that we hear from those two witnesses.

[English]

So until we meet again, thank you very much for coming. We will stay in touch.

[Translation]

The meeting is adjourned.