SCYR Committee Meeting

37th PARLIAMENT, 1st SESSION

Sub-Committee on Children and Youth at Risk of the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

EVIDENCE

CONTENTS

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

º

1615

Ms. Neville

Mr. John G. Richards ( Professor of Policy Analysis, Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University; Phillips Scholar in Social Policy and Fellow-in-Residence, C.D. Howe Institute)

Mme Monique Guay

º

1620

Ms. Neville

Dr. J. Fraser Mustard (Founding President and Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; The Founders' Network)

º

1625

º

1630

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Ms. Pauline Clarke (Superintendent of Schools - Inner City, The Winnipeg School Division No.1)

º

1635

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Ms. Guay

Ms. Pauline Clarke

Ms. Guay

º

1640

Dr. Fraser Mustard

Ms. Guay

Mr. John Richards

º

1645

Mme Monique Guay

M. John Richards

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Mr. Alan Tonks (York South--Weston, Lib.)

º

1650

Prof. John Richards

º

1655

Mr. Tonks

Ms. Pauline Clarke

»

1700

Ms. Neville

Dr. Fraser Mustard

»

1705

Mr. Tonks

Prof. John Richards

Mr. Alan Tonks

Dr. Fraser Mustard

Ms. Neville

Mr. Alan Tonks

Ms. Pauline Clarke

Mr. Alan Tonks

Ms. Pauline Clarke

Prof. John Richards

Dr. Fraser Mustard

Ms. Neville

Ms. Guay

»

1710

Ms. Pauline Clarke

Mr. John Richards

»

1715

Ms. Guay

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Dr. Fraser Mustard

»

1720

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Ms. Pauline Clarke

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Prof. John Richards

»

1725

Ms. Guay

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Mr. Alan Tonks

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

Dr. Fraser Mustard

Ms. Neville

Dr. Fraser Mustard

The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville)

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CANADA

Sub-Committee on Children and Youth at Risk of the Standing Committee on Human Resources Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities

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NUMBER 019

l

1st SESSION

l

37th PARLIAMENT

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EVIDENCE

Wednesday, March 13, 2002

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

º  (1615)  

[English]

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville (Winnipeg South Centre, Lib.)): I'd like to welcome you to the House subcommittee for children at risk. My name is Anita Neville. I am the member of Parliament for Winnipeg South Centre, and I am chairing the meeting today in the absence of Mr. Godfrey, who is out of the city.

    Before we begin, I would like to welcome the young people who are here from the Forum for Young Canadians. I hope you enjoy the discussion here today. You represent all parts of Canada, and we're delighted to have you here.

    We have three speakers here today, and we are expecting more members of the committee to arrive.

    I'm going to suggest that you each have about five to seven minutes to make a presentation, but I just want to advise you the we have been celebrating the long service of Mr. Gray in the House, so it was a little congested just getting out to get over here.

    I suggest that we begin in the order in which the witnesses are listed. I'm going to ask Professor Richards to begin, unless he has some major objection to that. We will then proceed in order, with Dr. Mustard following him, and Ms. Clarke following Dr. Mustard.

[Translation]

    Mr. John G. Richards ( Professor of Policy Analysis, Faculty of Business Administration, Simon Fraser University; Phillips Scholar in Social Policy and Fellow-in-Residence, C.D. Howe Institute): I will start in French because I have apparently not followed the rules. I was supposed to translate everything. There are three of you here who are... If you want to have some graphs and a few tables that are in English only, I will give them to you, but I do not want to compel you to accept something that has not been translated into French. So it is up to you. I do not have the funds required to run a translation system.

    Mme Monique Guay(Laurentides, BQ): Madam Chair, may I say something? Don't worry, Mr. Richards, your documents will be translated and submitted to us, because the translation will have been done.

    Mr. John Richards: Well, you can do so if you wish. In my opinion, it is not worth the expenditure.

[English]

    I will switch to English briefly.

    It is very difficult to say anything of substance about such an immensely complicated problem in five minutes. Accordingly, I will say very little, but I will make three arguments. I will talk about patterns of aboriginal migration, I will discuss very briefly the matter of emerging ghetto neighborhoods in western cities, and I shall very briefly say something about social assistance.

    By way of introduction, I teach at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, I was an NDP MLA many years ago in Saskatchewan, and I try to hold up the social conscience of the C.D. Howe Institute, where I also do a lot of work.

[Translation]

    My first observation is that, whatever the problems in the cities, it is better in the cities than on the reserves.

[English]

    The first and obvious matter is that migration is taking place from reserve to cities, and it will proceed. Whatever the problems for kids at risk in cities are, they fair better than kids on reserves. Education levels are better. However bad our high school completion problems—we will learn more about those from our friend from Winnipeg—they're better in Winnipeg than they are on the reserves. Incomes are higher. Overall in Canada, according to 1996 census, they were roughly one-third higher. In these non-translated statistics, I could give you many more details.

    Given that in the cities is where jobs exist, and given that it is nigh impossible to create an economic base on reserves, this migration will proceed. Among registered Indians, approximately half live off-reserve, but the data are unreliable. The 1996 census indicated that almost exactly half of the aboriginal population lived in cities. Probably one of the results from the latest census is that this has now become over half.

    Secondly, we have a lot to learn from the American experience with inner-city poverty. Unfortunately, however much better east end Vancouver, west side Saskatoon, and north end Winnipeg are relative to the reserves, there are grave problems. Canada is in the process of creating urban ghettos in western Canada, with many of the same syndromes that are attached to American ghettos. We have things to learn about how to try to minimize those problems.

    I have again provided some statistical work that I've done on this, using techniques toward finding extremely poor neighbourhoods, ones which have over twice the national average poverty rate. Using that as a crude cut-off, what is apparent is the concentration of urban native people in those neighbourhoods. Particularly, that is the case in Winnipeg. If you consider different categories of people—for example, of mixed origin, of single origin, and aboriginal by identity; I'm afraid there are multiple ways of defining these statistically—the most severe concentration of aboriginal people is amongst single-origin Indians. In Winnipeg, in the order of two-thirds are in neighbourhoods deemed poor. And all the syndromes attached to very poor neighbourhoods disproportionately affect aboriginal people.

    Given the time, I'm going to say nothing more than that I think Pauline should be quizzed by you people extensively on how you can make schools better. I have some ideas that I have learned from mentors of mine such as Allan Blakeney. There are experiments that need to be undertaken and I have a few themes and ideas that I'm sure are inferior to those of Pauline, but the problem of very high high school dropout rates is among the most crucial problems facing urban children. This is primarily a message addressed not to you as federal MPs, but to the provincial governments, which are not doing nearly enough to make aboriginal-friendly schools work for them.

    I'll get to the final subject before I stop talking. The first point is that people are coming to the cities, and that will continue. The second point concerns the creation—this is primarily a western Canadian phenomenon—of ghetto communities in which aboriginals are disproportionately represented. But the third matter is perhaps the most controversial. If many of the studies about the fates of kids say it is important that the parent work—and I believe they're right—there are still other aspects that obviously matter, such as the income of parents and the neighbourhood of parents. Among other variables that affect whether the children of the poor make it—whether they avoid teenage pregnancy, whether they graduate from high school, whether they avoid welfare themselves as adults—is whether or not their parents work. The role model effect of working parents is extremely important.

    This brings me to perhaps the most controversial recommendation I make, and that is that welfare in general should be rendered more difficult to access, particularly for the young. This is not solely targeted at aboriginal people by any means. This is crucially part of the equation, however, because in the four western provinces, between one-third and 60% of the off-reserve welfare case load is aboriginal. In my home province of Saskatchewan, officials estimate that 60% of recipients are aboriginal, while 80% of the kids in care are aboriginal. So anything dealing with welfare is essentially dealing with aboriginals.

    The one province that has drastically experimented, not coincidentally under an aboriginal social welfare minister, is Alberta. Ten years ago, an obviously small-c conservative individual, Mike Cardinal, was key in articulating the case for rendering access to social assistance more difficult. Again, in my untranslated tables is a time series indicating the proportion of provincial populations using welfare across the country, and it's quite obvious that Alberta stands out.

    What is also significant—I qualify this, because there are many more things to be said—is that the employment rate in poor neighbourhoods in Edmonton and Calgary is significantly better than in the comparably poor neighbourhoods in my home province in Regina and Saskatoon, and in Winnipeg.

    I'll sum up, but there is much more to be said about this. I look forward to your questions and to listening to the others. I have quickly made three points. Aboriginals are coming to town and we must make town amenable to them. Secondly, the question of high school drop-outs is a crucial problem to be addressed. Thirdly, the most politically painful subject is social assistance, but it must also be addressed.

[Translation]

    Thank you.

º  (1620)  

[English]

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you very much.

    Dr. Mustard.

    Dr. J. Fraser Mustard (Founding President and Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; The Founders' Network): I do not have a French translation of the charts I'm using. When we did the Reversing the Real Brain Drain: Early Years Study for Ontario, I learned that translating a semi-technical document into suitable French is an awesome task, and I wasn't prepared to try to do that for this group. The person who lectured me on this was Marc Renaud, the current president of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. He said the English translation was fine but the French translation was a pile of crap, so I hope you can do a better job with this material.

    First of all, the Government of Canada, made an announcement on September 11, 2000, about an early childhood agenda for the country, with the sum of money put up to be used by provinces to build capacity. That was a landmark document because, as far as I know, we were the first to say that publicly, at least in terms of an English-language and French-language culture.

    I appreciate your comments, sir, but I will hammer you that the period of very early life sets the structure of your brain. What I would call experience-based brain development is crucial in utero and during the first three to four years of life. If that's not done well, it's very hard to improve things through education and job structures. And the skew of that effect on the first nations population is not trivial, nor is it trivial on the other populations in the country.

    Early brain development affects not only your capacity to learn and your behaviour, it effects significant health risks. When I talk about this to first nations communities and I list the diseases that are related to these early years that are setting up the risk—they include coronary heart disease, non-insulin-dependent diabetes, obesity, blood pressure, aging, memory loss, and mental health—they say, “You did that to us.” It's very stunning. They understand this perfectly because of the disease patterns that they have. The patterns are actually part of the problem of how the children have been handled in their early years.

    We are all products of how we were handled when we were very young. I just want you all to think about that. If you have anybody with you who has bad behaviour, talk about their early childhood.

    To summarize, the brain is clearly the pathway to learning, behaviour, and health. How societies invest in ensuring high-quality early childhood development is important.

    When we did the report for the Government of Ontario, we put together a whole package of things and looked at the story that we now know from the neurosciences: how you optimize the wiring and sculpting of the brain in these early years, and the kinds of interactions that are required. We therefore said to the Government of Ontario—and the language is actually in your September 10 document, and in the September 11 document as well—that we should set up early child development and parenting centres—note the language—because we have to have the parents involved in understanding parenting in today's world. That's very important. Unfortunately, though, the Province of Ontario has not been quite as good as it should have been in implementing the report. I won't say anything more about that, but I have certain concerns.

    One of the benchmarks that is applicable to any community—be it on-reserve or off-reserve—is the actual setting up of these kinds of centres. We do have one example. It does not provide official day care in Toronto, but it runs in thirty schools and would be quite applicable in Winnipeg. It is a form of parenting centre at which mothers, when they're pregnant, can come in and join the group that is concerned with pregnancy and having children. Each unit is led by a very skilled person who knows how to work with adults to learn, and how to work with children at the many stages of learning for these different age groups up to the time they enter the school system.

    It's relatively cheap. It costs $1,000 a child to operate this in the Toronto school system. Actually, heat, lights, buildings, and whatnot are free. But the stunning thing about this program, which uses all the key ingredients for early childhood development, is that the parents learn by doing, by working in the centres, which is important to understand in this kind of strategy. I must say that when I went to the first centre, I had to be careful about where I stepped because it was full of mothers and kids. But around each adult was a group of kids. It was marvellous to see.

    In comparison to the other children in the district who were not in these programs, we now know that for the children in these programs, their performance when they come into the schools is five orders of magnitude better. It seems to me that this is a very important message for the country to carry. It's applicable everywhere, whether it's on a first nation reserve or whether it's in the inner-city schools in Winnipeg, or whether it's in the inner-city schools in Toronto, with immigrants, etc.

º  (1625)  

    I've visited quite a few reserves in this country and will say this: In Duncan—and they may have spoken to you—and in Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, very good programs actually are doing what I think is necessary for early childhood development and parenting. What's taking place is really quite stunning. The characteristic is that the leaders on these reserves have taken control of the activities. Their frustration stems from the fact that the government programs are a bag of different financing things, and it's very difficult for them to integrate the functions.

    Somebody in the federal government should look at why you put money from different ministries into your communities and then leave it to the people to have to sort out how to integrate things. It seems to me that this is a very fundamental mistake in the whole program. If you want to do something constructive, put it all together and make somebody responsible for it.

    I visited one urban community called Thunder Bay, and their group of first nations people had one of the finest early childhood development and parenting centres I've seen off-reserve. I don't know whether it's still operating or not, but it was superb. They were well qualified, they knew what the heck they were doing, and because they were first nations people and not comfortable with the other cultures, they wanted to keep it running as one of their units. So there are examples, both on- and off-reserve, of good steps toward doing something.

    My final comment is that a recent article in Scientific American—and I've given the article to your research staff—points out that children subjected to sexual or physical abuse in those early years are permanently damaged. You cannot get around the problems. You know about the problems I'm talking about. They're in all cultures and communities. The purpose of putting these in place is so that you can avoid all that.

    If I were to give you some summary recommendations, they would be as follows. First, expand and integrate resources available for early childhood development and parenting centres in aboriginal communities and for aboriginal children in urban centres. That's rule number one.

    Second, ensure that the initiative covers the early period of child development as much as possible, and involves mothers in the ECD centres after conception. Don't just put the mothers into the centres, because we know the influences in the in utero period have big effects.

    Third, use early childhood development and parenting centres to expand efforts directed at teen mothers both before and after the birth of their children; to ensure that they're well nourished during pregnancy, and to ensure that smoking and alcohol use are prevented—you will not touch the fetal alcohol syndrome unless you stop the consumption of alcohol during pregnancy—and to ensure that the fathers play a key role in early childhood development after the child is born.

    Finally, you should set up policies that facilitate the integration of resources from different governments for all the sites. You now have the governments in some of the provinces engaged in the act as well, and you get into the turf wars that you have between the federal and provincial governments.

    A very constructive recommendation for you is to accept what is in your September 11 announcement, and to direct resources to build capacity to enhance early childhood development, beginning at conception, because of the awesome evidence about what failure in this field does to your society in terms of literacy, numeracy, behaviour, and health risks.

    The good news—and I left the document here—is that we've been doing some work with the World Bank. The economist who handles this for the World Bank, the dean of economics in Amsterdam, has argued that the investment in this period is a hard investment to which all societies have to give a high priority. So that would be my plea to you in order to help to get at some of the first nation problems.

    Thank you.

º  (1630)  

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you very much.

    Ms. Clarke.

    Ms. Pauline Clarke (Superintendent of Schools - Inner City, The Winnipeg School Division No.1): Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to be invited to make this presentation to you today. As you know, I come from Winnipeg. I've spent a lot of my life working in, teaching at, and now supporting the inner-city schools in our city.

    Winnipeg, as you've already heard, has a high aboriginal population. Approximately one-third of the aboriginal families in the province live in the city of Winnipeg. They are some of the poorest people living in our city. The average yearly income for an individual from the aboriginal community is approximately $12,000, as compared to about $21,000 for individuals from non-aboriginal communities.

    Many of the children who are under 15 years of age live within our school division, and this is a population that is increasing. In the rest of our school-based population, we can see that the numbers are stable or declining, but not in the aboriginal community. One of the biggest factors affecting our aboriginal families is the continued transience, either around the city from neighbourhood to neighbourhood, or from in the city to out of the city and back again.

    In working with our families, obviously our mandate is to help the children have their education, but we've known for many years that education doesn't come in isolation. A child's success at school depends on many other factors. In working with our families, we see the loneliness of many of the families. Single women are raising six or seven children, with no supports and no networks. We see the frequent moves, the health issues that have been described to you, and the violence in the community, but we also see the pride that the families have. They have real faith that their children will be able to make a better life than they live themselves.

    Some of the factors that we face are intergenerational and don't seem to be getting any better. In the inner-city schools in Winnipeg, as I mentioned, we're trying to do a number of things that go beyond the mandate of a school division. We run a lot of aboriginal programs. We have written a lot of curriculum that has aboriginal content. We have opened aboriginal schools so that parents have choices.

    We want our parents not to be forced to go to one kind of school or another, but to have a choice about whether they want to go to a regular elementary school or whether they want to go to a French immersion school. If they want to go to an aboriginal school that highlights aboriginal languages and aboriginal culture, then so be it. They should have that choice, and we've done that within our school system—with no help from anybody else, I hasten to add; in many of these things, we've had no help from anybody else.

    We have to make sure the quality of education in our inner-city schools is second to none. We don't do the extra things at the expense of saying we want the best quality of education we can provide. We want to provide advocacy for our families.

    I mentioned the loneliness. One of the things that happens to the families is that when they come into the city, there's nobody going on their behalf. There are lots of organizations and lots of agencies, but many of the families don't feel connected to those agencies and organizations. So our advocacy role is a very strong one.

    In terms of the migrancy, we've put a number of programs in place to work with other agencies, which in fact often encourage the migrancy through their lack of understanding of what children moving from school to school can do. By grade 3, some of our children have been to fourteen schools and have no attachment to school and have no friends. Moving is their way of life.

    I mentioned the aboriginal content that we have in many of our materials and in the training of our staff. We want to develop the strength of children in arts programs, and we need support to help us do that. Our children are bright and talented, and we have to create the opportunities for them to demonstrate that. We're doing things in arts, but sciences would be... anything would be useful.

    One of the major issues is the concept of work. At the elementary schools, we are putting programs in place to help our children learn what the word “work” means. For generation after generation, work has not been something that's in their families, so we have to help them to break that cycle. School-to-work transition programs are useless at the high school level with our families. They have to be in place at the younger level.

º  (1635)  

    There are a couple of things that I think the government can do—and now I'm talking to the Government of Canada, although I appreciate Dr. Mustard's comments about the money coming to the provincial government. You already have some programs in place, such as Understanding the Early Years and the Centres of Excellence for Children's Well-Being.

    I happen to be familiar with both of those programs, and I have to say to you that there could be some improvements in both. What they tend to do, at least in our setting, is research again, at great cost I'm sure. But we've had lots of research over the last 25 years. You could talk to many of our families and parents and people, and they'll tell you what to do. They could have told you 20 years ago that parent-child centres are very important. What we need is the funding to sustain these ideas, not continued research.

    Funding for aboriginal people who live off-reserve is not that accessible. Our school division puts in proposals to help fund programs like the Girls Sitting Together program at Children of the Earth High School. Because we're not an aboriginal agency, it sometimes appears as if we can't access funds, yet we're dealing with many, many aboriginal students. We need the ability, as a non-aboriginal agency, to be able to access dollars that you're probably focusing onto aboriginal reserves and communities in the north.

    There are many other things I could say, but I think I'll stop there. Hopefully you'll have some questions.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): This is a small committee, so I'm going to try to deal with things very informally. I'll begin with Madam Guay, and then just move back and forth.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: Thank you, Madam Chair.

    I would like to thank you for appearing here before us today. Because you are in the field, your knowledge is very important to us. We need this information if we are to submit a report that makes sense.

    Our report will focus, above all, on children in the 0-to-6 age range both on and off reserve and on children in the 6-to-12 age range both on and off reserve. You are presenting us with an off-reserve point of view that is extremely important.

    It is true that we have many programs, and this has been a constant comment of the people who have come to make presentations, by members of the Aboriginal communities who have come to meet with us. I would like you to tell us which programs really work in your view.

    Ms. Clarke, you have just told us that you could implement certain programs helping Aboriginals, but that you do not have access to certain funds because you are not an Aboriginal agency. Somewhere, something does not make sense. What can we do to improve the situation? We will have important recommendations to make and, if we do not succeed in acting now, we are wasting our time. So, give us something concrete. The Committee members will take notes and will ultimately try to put everything together. There are Aboriginal people who have told us that they would prefer to have programs on their reserves, programs that would be controlled and administered by them, because they know their needs. Things are obviously different off reserve. So we need you to shed some more light on the subject for us. Carry on speaking, because this is an interesting issue.

[English]

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: We're in an urban centre. What seems to have been happening is that individual community groups within the urban centre have been identified as speaking on behalf of the aboriginal community. They probably do speak on behalf of some, but the aboriginal community is not one entity. Like any community, it consists of many diverse groups.

    It seems as if funding is flowing through to groups that purport to speak on behalf of the aboriginal community—and I don't want that to stop—but when we try to access it, we can't because we are not working out of the aboriginal centre that we have in this city, because we're not part of the Aboriginal Human Resources Development Strategy, or because we're not an aboriginal agency ourselves. For example, we tried to get funds for career interns to come to work in our schools. They would have been funded through Aboriginal Human Resources Development Strategy dollars, but we were told we couldn't access those dollars. We tried to get funding through Human Resources Development Canada, but we seemed to have a difficult time accessing certain dollars there. To other dollars, we can gain access. We've ended up trying to find aboriginal programs through Canadian Heritage, but it has taken us a year and a half to get some of the money we want.

    So it's slow in some cases, and in others we are just seemingly not capable of having access.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: We will have to correct that and find solutions to help you. Since you are working to improve the well-being of young people in schools and to facilitate their adjustment, integration and education, it is important that they have the necessary resources to continue.

    Mr. Mustard, you spoke a great deal about infants, about children in the 0-to-6 age range. When I myself decided to have children, I was always told that the child's formative years were from 0 to age five. This is when they are given their main tools for functioning in life. It is therefore important to give them the most at that age. but you still have to have the necessary tools.

    In Quebec there is a daycare system that costs $5. This really helps mothers to return to, or enter, the job market and to further their education if necessary. Have you seen similar programs elsewhere? And what do you think of those programs?

º  (1640)  

[English]

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: In my candid comments, to help all children in Canada, I wish the Government of Quebec would take over Canada, because none of the other provinces have really reached the level of performance that Quebec has in this area. It is a tremendous credit to Quebec to have actually put in programs that reflect this.

    One of the things the current Government of Quebec is probably going to introduce is a program that gets at the problem of very significant behavioural problems in children. It's a program that affects the first nations community as well, that will begin at conception and carry through to age 5, and that will be linked into the other programs. I think the figure they're putting into that is something like $60 million.

    The really important part of this is that brain development in utero is hugely influenced by things that set up patterns of behaviour. Just to emphasize your point, the Quebec data has shown that about one-third of male children hitting the school system will show anti-social behaviour that is a bit disruptive of the classroom. One-third will improve, one-third will stay flat, and one-third will be at high risk of being in the juvenile delinquency world, will be very difficult to educate, and will drop out of the school system.

    So when you talk about drop-outs from the school system, yes, school systems can do something, but what the Quebec government is actually doing probably will be the most effective measure. So I'm impressed.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: Dropping out is not something that affects only Aboriginals. We are currently going through - I can speak for Quebec - a period where dropping out has become a very serious problem again. We know that education comes under provincial jurisdiction, but we are talking about it because it affects everyone. I imagine that there is even more of a drop-out problem among Aboriginals.

    Do you have some statistics to present to us on this issue or can you give us a picture of the situation?

    Mr. John Richards: On the whole, in Canada, about a third of Aboriginals have completed high school. Among the nonaboriginal population, two-thirds have completed high school. So the Aboriginal figure is half the nonaboriginal figure. That is the general picture. If we take aggregations, the worst results are on the reserves. For example, I have the figures for Manitoba more or less memorized.

    In Manitoba, about a quarter of those living on reserves have completed high school. That means that three-quarters have not completed high school. Among the Métis, who obviously do not live on reserves, a little less than half, that is, 40% to 45%, have completed high school. As I said earlier, among the nonaboriginal population, about two-thirds have completed high school.

    I have graphs here indicating the results in eight cities where there is a more substantial Aboriginal population, that is, in Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Regina, Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal. In these cities we can also see a clear difference between ordinary (nonpoor) neighbourhoods, where the poverty rate is not very high, and the ghettos, the poorest neighbourhoods, with respect to the level of education. This is predictable.

    Furthermore, if we distinguish between Aboriginals and nonaboriginals, we can sum up by saying that the level of education among Aboriginal people living in nonpoor neighbourhoods more or less corresponds to the level of education of nonaboriginals in poor neighbourhoods. Consequently, the poorest of the poor are Aboriginals living in poor neighbourhoods.

    If I may, I would like to add a few details about the other questions that you asked, which were good questions. What can be done at the federal level? In my view, there are some things that can be done, particularly pilot projects. This is a very valuable exercise. It may involve experiments in Winnipeg or various other cities to find the best practices.

    Allow me to share a personal anecdote with you. I was born in England and I am 100% English, but I grew up in Saskatoon. Now, my high school has become an inner-city school in a poor neighbourhood. Five or six years ago the teachers decided that they had to do something to help the Aboriginal population in the neighbourhood. This was a very valuable experiment. It is a school that is still in the system. They teach the same boring algebra as in any other school, but they do a lot of things, such as those described by Ms. Clarke here, to put emphasis on the Aboriginal culture, to attract the Elders or counsellors and to find numerous ways to try to prevent students from dropping out.

    Finally, I will reply to Fraser Mustard. I am not against what he said about the importance of the first three, four or five years, but there is a vicious circle involving the scourge of alcoholism that affects the Aboriginal population. How can this be broken? Where the young are affected by fetal alcohol syndrome, we cannot do much. We can do something, but obviously...

    Ms. Monique Guay:We can do something afterwards.

    Mr. John Richards: We have to start before, with the parents.

º  (1645)  

    Mme Monique Guay: Obviously, prevention is important. We have many wall-to-wall programs in the country, but this cannot work like that.

    M. John Richards: I would just like to finish, if I may. We spoke about what the federal government can do: pilot programs. But I come back to my criticism of the current policy. My criticism is aimed mainly at the shortcomings of the four Western provinces. It is the issue of welfare, which has not been broached up to now, and the issue of education from daycare through to Grade 12. If any areas are obviously within provincial jurisdiction in a federation such as ours, these are such areas. In my opinion, the provinces have failed in what they were supposed to be doing in this field and, in a way, they have used the division of powers, on the whole, to tell us that these problems were primarily federal problems. Consequently, they do not really want to tackle this issue - the reality of the current migration that is underway.

    If you put the question to a typical Canadian not involved in the issue, he will answer that Aboriginals are mainly a phenomenon of reserves, a rural phenomenon. We know very well that this is no longer the case.

[English]

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Mr. Tonks.

    Mr. Alan Tonks (York South--Weston, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chair.

    Thank you for your deputations this afternoon. The themes you have developed, if I can extrapolate them in very general terms, are very similar to what we have heard about treating all of the children's and family needs in a holistic way, with supports that would be community-based, would be inclusive, and would be developed in a policy framework adapted to the community's needs and not to a template that is the same right across the country with respect to first nations people.

    Time and time again, we have heard about the absolute relevance of the parents. We have heard the early childhood strategies in terms of the outputs that are desired. There are two things we haven't heard, Madam Chair, but we've now heard them for the first time. I'd like to tap the witnesses for a further response on work for welfare and, for want of a better term, the segregated school concept.

    I would like to know why your views are more applicable. I'm sorry if I'm perhaps misquoting or drawing the wrong inference, but the inference that I'm drawing is that those two strategies would work better for aboriginal peoples than they would for poor people in any other setting. I would like to know, first, if my inference is right. Secondly, if it is, why do you believe that? Professor Richards, perhaps you could respond to that first since you're the initiator of those concepts, and perhaps we could then allow both other witnesses to respond to that.

º  (1650)  

    Prof. John Richards: Separate school systems and workfare—or whatever other label we want to apply to the ideas here—are two controversial subjects, so the very first point I make is one of modesty. One should never be certain about these subjects. One should allow that one may be wrong. Having said that, though, there's no use for me to come here to make what is really an academic disposition on the qualifications to all of these subjects.

    Let me first tackle the matter of schooling. In what I have written, I have drawn the parallel to Quebec. Had we, in 1867, said that what we wanted was a single, Protestant, English-language school system, we never would have had a country. Quite clearly, religion mattered in the 19th century, so we had denominational schooling. Language also mattered—it still does matter—and we had schools based on the French and English language. Inevitably, these created tensions at the borders, and if we were here for a term as opposed to just an afternoon, we could discuss the history of schooling.

    But I put it to you that in Canada we never have had the French idea that, from Lille to Marseilles, there should be one school system teaching the same history of 18th-century Louis XIV at eleven o'clock on the morning of Tuesday, October 8. In Canada, we have pragmatically undertaken a lot of experiments.

    The next point I would put to you is that aboriginal Canadians—not as precisely as Quebeckers have, but in some sense analogously—have said their expectation of participation in Canada, whether they're living on reserves or whether they have in many ways integrated into mainstream industrial society and they're teachers, computer programmers, or whatever, is that they think they have some special claim to preserving matters culturally. Hence, I think they do have a valid claim that there should be some unique accommodation culturally.

    Beyond the matter of recognition and the parallels that might be drawn with Quebec, I draw your attention to a wonderful book called Immigration et diversité à l 'école, by Marie McAndrew, a woman who is fluently bilingual but who actually has a Scottish name. That book is a wonderful discussion about the problems in Montreal, the rest of Canada, the United States, England, and France, in integrating kids from cultures that are dramatically different, whether they're Maghrebin in France, Vietnamese immigrants coming to the west coast of the United States, Hondurans in my city of Vancouver, Jamaicans in Toronto, or Haitians. Wherever you have some very profound cultural differences, it is often useful to experiment with schools that stress the indigenous culture of the group. But albeit that there's no magic formula here, you want to have constant standards. You want the same algebra to be taught at whatever school we're talking about.

    I do not have any Jacobin sense that the ideal is one and only one school system. This is very much a pragmatic question, and I sure don't say I have all the answers. I think there are some interesting experiments in Winnipeg, in Saskatoon, in an academy I know of in Edmonton, and in an inner-city elementary school very close to where I live in East Vancouver. So that's the first subject.

    The second subject was welfare reform, which is an immensely controversial subject in all societies. As non-poor people, we're dealing with what is appropriate policy for the poor. In a sense, I think we in Canada are analogous to the Americans of forty years ago. The Americans in the 1960s went through a period of civil rights legislation and eliminating formal discrimination against blacks. In the last generation, we have gone through a somewhat analogous process of eliminating a lot of discriminatory practices against aboriginal people.

    On the other hand, the last twenty years, in the 1980s and the 1990s in the United States, I submit that men and women of goodwill—and I'm summarizing, because there are lots of differences—have come to the conclusion that a variety of restrictions on access to welfare matter. Rendering access more difficult for the employable and the young is important. In 1996, with great controversy, of course, they eliminated what had been one of their long-standing programs since the Great Depression—that being aid to families and dependent children—with the desire being to encourage particular states to experiment. There are bad examples of what has happened subsequently, but there are also a lot of good examples. To be blunt, we in Canada must not be parochial. We must learn from what is good in what has happened Wisconsin, in Minnesota, and in California, in terms of getting people off welfare and into work.

    As in the United States, ours is a problem dealing with minorities, because obviously this is part and parcel of the dilemmas and the difficulties of policy in inner cities for the black community and the Hispanic community. The analogy in western Canada—and you know this probably as well as, if not better than I do—is that 12% to 15% of the population in my province is aboriginal. Among the young population, the proportion is much higher. Very similar statistics apply in Ms. Clarke's province. In Alberta it's 7%, and in B.C. it's 6%.

    In western Canada, the significance of aboriginals is very substantial. If we go through another generation with the extent of welfare dependency that we have known in the past, it will be a social disaster. While there are serious problems in the cities, here I must emphasize that the on-reserve problems are again worse. In my province of Saskatchewan, something like two-thirds of the aboriginal on-reserve population depends on welfare. The nationwide proportion is over 40%, and it has scarcely budged as a function of the state of the business cycle.

º  (1655)  

    Mr. Alan Tonks: Thank you.

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: If I could first comment on the last point about work and welfare, this ties in a little bit with your question earlier about drop-out rates. In Manitoba recently, many programs have been put into place, in which adults are given funding to get training to allow them to then get jobs. As a result, we have found that many our aboriginal parents who dropped out of school themselves when they were 12, 13, and 14, are coming back into the training programs, some of which are in our own schools, at any age. Our parents can be 22 to 50, so we have parents and children of the same family both taking certain training in some of our high schools, but with different goals in mind. For the adults who felt they couldn't access more training to get back into the job market, that program has helped by giving them a place where they can do that and keep their own respect as well.

    The issue is going to be whether or not the jobs are there once they're trained. I think they're trying to focus the training on what they consider to be the up-and-coming needs in Winnipeg or in Manitoba, but who can ever predict that? I don't know, but I think we're always going to be training people for something that may come later. So I think that's a good program.

    I also want to again emphasize the fact that we need to have our youngsters under 12 understand the concept of work. At school, we try to have them see school as their job, in a sense. We show them that this is what a job is, that this is what having a job means: you get up at a certain time in the morning and you come in every day. These are just some of the basic concepts that we need to ingrain in our students in the inner city. Many of them are under 12 years of age, so that's something we do in parallel.

    On the piece about the schools and separate school systems, one of the reasons our division went the route of building aboriginal schools within our public system eleven years ago was that we respected the parents' right to choice. It doesn't matter what background parents have, we feel they should have the right to choose their children's system and school, within the public system. The aboriginal schools were put in place initially in partnership with the community in order to offer that option, although many of our other regular elementary schools do aboriginal programming as well. For example, Children of the Earth and Niji Mahkwa are intensive schools focused on culture and on language. What we've found is that the parents really appreciate having that choice within the system.

    Some of the people who work in those schools have actually voiced concerns about whether they are working in schools that could be seen as racist because they're segregated. Although we will allow non-aboriginal students to attend, the fact of the matter is that 100% of the children who do go are aboriginal. It's interesting that when you put something in place that you feel is needed, there can still be some criticism of it.

    So for us, that option within the system has worked quite well, I think.

»  (1700)  

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Dr. Fraser.

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: I'd like to comment slightly differently.

    I appreciate my colleagues' statements, but what they're talking about only applies to certain children who come into the school system. I have a daughter who teaches in the Ontario system, and I have two granddaughters who go to school in the school system that she's part of. From the day they entered the school system, I quizzed them about the children having difficulty in the classes. These are not aboriginals, these are children from other groups.

    These children proceeded to have difficulty as they progressed through the school system. The education system could really do very little to bring them up to the level one would have desired, but that was as a result of what had happened to them before they entered the school system. My daughter then took the special-ed classes in grade 8 and worked very hard to give some of these people skills. She didn't get very far.

    If you talk to any primary school teacher in any province about this subject, they will tell you that if the kids are not well prepared when the come into the school system, you have a problem. I'm sorry to say that the ministries of education don't pay any attention to it—and I'm not talking about the school boards, I'm talking about the ministries of education.

    Voices: Oh, oh!

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: They seem to be a bit brain-dead. I don't know where the hell they come from.

    But when you put that on the table and then raise your question, you have to be very careful about what this means. Our analysis of Canadian children is that 25% of the children in the 0-to-6 group are in difficulty when they come into the school system. That is a massive figure. It's over 250,000 children in Ontario. We know that data feeds into functional illiteracy, and we know it feeds into substantial behaviour problems. Quebec's ahead of the rest of us, and we know that countries that invest in the early-year period do better.

    If you're talking about a modern economy, if you don't have a high-quality population, how in the hell are you going to compete in the system? The first nations population is caught in this box even more because of the transition from their culture into our culture.

    John, I think you're right. We have to be flexible. We have to be pragmatic in finding systems that work. In metro Toronto, which I have some knowledge about for various reasons, the parenting centre structure is open to aboriginal families. It works hugely successfully with the immigrant population because they use this play-based learning centre, if I can use that language. When they bring in mothers when they're pregnant, the instruction in the centre is in English, but the people who run it have all the texts that they're using translated into the language of the people using the centre. How they do that is very clever.

    I couldn't find a cab driver to do my French translation for me, but I'll tell you what Mary Gordon did. She simply got into cabs in Toronto that were driven by educated immigrants. She'd select those with drivers from East Africa and South Asia, and she'd tell them to put the meter on and would get them to translate the books for her. That was how she translated the texts in order to be able to give them to the people in the classroom. It worked hugely successfully. Those children will go on into the integrated system, because the children are coming up within the school system.

    But you raise an interesting question. Could you do this with the aboriginal population in Toronto? We have not done a good job with them in Toronto, and I'm told we have the largest urban group in the country. That's a very fascinating question, because if you don't involve them early, you are going to be faced with the issues of segregation.

»  (1705)  

    Mr. Alan Tonks: I think Winnipeg's is the largest, but—

    Prof. John Richards: [Editor's Note: Inaudible]...information, I think she gets the first prize.

    Mr. Alan Tonks: If I may, Madam Chair, just—

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: Well, I just have to say the Toronto people will have to straighten them out.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): It's not a contest.

    Mr. Alan Tonks: I just have one targeted question for Ms. Clarke.

    With respect to Professor Richards' thesis or proposition of the segregated school, and even the adapted model that would need some work, are there any data and indicators with respect to the success of the students comparatively? It seems to me that they would be things that would bear some relevance to Professor Richards' model.

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: In our schools, we did a review of Children of the Earth High School after it had been open for five years. That review was done in 1996, and we have been doing ongoing reviews on an annual basis. It's a very small high school, but that's part of the attraction of it. We've found that the numbers of students who are graduating out of there is probably of a higher percentage for the size of school than the numbers coming out of other schools.

    But then we run into another problem. Even though the young adults are graduating, we're now having to try to build in transition programs from high school to university when they want to go to university, because this small setting seems to be very effective for aboriginal youths. They feel far more comfortable in a small high school, in an alternative kind of program, than they do in a huge, great big high school, where they often can get lost. To then transition from that setting to a huge university... What we're trying to do now is get funding to build high-school-to-university transition programs in which we do some university courses at the high school in order to give our students the idea that they can be successful, and then we make those links.

    So there are many steps in the process in order to create success, and that's what we're finding we have to do all the time.

    Mr. Alan Tonks: But admission standards and requirements probably factor into that, as opposed to actual intellectual competencies and so on. The universities or the colleges wouldn't compensate in terms of qualifications, applications, and so on.

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: The students I'm talking about are graduating with the regular high school graduation diploma—that means regular graduation is what I'm talking about—so they have all of the academic qualifications required to go to the University of Manitoba or the University of Winnipeg. The problem becomes their own feelings about what they face. We want to set them up to be successful, not to drop out after three months because of this great big... some regular students have problems with university too, you know.

    Prof. John Richards: If I might just add a very brief observation on that theme, at the university level in Saskatchewan, we have also undertaken experiments that are designed to try to ease this cultural problem. The Saskatchewan Indian Federated College at the University of Regina has been in existence for probably thirty years and has had some good success in these kinds of experiments. There are Indian programs within, for example, teacher training to try to increase the number of aboriginal teachers.

    Again, a lot of it has to do with trying to be culturally sensitive and to ease these problems of transition that Ms. Clarke is talking about.

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: I'd like to comment on that point, because I've visited those colleges and they are clever. The first nations people coming into them are comfortable in Saskatchewan. When I went up to Meadow Lake, a large number of the people running the systems up there had been through those colleges.

    In Manitoba, I've been to the University of Manitoba as a visiting professor on several occasions. It does take some first nations students, but it doesn't have a cultural base. The students there feel like second-class citizens, whereas the University of Regina and the University of Saskatchewan got around this with that Saskatchewan Indian Federated College. So I think there are some lessons there.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Ms. Guay.

[Translation]

    Ms. Monique Guay: Madam Chair, I just want to say that we obviously have to help out young people. We also have drop-out problems. In Quebec, young people have been told that most jobs now require a Secondary V (Grade 11) education and that if they dropped out at the Secondary II, III or IV levels, they would be going into the job market, but their employment would be very precarious. Often this is the time for a young person to work for a year and realize that ultimately it would be better to go back to school to get his high school diploma or even go to CEGEP. In Quebec, students attend CEGEP before university.

    The programs in any case fall under provincial jurisdiction. No matter how long we discuss this, the fact remains that each province decides on its own school system. However, there could be pilot projects at the university level. I do not think that this should be done at the high school level. I think that if an Aboriginal youth has obtained his high school diploma, he should be helped to make the transition, but this should be at either university or CEGEP. In Quebec we have programs in the regions where there are concentrations or Aboriginal people, where the process exists in the CEGEPs, that is, at the pre-university level, to help young people integrate, because the transition is difficult. Here again, we are the ones who decided to implement programs. I think that there may be possibilities for pilot programs, but these should really be at the university level. Otherwise, even if we keep a youth for three or four months at the high school level, he will arrive at university with a problem because the others will be ahead of him. It is as though he will be overprotected. I think that the process should really occur at the university level.

    Having said that, I would like to know whether the level of illiteracy is very high among Aboriginals. I did not have data on this. You may have information that I do not have.

    I hope that solutions will be found that fall within our ambit. We cannot implement wall-to-wall programs. It is impossible to be all-encompassing. You come with different visions. Furthermore, you represent different provinces. I think we have to be able to find ways and to trust those in the local setting. Since you are in that setting, you know what is needed. It is not worth trying to establish guidelines for the entire country because this does not work. Ultimately, we see the results.

»  (1710)  

[English]

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: On the issue of the literacy rates of our students, all of the assessments that we have done show that when you compare many of our inner-city schools to schools in other neighbourhoods, most often some of the inner-city schools come in lower than the schools in the other neighbourhoods. But I have to say to you that if we can put certain programming in place, if we can support parents with how they work with their own children at home in terms of helping them to understand the things that contribute to literacy in the children—sitting and reading with their child for ten minutes, or whatever those things are that help—we've found we can actually have an effect on increasing the standards in some of our schools.

    One thing that happened to us a few years ago was that one of our inner-city schools got the highest grade 3 math scores in the whole city of Winnipeg. It was on the front page of the paper, as if it was a shock that inner-city children could do so well. It was quite offensive when people started to comment that way, but what it shows is that with certain supports built in at home, at school, and in the neighbourhood, if those supports are sustained, I think we can make a difference. But they're not pilot programs with one-time, three-year funding, and then they disappear. People have to know they can rely on these kinds of approaches, but there's no question that we need those programs to help make gains.

[Translation]

    Mr. John Richards: You asked me for some statistics and I cannot give you anything very precise. What I have in front of me, which was taken from the 1996 census, is the percentage of Aboriginals who have not completed elementary school. It is a guide.

    Ms. Monique Guay: Yes, it's a good guide.

    Mr. John Richards: The on-reserve figure is 30%. The off-reserve figure is about half. So this indicates there is a problem.

    I do not want to go against you when you ask for programs in CEGEPs and for transfers between high school and post-secondary education. This is important. The best results for Aboriginals are Ontario and Quebec, God knows why. Perhaps it is because there is a long history and they are better integrated. The worst drop-out problems are in the West. In the West, I do not think it is feasible to focus on university. Of course, those who reach university have had the most success, but the crisis, if I can use the word "crisis", is at the high school level. When we see a situation in Winnipeg where more than half of the youths drop out, it is not feasible to focus on university. Specific programs are needed.

»  (1715)  

    Ms. Monique Guay: You have misunderstood me. I was saying that if the child reaches and successfully completes Secondary V (Grade 11), he should not be kept in high school. We have to help him to integrate and go as far as university level, if he wants to go to university, instead of keeping him in high school to give him three of four months of help to make the transition to university, if he has been successful. Do you understand? That is all I was saying.

    However, there is no doubt that you are quite right. We should not delude ourselves. If the path has not been set out for them and they do not even get through high school, this is where the focus should be. That is where we should try to help them. That's for sure.

[English]

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): I have a question or two.

    Dr. Mustard, you talked about three particular points: the expansion and integration of existing programs; early childhood development both after conception and post-natal; and preventive programming for parents.

    We heard about the migrancy rate. I'm from Winnipeg, so I know the situation in Winnipeg well. I know of the movement back and forth from and to the reserves. I know of the demands on the Winnipeg School Division, and I know of the demands on the social systems in the province of Manitoba. But what I'm really concerned about is the urban aboriginal child who moves back and forth from reserve to city and who falls under the jurisdiction of two different levels of government.

    I guess my question would be to all of you: What suggestions do you have in terms of the potential harmonization of policies and practices in order to allow the integration of programming; to do away with some of the jurisdictional barriers; and to deal with things in the holistic way that Alan Tonks talked about when the child moves back and forth or when the child moves from reserve to city sometimes as a result of a federal policy in another area?

    Perhaps a family moves in because of health issues. I always use the example of diabetes. With transportation only being available for three months, the family is forced to move into the city if the family member is going to receive the health care required. When that occurs, how do we get around some of the jurisdictional issues? Do you have any thoughts or any suggestions?

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: You've put me on the spot.

    I'm not an expert on the aboriginal community, although I interact with them and have visited them. We have produced some very distinguished first nations leaders in the country. For example, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the lady who is on the Provincial Court of Saskatchewan bench, is an impressive woman. I don't know whether she's meeting with you or not, but if she were here—I think she came from a reserve, if I correctly recall my discussions with her—she would tell you about the importance of the early years in setting capacity. She would be blunt about that. Your drop-out rate with the first nations people is hugely driven by that, she would tell you.

    If you brought in the provincial court judges who deal with dysfunctional families, family abuse, and the Children's Aid Society, they would tell you that when they have to handle those things, the children are put in limbo in their most critical years. They've said to me that we damage them permanently. That's a very interesting statement from people who live in the real world and are trying to handle these problems.

    I suspect that if the justice were present, she'd say you should try to develop a reciprocal kind of component so that, on the reserve site, you actually have centres and educational systems that can integrate with those in the urban centre. This is not too difficult a task to think about. I can think of the unit in Thunder Bay, which impressed me as an early childhood development and parenting centre run by first nations people who were as gifted and as good as you'll see in any jurisdiction. The tribal areas near that unit need to be in a reciprocal relationship with it. I have no idea what the school system in Thunder Bay is like, by the way, but you could see that you could create some integration.

    But I agree with the point you made about how the budgets that come in from the different jurisdictions tend to be set in silos that prevent the flexibility needed for people to create these things. What you need to do is figure out a way to let communities develop integration systems in order to try to test your question.

    Coming back to John's point, I think you'll find regions that will do a good point in tackling that. Don't try to make a blueprint at the moment, just try to set what the standards should be and what performances you want. You'll get those from these people, because I think there's a nucleus in the country that can move this forward and answer your question.

»  (1720)  

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you.

    Anybody else?

    Ms. Pauline Clarke: I would just say there are two facets to the migrancy. I can think of one area in which there's a possibility that we can work collaboratively. When children come to the city and go out of the city because of child welfare reasons—they're taken into care, they're coming for health reasons, or whatever it is—there's usually another agency working with them. In Manitoba, we're going to a whole different system of child welfare. Our first nations and Métis communities are going to take on that responsibility themselves.

    As of now, we're doing away with our child welfare system. In those settings, with new agencies coming in, there's a chance we can have people we can work with on the reserve and in the city. We can make connections that really are not there at the moment, to the detriment of the child.

    But there's another set of reasons for the movement, and I really don't know how we can address those reasons. Families themselves decide to move for all kinds of reasons. I can tell you that we have a family right now whose mother has gone to Kenora for work and whose child has come into the city to live with a grandmother. We have a child not knowing whether they're going back to the reserve, or back to Kenora if the mother gets work.

    Time and time again, the extended family becomes the caregiver in the city, but nobody is working with them. The children are coming on their own, and they have every right to do that, so I really don't know what we can do. When they get to the city, though, at least we can make sure we have a connection in place, that we have supports in place. We can then work out from there where it is that they came from and how can we work with them. But I think that's a very difficult situation to get a grasp on.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you.

    Professor Richards.

    Prof. John Richards: There's a lot of agreement here, but I admit I'm conservative on this theme. I think the theme that must be raised here is the matter of welfare dependency and how it often does lead to a very transient lifestyle. In general, my observations among social service agencies—and I've done quite a bit of talking to people across the country on this subject in the last decade—is that there has been an insufficient appreciation in Canada of how crucial it is to make a work attachment.

    I don't want to sound like an unqualified exponent of what they've done, because some of it has been harsh. My conclusion from the evidence, however, is that even if the income increases have been modest in the last decade in the American experience—and they have been modest; what has happened in many cases has been a decline in transfers from welfare, for example, with movement to earnings in low-wage occupations—this is worth doing. It brings some stability to families, and to the extent that we have an intergenerational problem, it has been good.

    I'm an economist. I'm reluctant to start going into tax rates and discussions of that nature, but I'm not going to entirely resist the temptation. One of the good, modest programs that we put in place in Saskatchewan in the last decade was a copy of what the Americans have done as a massive supplement to low-end wages.

    You can criticize it if you like that we're subsidizing work at 7-Eleven, but the rationale for this program—administratively, it is very well organized; we're spending in the order of $50 million on it annually—is that if a person, often a single mother, works part time, we supplement her earnings.

    Maybe it's better to do it the way you did in Quebec, with a $5 payment per day, but the idea here is to get money to parents so that they will obviously be using it in part for childcare. This is done electronically. You punch in via Touch-Tone telephone that you've worked for $600 at McDonald's for the last month, and if you have two children, you will get approximately a 30% supplement within two or three weeks.

    There are lots of discussions technically about tax-back rates and about whether this does or doesn't work. We haven't evaluated it sufficiently, so I can't tell you how many of the people are or are not aboriginal. But the rationale here is to make work pay, to be prepared to devote to work some of the money that might otherwise just be going to a straight welfare budget, to put that money into supplements.

    This is obviously oriented very much towards aboriginals when we have 60% of our caseload being aboriginal. It's addressing the matter of childcare to some extent, although I certainly do not want to portray that it does more than it actually does do.

    Administratively, it has been working very well. There has actually been a lot of cooperation with the unions and the telephone company that helped to set up the program and make it run smoothly. The American equivalent, which is the so-called Earned Income Tax Credit, is their single-largest anti-poverty program at this point. They spend the equivalent of $50 billion U.S. on their Earned Income Tax Credit. And the British have implemented a major program of a similar nature, the so-called Working Families Tax Credits, on which they spend the equivalent of $12 billion Canadian.

»  (1725)  

[Translation]

    In Quebec, you earn a certain credit. It was under Claude Ryan in the 1980s that you had APPORT. This was the first Canadian experiment of this kind.

    In my opinion, your program should be revamped and updated. It is an old program and it is now poorly organized in terms of what can be done. This is not a criticism. It is just an observation.

    Ms. Monique Guay: No, no. We have a program to get people off welfare. A single mother who wants to return to the job market at minimum wage will be given a tax credit or an increased salary to get her off welfare for a period of three years.

    Mr. John Richards: Here, it is universal.

[English]

We have no cut-off. The idea here is to keep people away from the welfare bureaucracy. One of the important aspects of creating family stability is ensuring that families start getting on their own financial feet independently of the welfare bureaucracy, whether it be on or off the reserve.

    Thank you.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you.

    Alan, do you have any further questions?

    Mr. Alan Tonks: No, thank you very much.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you.

    Monique? No?

    Is there anything else we haven't asked you that we should know or ask about?

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: I would like to actually express a difference of opinion from John. If you look at qualities of population by fundamental measurements in health, literacy, etc., and you plot those measurements for the whole population across what we call social classes, you'll find it's a gradient.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): It's a gradient?

    Dr. Fraser Mustard: It's a gradient. If you live in the mountains, you have a steep gradients and shallow gradients. John should know all about those, since he's at Simon Fraser, which is up a bloody gradient.

    Nevertheless, when you look at those gradients across countries, some countries have high-performance shallow gradients, and some countries have high-performance steeper gradients. In our total population, we have pretty good high performance, but we have a steeper gradient than other countries.

    I should tell you that if you measure verbal skills at age 5, you're actually doing an astute measurement of brain development that affects health and behaviour. When we plotted the data for Ontario—the so-called wealthiest province, although you may contradict that as well, John—we found that 36% of the children at the bottom end were not doing well, and 12% at the Margaret McCain end—she was my co-chair—were not doing well. The biggest number of children in difficulty were in the middle class. Welfare is not a key issue for them, so there's a deeper issue as well: the basic structural characteristics of our society. I think Quebec has taken a leap ahead of the rest of the country to move on that.

    When you're going at the first nations population, you must keep in mind—and I do not know what their gradient would be like, John, but I suspect it would be pretty steep—that you must take that into account, and you must concentrate on how to convert that. You will not do it in one year, though. It will take you one generation.

    The Acting Chair (Ms. Anita Neville): Thank you for coming to Ottawa. I apologize for pushing back the time of the meeting, but it was just not avoidable today.

    This discussion was very helpful and very useful, and we will send you a copy of the report when it is completed.

    The meeting is adjourned.