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 DES ENFANTS ET JEUNES À RISQUE DU COMITÉ PERMANENT DU DÉVELOPPEMENT DES RESSOURCES HUMAINES ET DE LA CONDITION DES PERSONNES HANDICAPÉES

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Wednesday, May 9, 2001

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[English]

The Chair (Mr. John Godfrey (Don Valley West, Lib.)): Welcome, everybody, to the weekly meeting of the Subcommittee on Children and Youth at Risk.

The context for this meeting is that this week in Ottawa there's a very special conference of communities with an interest in early childhood development. These communities are represented by researchers and community activists from across the country.

We thought it would be very useful to have a pre-conference session, which will focus on what we understand to be the research part of the early childhood development story. We're interested in knowing about the relationship between community and better outcomes for children. As I understand the purpose of the conference, which will take place tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday, it's the linkage between the research and the on-the-ground reality that is the subject matter of the conference. It also gives people from across the country a chance to meet each other.

I would also remind people that members of the committee are invited and encouraged to attend the conference. We will cover any expenses should members wish to do so. There is a breakfast on Friday morning where we'll be meeting with community representatives. So far I think there are only two of us who are going, but if others wish to change their minds or if they find themselves available on Friday for the conference, we'll certainly arrange for that.

Let me begin by welcoming all of you. This is really a nice pan-Canadian enterprise. We have representatives of the Community Education Network in the person of Sharon Park, research coordinator for southwestern Newfoundland; Margo Craig Garrison and Allen Zeesman from the applied research branch of the Department of Human Resources Development; Sarah Gallant from Prince Edward Island's Early Childhood Development Association; Eileen Grant, from First Call, the B.C. Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition; Linda Nosbush, from Saskatchewan Rivers School District; and Jodi Lee, of the Winnipeg School Division, the research coordinator of the Understanding the Early Years Project.

I don't know whether you've had a chance to establish a batting order. Have you decided among yourselves who's first, or do I get to pick? Seeing Mr. Zeesman's enthusiastic hand, I think it would be appropriate to have Allen Zeesman do a little scene-setting to give us a sense of what we're talking about this afternoon and give us a bit of a history and a framework of understanding.

Welcome.

[Translation]

Mr. Allen Zeesman (Acting Director General, Applied Research Branch, Department of Human Resources Development): Thank you very much.

I will only speak for a few minutes. Then we will introduce our guests from just about everywhere in Canada and continue the discussion with you.

[English]

Apparently these days we actually have these speaking notes we give to you. You can read them, so there's no point in me just kind of running through them. I'm going to give you a little bit of background and then we're going to go into the individual experiences of the communities.

About ten years ago we decided that in Canada we didn't have the type of information we needed about the development of children, so we began something called the national longitudinal survey of children and youth. We began collecting information on this survey in the middle 1990s and have produced a lot of work on that survey since then.

You've undoubtedly heard a lot about many of the results, whether you connect that with the actual name of the survey or not. They get a lot of coverage in the papers and the media and many of the results have become part of the Canadian conventional wisdom on child development.

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At one point in the development of this work, which is ongoing, we recognized that we had large community effects on children. Above and beyond the effects of income, parenting, school systems and some of the other things that are important, there were important community effects, but the only way we could find out exactly how those community effects operated was to actually go into communities to dig a lot deeper and to talk a lot more to communities about what was going on there.

That was our original motivation as researchers, but as we went into communities and began to collect the information about those communities, we realized that at the same time that we had this research objective we had created a real wealth of information about those communities, which we wanted to share with the communities and which they could use in terms of their own direct and immediate purposes. Those are basically the two sides of the understanding early years program: the research side and the community side. Both are focused on community issues.

The community component is what makes this thing really work. It's community-based, which means that the impetus to do the research comes from the community itself. To date, only communities with active coalitions of agencies and organizations working to improve the lives of children have been eligible to participate.

The research is coordinated by the community through the representative coalition and a local research coordinator supported by HRDC under this venture. Gathering the research involves having everybody in the community participate, including parents, children, and schools. Once the research is done, communities develop and put in place community knowledge action plans to address the problems identified by the research. It's a bottom-up kind of approach to research.

I'll tell you about three instruments we have developed, because they might be mentioned as people are talking to you about their own experience: the early development instrument, which is an outcome measure for children five years old; the national longitudinal survey of children and youth, done inside the community, which is bigger than the original survey because there's a whole series of questions about community participation that are added to it; and then a community mapping study, which breaks up the community up into its local neighbourhoods and looks at resource allocation and socio-economic status in different parts of those neighbourhoods and gives a more finely grained picture of the community for the community.

We started off with five communities, and here they are today. These five communities were the first ones to apply and to begin this process. These representatives are here to share some of their experiences to date with the understanding early years program.

I'll just pass it over to them. Sarah will start. Is that okay, Mr. Chair?

The Chair: Sure. We can be totally arbitrary about this.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Margo Craig Garrison is with me at HRDC.

The Chair: Okay. Why don't we arbitrarily follow the sun and start in the east, then, with Sarah Gallant from P.E.I.?

Ms. Sarah Gallant (Research Coordinator, Understanding the Early Years Project, Early Childhood Development Association of Prince Edward Island): Thank you very much.

I hope to share with you today my passion for the work of the Understanding the Early Years Project and the critical role it has for our province as a whole as well as for each of the neighbourhoods across Prince Edward Island.

On Prince Edward Island, the Early Childhood Development Association has provided a collective voice for early childhood educators and early childhood professionals in our province for over 25 years. Discussions about the importance of the early years were under way for several years in our province and the work of the national children's agenda gave us an opportunity to pull together the various sectors that had shown an interest in supporting the early years.

In P.E.I., we integrated consultations on the NCA with our provincial consultations for a P.E.I. healthy child development strategy. The Early Childhood Development Association, of which I am a part, played a major role in the development of that strategy on our province.

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Both the province and the ECDA had been watching North York's understanding the early years site, which was the first pilot site. It looked like a project that would fit nicely with the direction our province was taking regarding the early years. We really felt that the Understanding the Early Years Project would be unique on Prince Edward Island for a number of reasons. I think you'll find that each of our communities is unique in what it has to offer to this research.

On Prince Edward Island it was unique because of the policy directions our government was taking in the development of a healthy child development strategy. It was unique because of the emerging plans for a wonderful, publicly funded, community-based kindergarten system. It was timely, given that we were just beginning to implement that system. What would be very interesting to you folks, I hope, is the fact that our small size allowed us to take a provincial approach to this project. Our whole province is involved in the Understanding the Early Years Project, which I'll refer to as UEY, to save a mouthful.

The goals of the UEY Project complement our provincial approach. The research tools that the UEY Project uses will support the development of action plans across our province as the provincial strategy unfolds. Prince Edward Island provides a unique perspective for the UEY Project in that we are in a position to develop and document a province-wide program of research and action on early child development services and programs. We're already doing this with the UEY Project.

There are many organizations and many people from many sectors across P.E.I. involved in our provincial strategy. The HRDC-funded UEY Project is recognized as a very strong, comprehensive, and integral piece of our focus on the early years, both in the development of the strategy and now in the ongoing implementation of it.

Maps we are generating for the UEY Project are helping us to understand the geographic and socio-economic factors that influence healthy development in a community. Our high unemployment rates, the seasonal nature of employment on Prince Edward Island, the levels of education, and the lower income levels are all factors that are seen as challenges for development of children in our community.

However, preliminary results from the early development instrument and the NLSCY are suggesting that our children score well compared to children of the same age living elsewhere in Canada. In the face of this conflicting information, the UEY Project is helping us to understand what's really happening within that. In fact, it's very interesting to see that the NLSCY is revealing that P.E.I. as a whole exhibits high levels of social support and social capital, neighbourhoods that are stable, and people who are involved with one another.

We're finding that the cohesion of a community really has an impact on how are children are doing. This is important information because it helps us understand community influence on early development and, in particular, how our community overcomes less than favourable socio-economic predictors.

The UEY Project is providing the groundwork on which to build provincial priorities and action plans. What is exciting is that this is exactly what's happening. The Understanding the Early Years Project is an important and respected piece of work on P.E.I., with an integral role in contributing to a comprehensive overview of how our resources for early development are being used and how our communities are supporting early development. The research tools are providing current information and are being recognized as important measurement and evaluation tools as the strategy progresses. It's key to understanding what's happening across our province.

Results from the UEY initiative are informing our province at a number of levels, and I think this gets into what really works with the project. First, information from UEY is useful to specific action networks that are being mobilized across our province. Each network is focusing on a key area of early development, such as pregnancy, birth, and infancy, or childhood injury, or family literacy. Those are three of 13 areas.

The action networks reach out to community and regional representatives who are involved in actual program design and delivery in our province. Understanding the challenges faced in each of our communities and the factors that are helping us to overcome those challenges make up the groundwork on which sustainable action plans are built.

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For example, we can work with the Family Literacy Action Group, providing them with a comprehensive snapshot of how our children are doing in language and literacy measures. We can add to this by sharing with the network our maps on where language and literacy resources are located across the province. This, along with socio-economic profiles we have generated for our communities, can help the network generate an action plan that is truly grounded in evidence.

We've also begun work with our municipal governments, regional authorities and family resource centres to do the very same thing. There are many areas across our province, involving both organizations and people, that are tapping into what the Understanding the Early Years Project is producing. Similarly, information from the UEY Project may be compiled in a more global provincial way to inform and support the work of our new children's secretariat and children's working group.

Finally, the UEY tools are accessible to all communities and organizations so that we can really work at the community level to develop action plans and tie in all important areas of early development.

UEY is a very strong initiative and is viewed as integral because it provides research results that encourage a community to look at itself as a whole community, or in our case as a whole province, as well as neighbourhood by neighbourhood. By doing this, we can really set in place sustainable strategies that will improve the early development of our children.

We're a year and a half into the Understanding the Early Years Project, and I have two community initiatives that have already built on the work of UEY Project. The first is called “Building Child-Focused Communities”. This project will develop the skills and opportunities of our early childhood care and education professionals to capitalize on their interactions with parents and their location within communities. This is funded by the community mobilization program of the National Crime Prevention Centre. This work was developed by the Early Childhood Development Association specifically to build on the work of the Understanding the Early Years Project.

Also, the ECDA and the P.E.I. Federation of Agriculture have partnered to submit a proposal to HRDC to the social development partnerships project. This seasonal, rural early child development proposal again builds on the UEY work, using the results to help agricultural communities understand how their communities influence their children's development and to encourage them to develop community-based solutions for their children and families. It really helps equip and mobilize people in communities to work on and develop strategies for the children in their communities.

The whole province of Prince Edward Island is coming together to make the nurturing of and caring for children in the early years the highest of priorities. The tools and resources of the Understanding the Early Years Project are helping us to understand how our communities influence early development and helping us to develop the necessary plans to improve it.

In conclusion, the UEY Project is providing many levels of analysis and that's what I'd like you to take from what we're saying today. It's important on a national perspective that we understand how our children are doing across Canada and how the actions we take to improve early development are monitored, measured, and seen in communities. Second is the provincial level of analysis, which is providing key information on which Prince Edward Island can base its strategy and monitor its success.

Finally, and I believe most important, there is the work this project enables us to do with communities, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. This is especially important when we see the strong influences our communities have on development. That's what the research is telling us. Every neighbourhood and community in Canada is unique. The UEY Project works well at this level. It provides the tools for community groups to use to make decisions about their children as well as the tools to measure and monitor how we do at implementing those decisions. It has been particularly timely for Prince Edward Island and it has made and will make a difference for our children. I hope all communities in Canada get that same opportunity.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you very much. That's a terrific story. I would now like to move along to Winnipeg and Jodi Lee from the Winnipeg School Division, which is also involved in another UEY Project.

Welcome, Jodi.

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Ms. Jodi Lee (Research Coordinator, Understanding the Early Years Project, Winnipeg School Division): I don't think urban Winnipeg could be more different from P.E.I. The unique thing about Winnipeg is that it is so diverse. In Winnipeg we have those with incredibly high socio-economic status, those with very low socio-economic status, and pretty much everything in between. We also have a very high aboriginal population in the inner city, and that creates a particular challenge for us when we're trying to look at program development or research background with aboriginal children.

This project has given us the opportunity to look at what's going on for all of our children but particularly for our aboriginal children in Winnipeg. The exciting part is that it's a lot of information we already knew, but the different way of portraying it makes it accessible to a lot more people. In particular, the community mapping piece has been extremely popular in Winnipeg. In fact, I'm the exact opposite of Sarah because she does the whole province and I'm not even doing the whole city; I'm just doing a very small segment of it.

It has been very exciting for everybody else in Winnipeg to get access to that kind of information. The mapping component takes information we've known about Winnipeg and puts it into a picture so that people who don't necessarily have a statistics background can understand it right away. We see where the shading is and we can put some resources on top of there and see if we're making a match and what that match might be.

The rest of Winnipeg really wants to be able to get involved in the mapping study. It has been very exciting to have everybody clamouring for this type of information, because normally research is viewed as a little bit dry and boring. It's a lot of fun to be able to make these pictures.

The communities are also starting to understand the role research can play for them. These are communities that want to work with their children but don't know how to or where to turn for support. Now the UEY Project can give them statistics. It can give them numbers to support funding proposals or to continue funding, because it's grounded in research, which is really important to funders, as we know.

One of the things the community coalition in Winnipeg has really emphasized to me to tell you about is that it really appreciates the recognition that children don't grow up in a vacuum, that looking at community is extremely important, especially with some of the results that are starting to come out. We're seeing that the high SES areas don't necessarily have the highest outcomes and that the low SES areas don't necessarily have the lowest outcomes. We're seeing a change in the gradient, which is very important.

It also tells us that there's something else at work here, beyond income or education. They are still important and we need to continue to look at them, but we also need to go to the next level. UEY has enabled us to do that. We can go out into the community and talk to people about what's going on there that might be helping them.

Winnipeg has the unique situation of having a very organized provincial strategy. Healthy Child Manitoba is an intersectoral department in the provincial government that brings together all the different departments on a strategy for children and a strategy for youth. What we have partnered on, which is very exciting, is taking the UEY piece as the beginning. We're doing the baseline. We're going to find out where it is that we are right now and the province is then going to take that information to the community.

We're going to discuss it and figure out in which direction we want to go from there. It is a very coordinated approach, which is something UEY really wants to get at: how do we use resources in a better, more efficient way? This is a great partnership among the city, the province and the communities, all the different levels, to move this through all the channels.

We also have the absolute flip side of that. We have the provincial partnership, which is wonderful, but we also have neighbourhood resource networks in all our neighbourhoods. That is very exciting. They've started to try to put together some lists of available resources, but they don't really have the background for how to do that. It's a wonderful opportunity for the Winnipeg School Division, first, and the UEY site, second, to be able to go in there and say they can help out with that. It has been a very exciting time.

We're moving into the knowledge action strategy right now and, believe me, people in Winnipeg certainly have ideas on where they would like to go with this. It's really wonderful to see the involvement they'd like to have, so we're going to move into that piece now. It's very exciting.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

I should have mentioned that we have a member of Parliament from Winnipeg with us in the form of Anita Neville.

Ms. Jodi Lee: Yes, we do.

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The Chair: So you're old friends.

I wish I could just give all the members present their own project. I can do it to a degree. We have Roy Bailey here, and we of course have Linda Nosbush, who has come from the Saskatchewan Rivers School District. Is that in your area, Roy?

Mr. Roy Bailey (Souris—Moose Mountain, Canadian Alliance): No. We're a far distance apart.

The Chair: I see. I have the right province.

Mr. Roy Bailey: Right.

The Chair: With that, Linda, welcome. Tell us about your project.

Ms. Linda Nosbush (Representative, Understanding the Early Years Project, Saskatchewan Rivers School District): Mr. Chairperson, members of the committee, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is with a great deal of pleasure that I am here to talk to you today about a research project that I am proud of as a Canadian, as an academic, as a professional, and, finally, as a parent.

As I was travelling here, which was quite a distance to travel, I picked up a paper. Everything becomes UEY after a while. Michael M'Gonigle was saying to “think systems, not symptoms”, when he was talking about the water ills in our province and yours. Of course, Hertzman says “Think about learning societies that are capable of organizing themselves and acting on behalf of human development.”

This is what UEY is about. We need to recognize the symptoms, have the ability to think about them, and develop an action plan. All three of these are gifts of this national project. Our Saskatchewan action plan for children actually predated the national children's agenda, so today I can talk about what all three pieces are able to do for us.

This particular project, according to the intersectoral committee who sponsors me, brings the broader children's agenda to the average community member. It helps the citizen understand the development and the lifetime implications. Maybe most importantly, it engages all the families, not just the service providers, and it enables those families to be part of the process and part of the action that helps them build their future. It provides outcome measures with which to assess our success. We're given that five-year window—and I'd like to commend you for that opportunity, because so often we fund things for a short period of time—and this five-year window will enable us to do many things. In short, then, it has empowered our community and it has mobilized action in the first nations community, in the civic government and in all of the public and private sectors. It allows our community to build and transform itself.

The kind of data we're able to look at has helped our community a great deal. I'd like to describe Prince Albert for you in just a bit of detail. We are sometimes known as the city of bars, as we have eight penal institutions in Saskatchewan and the justice system is our biggest employer. We have three federal security institutions, a men's provincial institution and a women's provincial institution, and three youth facilities. We also have a farming crisis. As well, in our Prince Albert site we have an inner city need. We have an upper SES population, but we also have a huge rural population surrounding our area. We have a highly mobile population. In some of our schools, 95% of the children will shift at least once or twice in any given school year.

We found through the early development instrument that at least one-third of our children are in the lowest 10% of the national sample. Our statistics from the health board suggest that this will rise to two-thirds before we implement measures that reduce the risk. Our infant mortality rate runs at 11.4 per 1,000 live births, which is double the Canadian average.

In regard to our social index, we mapped our city. I have some maps to show you today. As you can see from the two very high risk areas I'm showing you, we looked at all of the facilities and all of the services available and then did our mapping. Over 50% of our city is in the highest risk category.

One particular area is our far west flat. We have a community organizational group that has developed a whole series of integrated services and is very active in writing its future. However, that area is distant from all services in our community. Another area is our midtown area, which is also extremely high risk. Nineteen of the 24 children who go to school in this area were in the lowest 10% of the nation.

What we have to seek to do, then, as we write our future—and here are some stats from an international study—is to have a gradient that is nearly flat so that there's less difference between high-risk and low-risk populations. Canada is shown here as the yellow gradient; we're somewhere midway between. So we have to look at ways we can level the playing field, we can change the odds rather than beating the odds.

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Our situation in Prince Albert is fraught with addictions difficulties. In some of our schools we have third- and fourth-generation fetal alcohol syndrome. Some of the numbers rise as high as 80% of the school population. We have a large number of gambling institutions in our city, and many of our citizens avail themselves of these. Each of these factors will have a huge effect on the health and well-being of families and children in our community.

Not to paint a bleak picture, however, we also have a community that cares and shares, and knows that we are far better together than we are alone. We have a 30-year track record of working together.

I'm going to discuss briefly our plans for the federal moneys that are coming down in the name of early childhood.

I'm pleased to say that we have a department of early childhood, newly formed and intersectoral. All babies born from the fall onward will be screened to determine the challenges they face. Those children with the highest needs, about 500 families, will receive home-visiting programs. They will also receive help from people in alcohol and drug abuse and mental health to prevent our more serious difficulty—fetal alcohol syndrome and alcohol-related birth defects. There will be 195 new child care spaces, and early learning programs, called pre-kindergarten in Saskatchewan, will be expanded. There will also be an extensive program to support parents around parenting, literacy, nutrition, and other client-identified issues.

Our community has two of these highly identified neighbourhoods. We're working in consultation with the province to use the UEY data to help people interpret what it is that happens.

So we looked at reducing that gradient to level the playing field. We also have to look at reducing the latent effects of some serious and harmful issues that arise in early childhood, like alcohol and drug abuse. We also have to look at reducing the huge pathway effects. Here, I'd like to tell you a story.

When I visited our Pine Grove Correctional Centre for women, which has won many national awards for its parenting and literacy programs, I was told that if you had at least a grade 11 education and were dry—that is, not addicted to either alcohol or drugs—the chances of you landing in this institution would be nil. There is one person out of the 700 and some that will walk through those doors this year who does not have these problems—she has a gambling addiction.

The cumulative effects can be very great. Here's another story.

A few weeks ago I was visiting a maternity unit at the hospital, where I saw a two-week-old boy who had been born to a 15-year-old mother—her third pregnancy, first live birth. This baby was addicted to alcohol and drugs. He will need to be on phenobarbital for the first month of his life, and then he will be taken into care and moved through a series of foster care institutions. The average number of foster cares for a woman in jail is eight foster homes over a lifetime. For this young boy, it will increase markedly. So sometimes some effects have a lifelong, cumulative effect on what happens.

We know also that there are biological ways in which the environment can play in the development mechanism. There is a wide range of stimuli needed to help children develop, and if these are not provided during crucial times, the brain literally is wired in a very different fashion. And children react rapidly, rather than reflectively, which means they're not set up to learn; they're set up to flee or to fight.

Biologically, those critical periods will ensure that language, problem solving, and emotional issues will be developed and dealt with in a positive manner. Many of our children are not facing the environments that would stimulate this kind of growth prior to their entry to school. Those critical periods by and large occur during the pre-school years, those very critical early childhood years.

So when Hertzman and Keating talk about what we need to do as an early childhood plan, it's absolutely amazing to see that your committee has had the foresight and wisdom to do all of the things he suggests.

It should be comprehensive. There should be early childhood education, child care, parenting, and caregiving support. Your initiatives in all of those areas are to be commended. It should be universally accessible and available to all children. We shouldn't target specific populations. It should be integrated. There has to be a seamless weave of services, and those services have to wrap around and support our children.

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It should be community-driven, where we get to write our own action plans based on our own culturally sensitive needs. It should provide quality standards, and there should be accountability for what it is we're able to do so that we can measure our success and allocate the resources.

Now, since my first life was as a literature person, I need to close with a selection from literature, by Thomas Kinkade, who's the painter of light. I'd like to suggest that you do paint the days of this country in very bright colours. He states:

You may not be skilled with paints and brushes, but you are still involved in creating an intricate, beautifully crafted work of art: your life. With every moment that you experience, every choice you make, you are adding brush strokes to the canvas. More important, you are determining what kind of message your artwork will convey to the world.

It's the highest calling any of us have in life: making the world a little brighter because of the way we paint our days and hours and months and years... It's no secret that darkness is in plentiful supply in our world today...[but it is better] to light a candle rather than curse the darkness.

The influence a work of art can have is limited by its physical existence. ... But a human life is a work of art that can reach eternity. Each life has the ability to touch other lives, which in turn touches yet more lives. And so, person by person, generation by generation, a world and a future are shaped.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child adopted 54 principles that have been ratified by 191 of 193 countries. Caroline Castle adopted this particular set of principles, and I'd like to read one of her recommendations. She suggests we understand that all children are precious. She asks us to pick them up if they fall down, and if they are lost, to hold their hand. We have to give them things they need to make them happy and strong, and always do our best for them whenever they are in our care.

I'd like to commend you then, in closing, for creating the light that the Understanding the Early Years Project has provided for this nation—your direction will illuminate our path for years to come—and for doing the best for our nation's young by encouraging the dissemination of a coherent concept framework for understanding the early years. It invites all of us to join the conversation and to act from the insights we gain from this extended conversation.

The Chair: Thank you for that very compelling portrait of Prince Albert.

I also want to apologize to Sharon—I do know that Newfoundland is the easternmost part of the country. What I had not quite realized is.... Newfoundland was dropped off the sheet I had in front of me. We will return to you.

I think what we will do before we go back to the east coast, in the interest of some sort of consistency, is go to British Columbia and Eileen Grant, who is with First Call: BC. Again, we have a member of Parliament from your region in the form of Libby Davies.

Welcome, Eileen. Tell us how things are going with you.

Ms. Eileen Grant (Research Coordinator, First Call: BC Child and Youth Advocacy Coalition): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, and ladies and gentlemen.

I'm very pleased to be here today to talk to you about the Understanding the Early Years Project, and to share with you some of the things that are taking place in the Fraser North area of the lower mainland of B.C.

The Fraser North area includes the cities of Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, and the villages of Anmore and Belcarra. It's a suburban area that is part of the Greater Vancouver Regional District. It sits on the north shore of the Fraser River and is often referred to locally as the “tri-cities”.

The Fraser North area covers the same geographic territory as our School District 43, so although we have five different civic governments, in many ways this community behaves as though it were one community.

The Fraser North area is home to approximately 190,000 people, and slightly more than 10%, or just over 19,000, of that population are children from the ages of zero to six.

The main local sponsors for our project in the Fraser North area are our school district and the Fraser North Council for Children and Youth. This is a council that has existed in our community for over ten years, working on issues for children and youth in the community.

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We're very fortunate to have a wonderful school district, and we have very bright, involved, knowledgeable, and supportive teachers who have been working with us on the project, and a very supportive, forward-thinking administration. As well, our school board has been very supportive and helpful at every turn in getting the Understanding the Early Years Project under way and keeping it in place in the community.

The Fraser North Council for Children and Youth is a broad-based, grassroots type of community table that envisions a community where all of our children have the supports they need—physical, social, emotional, and intellectual—so that they can reach their full potential and be able to arrive at school ready to take advantage of the learning opportunities that are presented to them.

This vision statement of the Fraser North Council was written well before the Understanding the Early Years Project came to our community, but it echoes perfectly the five domains we used in the early years project to structure the research. Those five domains are physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication and general knowledge.

As one of the five pilot Understanding the Early Years sites, this innovative partnership between the Government of Canada and our local community has built on a desire that has existed in our community to make a difference for children in the early years. The project has generated a great deal of interest, both locally and throughout the province.

As this is the first UEY Project in British Columbia, I have been inundated with telephone calls from other communities that want to know about what we're doing and how we're accomplishing it, and it's been very important in our local community in terms of raising the profile of the work that has been and continues to be done for children and youth. It has added legitimacy to our community work, and the groups that are working on behalf of children and families have felt positive benefits from the support both in terms of an understanding of the type of work that we're doing, and the very critical strategic tools that the project has given us to work with.

As a matter of fact, we have been so overwhelmed by interest in the project, and locally, by people who want to come together and actually make a difference with particular initiatives in our community, that we are struggling with our own success at the moment. My telephone and e-mail are constantly inundated with requests for information and requests to come together and work on behalf of children in our community.

Through the work of the Understanding the Early Years Project we have been able to access very specific information about the school-readiness of the children in our community. This gives us an understanding in detail about where our children are.

As Jodi mentioned before, a lot of the information that's coming out of the work we've been doing does support what communities already knew or suspected they knew, but it gives us very specific data that we can show to demonstrate what the conditions are for children in our community and help us with planning tools to bring forward initiatives that will make a difference.

The Understanding the Early Years Project has a very strong presence and a very high visibility in our community. This project has also had a strong mobilizing effect, so in addition to the people who you would traditionally expect to be working for children and youth, the project has brought a great deal of interest and support from other non-traditional sectors of the community.

As well, it's giving us an opportunity to work proactively with the provincial level. There has been a lot of support from the provincial intersectoral groups, and we have a very stimulated and energized steering committee and community coalition that are working proactively to take the information we get back from the research and put it into practice in our community.

One of the priorities is to share that information and the learning we have made in our community with other communities to help us all move forward as we work for children.

The UEY Project provides all of the stakeholders in our community with important information about the community factors that are influencing our children's development, and it shows the interrelationship between what is taking place in our community and the levels of readiness for school that we have.

The UEY Project is also enhancing our community capacity to use this data to monitor child development and create effective community-based responses.

The first work of the project, the community-based research, is giving us a clear, and, as Jodi mentioned, very graphic look at how our children are developing. It's also giving us a baseline against which to measure the effectiveness of the initiatives we're putting in place at the community level.

• 1605

Our findings to date in Coquitlam have been very encouraging. They show that on the whole our children are thriving. However, because the data can be detailed at a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood level, we are able to get beyond the blending-to-average effect you often get with research data, where your top end and your bottom end come together and everybody in the middle of a community, especially a suburban community like ours, looks as if they're doing just fine, thank you.

This very detailed information gives us specific tools to work in neighbourhoods on whatever the particular needs in the neighbourhoods are and to work with specific groups in the community whose expertise in that area can meet whatever our requirements are in one of the five domains. If we have challenges in the physical area, for example, we may need to be talking to our parks and recreation department. It's a very cooperative situation when all these people are sitting down at the table and bringing their expertise to work together on the issue.

The experiences of our community highlights the importance of a coordinated approach that involves all sectors of the community and the intersectoral groups within the province and across the country. It's making a big difference for our community.

We have a number of strengths and challenges I'd just like to go over very briefly. Again, because this is a high-profile vehicle, it brings important information to the community and it enhances our ability to make a difference. What's particularly important is that this is not a top-down solution, but it's a grassroots community solution, so the buy-in is at the community level. The energy to actually make a difference by going out into the community and working on projects that will meet the needs we've identified is great.

This work has very much supported the work people are doing and has identified for us things we have to bring to the community as areas in which to work. It also validates the work of local groups in the community who have been working for children and youth and broadens our recognition of the importance of the early years. It's been able to bring to our community important information about brain sculpting and about the critical windows we have in the early years. The public visibility of the project makes people in the community sit back and pay attention, where before, although some of this information was being presented, it wasn't always being felt in the departments we needed to take a look at.

We've had a number of challenges that don't come from the structuring of the project itself, which has worked very well for us. They come from the fact that as a community group so many of us are working off the sides of our desks that we are reaching the critical burnout threshold with this mode of doing business.

We think that a community table is really important and that the learning you have as a community and the experience you have with your children in your community are critical. In these days of limited resources, when you have a community table and everybody can bring to that table what they can contribute on behalf of children and youth, tremendous things can happen. But we have no infrastructure in our community to support this kind of table, nor do we have the staffing, so this is making it very much of a challenge to continue moving ahead.

We are lucky to have the Understanding the Early Years Project in place right now, and the work we're going to be moving into with the knowledge action plan is critical. For sustainability in our community, having some structure in place for this community table is critical.

As well, we have run into problems at the community level with obtaining a charitable tax number for the group that is coordinating the activities of the community planning table. Unfortunately, when you work as a partnership, you are ineligible for a charitable tax number, and because most of the work we're doing is proactive and not remedial, this also makes it more difficult to prove your case when it comes to getting a charitable tax number.

So at the moment funding is a big issue for us, and we increasingly find that groups who would have normally given us funding are looking for recipients with a charitable tax number.

We are at a point in the community where the willingness is there and these fabulous tools we're getting from the Understanding the Early Years Project have generated all kinds of interest and wonderful partnerships. However, it is going to be a challenge to keep this community planning table working at the level it could work at.

On the whole the project has been extremely positive for our community. It's something that we're working on in Coquitlam, in the other cities, and across the province. We're hoping to make a big difference in the lives of our children, and this has been a wonderful opportunity to move ahead.

Thank you.

• 1610

The Chair: Thank you.

I only regret that Libby Davies is not your actual MP, because she might be able to help with the tax number. She's not that far away. Maybe she has notions.

Ms. Eileen Grant: We've been working very closely.

We've been working very proactively with the groups that do work in Ms. Davies' constituency, and we share information with them on a regular basis with the windows of opportunity.

The Chair: Super.

Finally, we revert...we skip right back to the Atlantic Ocean and Sharon Park. Tell us about your community.

Ms. Sharon Park (Research Coordinator, Understanding the Early Years Project, Community Education Network): Thank you.

Newfoundland is the poorest province in the country. The southwestern region of the province, where the UEY initiative is concentrated, has some of the poorer communities within the province. It has a higher percentage of families with low levels of education and low family income. It has a higher percentage of both mothers and fathers who don't work outside of the home.

Despite these factors, parents have very sound ideas about what they want for their children and are very involved in community initiatives. Some of the early findings coming out of the UEY initiative are telling us that our children are doing well on their readiness to learn and that our parents have some very exemplary parenting skills.

In southwestern Newfoundland, Understanding the Early Years is being sponsored by the Community Education Network. The Community Education Network is an established coalition founded in 1991. It is an umbrella organization that has facilitated partnerships among social services, economic development, education, and funding agencies.

The primary activity of these partnerships has been one of brokering designed to facilitate learning programs and processes aimed at community capacity building. The orientation of these learning programs and processes has been one of community education, a process for individual and community learning and involvement at all ages. The use of community learning, resources, and research can bring about community change and the recognition that people can learn and work for each other on a community level to create a better world for our children.

The Community Education Network has over 20 partners. It is committed to the development of a comprehensive strategy for long-term development for communities within this region. The Community Education Network and its partners have a solid track record for implementing prevention and early intervention programs and community capacity-building initiatives.

The Community Education Network has identified six priority areas, the first of which is prevention and early intervention strategies. Recognizing that early intervention is crucial and that what happens in the first few years of life can have a lifelong impact on health, mental ability, and coping skills, the Community Education Network has been committed to the implementation of prevention and early intervention strategies.

As a founding partner, the Community Education Network continues to sit on the working group of the Community Action Committee, which is the facilitator for family resource programs and is the CAPC initiative in southwestern Newfoundland.

One of the things that in particular is becoming very evident in Newfoundland is that we have been very program focused. We need to put resources in place for all our communities within this particularly rural, isolated area. With the information coming from the Understanding the Early Years Project, we know that we need to continue to do this process, but we also know that accessibility for our particularly rural area is a major thing we need to work on in the future.

Understanding the Early Years Project combines information about families with information about families and children and the communities in which they live. In order to understand the relationship between children's outcomes and the environments in which they are raised, southwestern Newfoundland has been very active in the last ten years in promoting early childhood issues. Because of some of the outcomes coming from Understanding the Early Years, we've found that what we're doing is really working. It is validating what this committee had already started to do.

• 1615

One of the things that's very evident in Newfoundland, as I stated earlier, is the high unemployment and the high illiteracy rate. One of the things we found is that parents within these communities want to become involved. Because we have made them partners in the Community Education Network, these communities are becoming very mobilized in knowing what they want.

Because southwestern Newfoundland is very rural and very isolated, we know we will never be able to bring all of the programs necessary to facilitate healthy child development to every community in our district. But we do realize that now we have to focus on accessibility; we have to make quality, affordable child care have a very major impact on what we do in the future. As well, we have to look at transportation issues for families who cannot afford to access programs we already have in place.

In concluding, the Understanding the Early Years Project is providing a very sound base for the work already ongoing in southwestern Newfoundland. It's validating particular community partners—like local HRDC groups, RCMP, justice, health, and social service agencies—telling them that what we've been doing for the last ten years is really working. It gives us some very concrete data we can now take to our provincial and municipal bodies to further address the issues facing children in southwestern Newfoundland.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

We have gone on longer than we normally would have with witnesses, but we've had a really extraordinary cross-Canada tour. I want to say only two things, and then Allen Zeesman wishes to add....

First, you will note that we had nothing from Ontario, because the flagship project was the one from North York. It's in a different sort of category, because this really represents the second wave.

[Translation]

Secondly, it is clear that we have not had any representation from Quebec. That is because there is a third wave, if I can call it that, which is set out in the documentation. But the Montreal project is not yet far enough advanced for us to be able to go into any great detail. I would truly like to emphasize the fact that we have not neglected Quebec. The simple truth is that those communities are more or less at the same level.

[English]

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Actually, I was going to point out today that in the group we have with us the representatives of the seven newly subscribed communities: Abbotsford, B.C.....

The Chair: Would you please wave as we....

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Abbotsford, B.C.,....

The Chair: There we are.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Saskatoon; South Eastman, Manitoba; Niagara Falls; Mississauga Dixie-Bloor, Ontario; Montreal; and Hampton, N.B.

The Chair: We have

[Translation]

too much to choose from,

[English]

I would say. We're delighted to welcome all of you.

[Translation]

Welcome.

[English]

Are you here for the big conference? Everyone's kind of nodding. We're delighted you're here. I hope this kind of sharing will be one of the side benefits of the conference itself, so welcome. And we can get creative if we need to rope you into this.

The members have been very patient. We'll move right away to Roy Bailey.

Mr. Roy Bailey: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Because of the number of guests with us, I will very quickly go on with a few comments, and then maybe throw a question out that we may get to later. They can think about the question.

First of all, Mr. Chairman, as I was telling Sarah from Prince Edward Island, I want to inform you that I did win a trip to Prince Edward Island. They pulled my name out of a hat the other night. One of your colleagues, Roy Cullen, thought they were calling him, but he said no, he was no relation.

I have a few quick comments on each one. You can tell by looking at me I've been around a lot longer than you people have, in the field of education in particular. I happened to be in administration when kindergarten was first brought into rural Saskatchewan, so that's a few years ago. We won't talk about that.

It's exciting for me to hear what is going on, because for most of my career these facilities were not available. We simply had to rely on the goodwill of the community and most often on volunteers. So to Sarah I would say I wish to God my constituency would shrink down to the size of your whole province. It would help me a great deal, and not only in education, but also in my role as an MP. There are thirteen different school divisions in my constituency. This makes my job in representation a little more difficult.

• 1620

Jodi Lee, I was pleased to hear you mention the situation in Winnipeg. It's not unlike Linda's situation in many regards in Prince Albert, or indeed in the city of Regina, 26 miles from my constituency. We have a tremendous responsibility there. I hope this committee in its deliberations here will take a close look and report back to us somehow, particularly on how best to deal with aboriginal issues.

Linda, you described it beautifully. I've been to Prince Albert many times. There's a story I could tell you, but I won't tell it right now. It's a story of growing up, and through it I would draw an analogy with your situation.

Linda talked about the gambling addiction, Mr. Chairman. Well, I have about 18,000 gambling-addicted people in my constituency. They're called farmers, and they're out there right now, gambling the last bit of money they have away. Gambling addiction is not new to me, particularly in a rural constituency.

Eileen Grant, that was a terrific presentation on a very concentrated part of British Columbia. If I have it correctly, it's grassroots and you're talking about a critical burnout. I can understand and appreciate that from work I have done.

You don't have to answer this question now, but is the need for this type of program growing? I assume the answer is yes. But why is it growing at such a rate? I'll leave it at this.

Finally, to Sharon, most of our history has it mixed up. I'm glad Canada joined Newfoundland in 1949. A friend of mine who was stationed in the RCMP at Rosetown was from your province, and he would visit me frequently. I also served as a justice of the peace at the time, and he'd always remember to tell me how, in 1949, Canada joined Newfoundland.

You talked about poverty. I like to tell people that I grew up in an area so poor we didn't even have mice, and it's almost true. I was a child in the era in Saskatchewan when there was great poverty. Hopefully I'll get back to you, because I want to talk more about how you're dealing with the outlying areas. That's key to my constituency and key to Canada, because despite the fact that we have these huge concentrations, we do have these people in outlying areas who are sometimes forgotten.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Hopefully I'll get back to further questions.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Bailey, for that

[Translation]

overview.

Ms. Guay.

Ms. Monique Guay (Laurentians, BQ): Thank you Mr. Chairman.

I don't think that you forgot Quebec; I think that it is Quebec that forgot the committee. No, no. It's a joke.

Some voices: No, I...

Ms. Monique Guay: I wanted to welcome everyone and tell them that I am very pleased to see them, and particularly to hear them.

The work you are doing in the communities is extremely important for everyone. I think that on that point, at least, we can agree. Even the opposition parties agree on that, and you know full well that—I am speaking in particular for Quebec—early childhood in Quebec is very, very important. We are doing a great deal of work on prevention, child rearing, work with adolescents, prevention in terms of pregnancies for very young adolescents, and I think that our success rate back home is rather good. I would like to see that happen elsewhere in Canada.

• 1625

I have a question about Aboriginal peoples. Has there been work done with Aboriginal groups? I know that it may often be much more difficult in many instances to reach these people. Has there been work done to reach young people? We discuss this a great deal in committee. I know that there are problems. In our Aboriginal communities, these problems are much worse than in other communities. What actions have been taken in the various provinces where there are much larger Aboriginal groups? Are there points of view or have there been studies done, into approaches for dealing with these communities?

[English]

The Chair: I would assume perhaps Jodi Lee or Linda Nosbush may have something specific to say, although it's open to all.

Ms. Linda Nosbush: I can start.

We are actively engaging our aboriginal community. We are presenting and having them work with us through their urban services, as well as through the reserve communities. We've been asked by HRDC if we'd like to separate out our aboriginal data.

I went to the aboriginal community and they wholeheartedly supported us in analysing the data in two separate ways: as an aggregate, and with the aboriginal and other communities separate, so we can build an action plan—not for them, but with them.

In our meetings with people from HRDC last week, we had elders and chiefs join us. We're actively involved with both the first nations and Métis communities. They are sharing all of their data liberally with us. We're working on some joint projects, both federal and provincial, together. We're sure we can learn to walk in one another's worlds in a very effective way, and sure that our dialogue will enrich both of us.

The Chair: Jodi Lee.

Ms. Jodi Lee: One of our challenges is the very urban nature of much of our aboriginal population. So not only are they dealing with the challenges associated with being from a different cultural group, but they're also in the inner city.

Our schools have been very responsive to this. We have alternative schools with a really strong cultural base, looking at ways to try to support these young children in their culture.

You're right, it's very hard to access them. This is one of the things our community coalition is very much trying to make a focus of in its work. We have an agency in Winnipeg called the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre. It's in an old CN station. It's a beautiful building housing all the different agencies for aboriginal people, from prenatal all the way through to elder services—a whole lifespan approach. They are on our committee; we do know what's going on with them. We're trying to work with them to figure out how to take all the pieces of UEY and make them work for the aboriginal community—work for all the communities.

There are going to be different pockets in Winnipeg where people are going to understand at different levels. If we're dealing with the aboriginal community, we have to be very cognizant of making sure we're working with them so that they can understand what's going on.

[Translation]

Ms. Monique Guay: Thank you for your replies.

To be sure, my point of view and that of many of my colleagues is that it is always by getting closer to the grass roots, the existing associations or federations, that we succeed in achieving our objectives. I represent a district which has 37 municipalities, and each municipality provides services to young people. There are youth homes, and prevention work is done through these homes, and there are all kinds of bodies that do prevention work with young women, future mothers. We have all of that. If we succeed in working together, we can obtain results in the end. I know that in Quebec, it works. I hope that it will work everywhere.

My final question is this: How are you going to compile all these data? How we will be able to access it to find out what works, what doesn't work, what the results are from this whole study and when it will become available?

[English]

The Chair: Allen Zeesman.

[Translation]

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Thank you Mr. Chairman.

I want to say two things. First of all, at HRDC we are currently looking into the possibility of adding Aboriginal communities directly to the Understanding the Early Years initiative, and we are optimistic about the possibility of seeing something happen. Naturally, we do not know that anything will. That is the first thing, because it is a priority, for all the reasons that you mentioned.

• 1630

The second thing is research. We have several phases. The first phase will be access to community research for communities generally, and especially the Canadian public.

Then, we have a form of classification of the communities to give those that do not have a project some idea of how they are similar to others. Everyone is different, but there are also similarities. So there will be the possibility of seeing these similarities.

Thirdly, we have a rather detailed research project that compares communities. This will generate a new range of data. We will begin with the first five communities very soon. Here again, we will use our existing mechanisms to disseminate the results. Conferences will be held and we have our Web site, our publications, etc.

The Chair: Thank you Mr. Zeesman and thank you Madam Guay.

[English]

I think we might go over to this side now.

[Translation]

Madam St-Jacques, it's your turn.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques (Shefford, Lib.): Thank you Mr. Chairman.

I too would like to thank you for being here today and to congratulate you on the excellent work you are doing in the communities.

Ms. Grant was speaking just a while ago about funding. I think that money is the sinews of war, but have you confronted other problems by implementing this program? Have you encountered other sorts of difficulties besides the money problem? We know that money often helps, but there are surely other factors that played a role in creating problems when the program was being established.

[English]

Ms. Eileen Grant: Actually, we found that the community response has been excellent and the willingness to work together is unprecedented. We have almost no difficulties with combining the groups to work together. We've just implemented a couple of very successful projects where health is involved and education is involved. Community groups, groups that are spokespeople for inclusion, special needs, they've all come to the table. They've all contributed their expertise. What's very important is that we have community-based groups at the table who often come to these projects from a different perspective from groups that are in ministries. There has been a really good working relationship.

There are very few problems outside of the fact that it is very difficult to find someone to coordinate the initiatives. That's where our biggest challenges are right now. I get phone calls almost weekly with great new ideas for implementation for children. We're very lucky with the groups we have in our community. They're all, from every single walk that we have, willing to come to the table, including our business community and people in the justice field and different sorts of community groups. So we haven't had too many other challenges in that area.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Does somebody else have something to add?

Ms. Linda Nosbush: We found that over our 30-year track record of working together, we know that we walk into it knowing that we're going to come out of it differently. It's always surprising how different we are as we go through that process. And when you do group problem solving and work on a consensus model, you learn to grow a tolerance of one another and deep respect for one another's position.

I would suggest that the only other problem we've encountered is time. It's very time-consuming, but it's time extremely well invested.

Ms. Jodi Lee: One of the challenges we've run into is probably quite opposite from those of a lot of the other sites, in that we've only done one small segment of Winnipeg, and the rest of Winnipeg really wants to be part of it. So I think part of the challenge is to really make sure we stay focused on what UEY is. It's very important to make sure that we get through all the objectives laid out in front of us but also are responsive to those other areas that are really starting to get interested in the mapping. They want to know what their communities look like, because they're seeing what I'm doing for Winnipeg One, and they're sort of asking us to go talk to them. So it's a fine balance.

• 1635

Ms. Sarah Gallant: In the converse of that, both Sharon and I have faced the fact that our communities are quite large, and through understanding the early years' work, we're providing information at that larger level, but also are trying to provide the information at the neighbourhood and community level. That's a challenge, and time is a factor as well to be able to provide the information at the various levels so that everyone can benefit from it. Yes, it's a real challenge, but it's good.

Ms. Diane St-Jacques: Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Libby Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies (Vancouver East, NDP): Thank you.

First of all, like everybody else, I'd like to thank you all for coming today. It's been really helpful and interesting to learn how different the projects are across the country, even though there are some basic themes and common goals that you have. It's interesting to see how they're playing out across the country.

I'm very familiar with First Call in B.C., and I agree with all the comments that have been made about where groups come together, whether it's in the school boards or the service agencies or advocacy groups or parent groups. When all of that comes together—and certainly Windows of Opportunity is an example of that in B.C.—it really produces kind of a different quality of work. So I think what's really important about the UEY Project, as Mr. Zeesman has said, is that it is community-driven.

Mr. Zeesman, there was a very interesting article in the Saint John Times Globe in which you are quoted extensively. It's curious, because there are all these different research projects going on, and how the results are brought together statistically produces some interesting results. In this particular one, the headline is “Child poverty not as prevalent as thought”. It's actually referring to what I understand is another study you're doing on food security, where you're quoted as saying that basically the popular belief that 20% of Canadian children go to school hungry is very exaggerated; you show it at about 5%. I don't know what that's based on. Maybe you can explain it.

And then we're told by the minister that child poverty was actually reduced by about 180,000 children between 1996 and 1998. On the other hand, we have the StatsCan study, which I didn't bring with me today, the so-called wealth study, the first one in about 15 years, and it shows us that income inequality is growing. From my own community in east Vancouver and all the groups I work with, I just know it's true. The wealth study shows that I think the lowest 20% of Canadians had lost about a thousand dollars of income, whereas the wealthiest 20% had gained...I can't remember whether it was $12,000 or $120,000. Anyway, the gap was growing.

So when you take an issue like food security and say it's not as bad as we think, and then somehow that gets linked back to saying child poverty isn't as bad as we think, it seems to me that it's the exact opposite of what's going on here, which is that you are trying to look at the broader determinants of children's well-being, which would include income, for sure, but also a whole bunch of other things—and some of you have talked about them.

I don't have a precise question, but it's really to sort of lay that out and say that I think there are contradictions and sometimes things get interpreted politically for different reasons. So we read headlines like this, and I don't feel that the experience I have had in my community would bear that out.

I'm interested in any of your comments to that.

The Chair: This is where a politician would say “What I meant to say...”.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: No, actually, I'm going to give you a politician's answer to this.

Did you read the whole article?

Ms. Libby Davies: Yes.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Did you notice what he called me?

Ms. Libby Davies: It called you “Mr. Child Poverty”.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: No, but before that, my name.

Ms. Libby Davies: Yes, it called you “Gordon”.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Yes, “Gordon Zeesman”. You see, his reporting is about as accurate as the reporting of my name in that article. He's got it all about at the same level.

• 1640

The fact of the matter is I was making a presentation before the Canadian Jewish Congress last Sunday in Toronto, talking to them about child poverty. The whole presentation actually wasn't very much about this at all; it was really about whether or not there should be a narrower child poverty focus to the policy issue or a wider vulnerable child and child well-being focus. I explained to them how we've created indices of vulnerability and the majority of vulnerable kids aren't poor.

That was what the discussion was about. At the end of it, this journalist comes up and says, “You know, they say that there are 20% of people under the low-income cut-offs that are given by StatsCan.” He says, “I get letters from StatsCan all the time saying we're not supposed to use this as a poverty line, and I don't understand what's going on: 20% is about 250,000 kids, and I can't see 250,000 hungry kids.” I said, “That's because there probably aren't 250,000 hungry kids where you live.”

But child hunger is a problem. And the way we have gone about looking at the question of child hunger is that we've added a supplement to the national population health survey. What we looked at was the issue of food security, and our report on food security is actually going to be out in a few weeks.

What we found was about 4% to 5% of Canadians suffer hunger on a regular basis. A large part of this is related to too much month at the end of the money. In other words, you pay your rent and you pay your fixed costs, and then you get to the end of the month and there's not a lot of money around and you're starting to make choices. And for some of the choices you don't have real choices.

We also found that about 10% of Canadian families are very concerned about the possibility of going hungry and feel that they're kind of on the borderline of that problem.

So that's what I can tell you about food security. I'd be happy to talk more about the different pieces of research.

Ms. Libby Davies: Thank you for explaining that.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: Sure.

Ms. Libby Davies: It seems to me that you looked at food security and how you measure that. In some ways that's also something you self-identify, and it's very interesting that another 10% of families felt themselves to be on the border. If you add that to other factors, such as paying more than 30% of your income for housing, such as not having accessibility to early childhood child care, if you add it to a whole bunch of other things then you begin to get a different picture.

I don't know what other measures you use, but it was just curious that this was singled out and then related to we're doing a lot better with child poverty, because it seems to me that we don't have that evidence. Do you agree with that?

Mr. Allen Zeesman: This was singled out because this particular reporter was making the association between all the children who live in families with incomes below the low-income cut-offs as being hungry children. That's where I said no, it doesn't work that way. So that's how that connection was made.

We had not a good experience in the nineties with child poverty, as you very well know. Not only did it go up very high, but it stayed high even as we began our economic recovery, which is very unusual. We did certain very important pieces of analysis, which are publicly available, as to why that happened.

Now we're seeing it coming down. That's what you're hearing about in the national child benefit report, that in fact it's not coming down.... We would have hoped that it would start coming down a couple of years ago when the recovery was stronger, but the recovery continues and the numbers are beginning to come down. That's the 180,000 that you hear about from the minister.

The Chair: I think we had better go to Anita Neville.

Ms. Anita Neville (Winnipeg South Centre, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I just said to Madame St-Jacques that I would like to invite Mr. Zeesman back another time, if we might, to pursue this line of discussion further.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: It would be a pleasure.

Ms. Anita Neville: It's fascinating.

I have a couple of comments and then a question or two.

Let me thank all of you who presented this afternoon. I think the breadth of your presentations showed both the common links we have across this vast country and the great diversity of the country. It was very interesting to hear.

• 1645

I'm interested in a whole variety of questions, but I wanted to pick up on Monique Guay's question about, particularly, children of aboriginal ancestry. Jodi presented on the Winnipeg School Division, where we do have large numbers of aboriginal children. I still call it “we”—fourteen years of association with that body and I can't quite disassociate myself yet. We also have a very large multicultural population. It geographically overlaps. I compare the Winnipeg situation with the Prince Albert situation, which I'm somewhat familiar with, but not totally—it's a smaller community.

I'm wondering, recognizing that it's all community driven, whether you are sharing your common findings, whether you're sharing best practices among all the organization, and with those who are coming on board, whether it's necessary for them to start at zero or based on the experiences and the information you're gathering, they can start at two, or three, or four along the continuum, to make a difference in their communities? I don't know who wants to answer that.

Ms. Linda Nosbush: I can start, because we have cohorts here from Saskatoon who have been part of our planning group, and now we are in good communication. We're only 120 miles or so apart.

Ms. Anita Neville: I'm well aware.

Ms. Linda Nosbush: We do a lot of things together. We share a lot of common characteristics, because we have community schools, as they have community schools. So we're part of that provincial network. We both have active coalitions. So I would suggest that you're not starting at stage one, you're probably starting at one and a half or two.

Ms. Anita Neville: What about your sharing of what you're learning and how you can take the information back to your own community groups and move it forward? Jodi.

Ms. Jodi Lee: Eileen and I have very different strengths at the stages we're at. Winnipeg has moved along quite quickly in the technical part of it, with the actual mapping and producing the pictures to give to people. We've struggled with how take the coalition from this group in this nice little office, where we talk about all these wonderful things we want to do, and move it out. Eileen, I think, has experienced the opposite of that. She's very mobilized, as she's told you. Her phone rings off the hook. So we share that. She gives me advice on how you move forward. It's been working and has been very helpful. We've been talking about the technical piece for her as well.

One of the new sites we have is southeast Manitoba, again the very opposite. I am inner city, right smack in the middle of the most dense part of Manitoba, and Ales Morga, who's behind me, has to deal with about 10,000 square kilometres and drives most of her day. We've really been working together to make sure I'm giving her as much information as I can, so she's not reinventing things. Then she can move forward as quickly as possible.

So it's kind of laterally and up and down—it's a lot of fun.

Ms. Sarah Gallant: I would say the five of us do have a bond now. This is the third time we've come to Ottawa to be together. I think the piece that really ties us all together is the staff at HRDC who we connect with daily, on a regular basis, and who do facilitate the times that we are together, really help pull the whole project together, and help us with our communication pieces. This has been an integral part of how we've proceeded.

Ms. Linda Nosbush: They also do the site visits. I just experienced a two-day site visit where they look at your reality and see if you're seeing your reality in an objective fashion. That's been really helpful.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: The communications between the communities and the ability for them to work together is something we see as integral to the success of the project. So we are very much not only supporting that, but monitoring that, and we are committed to doing what we have to do to make that work. We think what you're talking about is essential to what we're trying to do.

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Ms. Anita Neville: Thank you.

The Chair: The other Alan is joining Allen here.

Mr. Alan Tonks (York South—Weston, Lib.): Thank you.

I certainly echo Anita's comments. Being an elected member, trying to understand the commonality of meeting the cause and how it's being carried out across the country is really quite a challenge, just to understand what's being done. I appreciate everything you've said. The way I would characterize it is as a strategic planning approach to building community-based capacity to deal with the early developmental challenges of children, little ones. Along those lines, to use a clinical analogy, it's using the tools of research as the analysis portion with respect to the dimension of your challenge. Then the prognosis is your action plan. You've given us insights into both those facets.

One of the comments that was made was that you would really benefit from having, with great respect to HRDC staff, a coordinator, an additional entity that would help in each of your cases to work on coordination. If you had a request to make for additional backup, is that where you would put it, or where would you put it? That's my first question.

My second is to staff, or to Margo or Allen. Is it fair, reasonable, or realistic to plan in a five-year cycle, to analyse the results of your research and so on? In regard to the dynamics and elements we're attempting to strategically position here in relation to the children, is five years a fair amount of time to evaluate what you've been doing in your first five-year period?

You've put that first suggestion forward regarding additional resources. Would that be where we'd have a commonality of agreement? Or are there other areas you would want?

Ms. Eileen Grant: From our perspective, it's not as a project that we need that in place, it's as a community. There is no infrastructure and there is no funding whatsoever for the work that takes place for the community to drive the initiatives. So as willing as I am to work with the community, right now the community is doing all it does off the sides of someone's desk, and because it's so difficult to gain access to funds for a community planning table, there is nobody who is designated and paid to do the coordinating work. So for instance, when somebody comes up with an idea such as we had before, they'll call me and say “I have a little bit of funding. We know that there is a need, because we've demonstrated it with our research in this particular area. How can we get people to come together to do this?”

So we need somebody to call the meeting who is connected with everybody in the community, who knows their way around applying for funding. That's a skill a community needs to have access to. It's that kind of infrastructure within our communities that's missing. I talk quite often with the group from Vancouver, the Windows for Opportunity, and they're facing exactly the same challenges. There's an incredible willingness to work together, but we do need somebody who is actually paid to coordinate the community initiative part, so that we, as a research base in Understanding the Early Years Project, can work proactively with them. Because we don't lead the initiatives that are being taken in the community, that's led by the community, and we're working with them.

When nobody gets to wear that hat or nobody gets to be paid for wearing that hat, it's a real challenge. And in a community that's as large and diverse as ours, it is wearing people down—and we have amazing people that have been working with us.

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Ms. Linda Nosbush: We have had that structure in place for almost seven years in Saskatchewan through the Human Services Integration Forum. There are nine regional integrated sectoral regions in Saskatchewan, and each of them has a paid full-time coordinator. Representatives from government and non-government agencies sit on this. That is my sponsoring group, and it's been very powerful to see those people work together. And I think you're right, it has to be at the broader community level, but our track record is largely because of those integrated efforts on behalf of all the government and non-government agencies.

Mr. Allen Zeesman: You can see that it's different from province to province. I don't know, beyond the experiences that are being reported here, how much activity is going on in each province. I do know that the fourth element of the ECD agreement is precisely this, so that is possible within this context. If you look at the four elements of the ECD agreement that was signed, the fourth element is precisely this kind of support you're talking about.

On the question of the five years, you're talking to someone who when they made a proposal about the longitudinal survey said we carry babies until they were 25. And when we had trouble with some of our databases on the long file and people asked why we have to keep information for 25 years, my first reaction was that I didn't understand the question. The fact of the matter is, yes, a lot of these things do take a long time, but what we have done is the five-year window will be enough for certain things and not enough for other things, but the understanding early years program is ongoing and we're going to have to make decisions at that point about what happens at the end of five years in a community.

Right now it's a five-year planning horizon, and HRDC is committed to this but only on a year-to-year basis, so we haven't nailed down all the exact steps. That's the situation we find ourselves in. So the answer is you're right, there are things that are going to happen in communities for which five years is too short, and there are things that are going to happen for which five years is good.

Mr. Alan Tonks: In your methodology you're going to attempt to focus those ones and then be fair in terms of the evaluation and on the outputs, and I guess the purpose of the five-year window is to make adjustments to the program where there are needs, where there are gaps, where there are additional resources required, etc.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Tonks. I realize that we're closing on the witching hour here.

I have one last question, but first a comment. It is clear that HRDC's applied research division could, not only to keep the existing efforts going over five years.... There's obviously a huge demand across the country for this kind of activity; that's why Eileen keeps getting all these calls. So a question the committee might want to ask in the future is whether there is enough money to allow that expansion, and if not, what are we going to do about it?

My question, though, relates to something Allen Zeesman said. He talked about the early childhood development initiative and the fact that there are these four funded areas, the last of which is community infrastructure. A crucial part of the ECD is measurement, and it's measurement of baseline activities and then outcomes. How does this work tie into the outcome part of the early childhood development initiative signed last September? That's probably a question to Allen.

And I realize we haven't got much time, but I'd ask the folks across the country, to the extent you're aware of their early childhood development initiative, how much are you part of all that? Do you think the provinces are going to take advantage of the work you do in mapping, and outcomes, and all that sort of stuff?

I will start with Allen and then get some reactions.

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Mr. Allen Zeesman: Those things are being negotiated as we speak. The national longitudinal survey of children and youth and the understanding the early years initiative are at the heart of the knowledge and monitoring of that agreement. The only reason we could even put that in the agreement was because these things existed. It's very closely linked.

The Chair: Are there any comments?

Ms. Sarah Gallant: As the one UEY community that is province-wide, it's so timely that we were involved in the understanding the early years initiative when this agreement happened and as we go ahead. We're going to have a province-wide database of what's happening in our province as they move forward with the P.E.I. healthy child development strategy, which is our provincial strategy for how to use those dollars. We're very involved with that. It's exciting for us.

Ms. Linda Nosbush: I talked specifically about how the dollars would be used. Right from the outset those provincial people came to Prince Albert to talk to us about what was going on in UEY, and are going to be coming to spend another full day where we're going to use all of the results that we've gained from mapping in the EDI in order to shunt those funds in our community on a population and client basis.

The Chair: Do I understand that would be specifically with reference to the federal dollars that are becoming available—

Ms. Linda Nosbush: It's called Kids First in Saskatchewan and it's like this.

The Chair: Great.

Are there any other comments on this?

Ms. Eileen Grant: In British Columbia most of the decisions about how those funds would be made were made at the provincial level. They have a number of sites called Children First in British Columbia, which are learning sites funded with those dollars. I work reasonably closely with them. We share information about what is happening in those communities. As a result of those ECD dollars, we now have a total of six sites in British Columbia. We have two understanding the early years sites that are doing assessment and community mapping. Vancouver is working, partly with the support of HRDC, to do similar work. Then we have the three Children First sites. The rest of the funding that's come through is pretty much being directed to supporting a universal child care program in British Columbia. As well, they're doing work in other areas supporting therapies for children in the early years.

What we're doing in our community that's interrelated with this is using our baseline data to see what differences some of the initiatives that are happening are making for children in terms of readiness to learn. So we're working fairly closely with what's being done at the provincial level.

The Chair: Thanks very much.

I think this is an appropriate time to bring the formal part of the meeting to a close. I want to say personally what a great experience it's been to see these tremendously different communities, first of all, with their different stories but also the common story, the common story of our children, the common story of the importance of community and social capital beyond socio-economic factors. I think this bodes very well for the conference, which will start tomorrow evening here in Ottawa and continue through Saturday.

I want to thank as well all of the “newbies”, if I may call them that, the folks from the latest wave. I don't want to editorialize or prejudice the outcome of any report this committee might make, but I sure hope you're not the last “newbies”. I hope we not only continue beyond five years but that we expand this highly successful program, because I think the demonstration effect, the leverage, the mobilization effect you cause in your communities through understanding the early years piece goes well beyond the dollars. It's a very sound investment. Of course, I can't speak for the rest of the committee.

Mr. Alan Tonks: Yes, you can.

The Chair: Apparently I can. Good.

On that note, I now will formally conclude matters and thank everyone.

The meeting is adjourned.