WINDSOR-ESSEX CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH CENTRES ASSOCIATION
CONTENTS
Tuesday 18 June 1996
Subcommittee report
Children's services
Windsor-Essex Children's Mental Health Centres Association
Dr Martin Girash, executive director, Windsor Regional Children's Centre
Mark Donlon, executive director, Glengarda Child and Family Services
Dr Paul Steinhauer
Child Poverty Action Group
Christa Freiler, program director
Dr Brigitte Kitchen, co-chair
Susan McGrath, member, steering committee
STANDING COMMITTEE ON SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT
Chair / Président: Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président: Gerretsen, John (Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
*Ecker, Janet (Durham West / -Ouest PC)
Gerretsen, John (Kingston and The Islands / Kingston et Les Îles L)
Gravelle, Michael (Port Arthur L)
*Johns, Helen (Huron PC)
Jordan, Leo (Lanark-Renfrew PC)
*Kennedy, Gerard (York South / -Sud L)
*Laughren, Floyd (Nickel Belt ND)
*Munro, Julia (Durham-York PC)
*Newman, Dan (Scarborough Centre / -Centre PC)
*Patten, Richard (Ottawa Centre / -Centre L)
*Pettit, Trevor (Hamilton Mountain PC)
*Preston, Peter L. (Brant-Haldimand PC)
Smith, Bruce (Middlesex PC)
Wildman, Bud (Algoma ND)
*In attendance / présents
Substitutions present / Membres remplaçants présents:
Bartolucci, Rick (Sudbury L) for Mr Gerretsen
Pupatello, Sandra (Windsor-Sandwich L) for Mr Gravelle
Clerk / Greffière: Lynn Mellor
Staff / Personnel: Ted Glenn, research officer, Legislative Research Service
SUBCOMMITTEE REPORT
The Chair (Mr Richard Patten): We'll convene the committee hearings. Before we call our first witness, I believe we have a motion from Ms Ecker.
Mrs Janet Ecker (Durham West): I'd be quite happy to move that the committee accept the subcommittee report as it is printed and distributed to the committee, subject to any direction or comments that the rest of the committee may have.
The Chair: Do we have agreement on that? Seeing no disagreement, good. Thank you.
CHILDREN'S SERVICES
Consideration of the designated matter pursuant to standing order 125 relating to the impact of the Conservative government funding cuts on children and children's services in the province of Ontario.
WINDSOR-ESSEX CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH CENTRES ASSOCIATION
The Chair: We now call our first witness this afternoon, the representatives from the Windsor Regional Children's Centre and Glengarda Child and Family Services. Welcome to our hearings, gentlemen. I ask that you introduce yourselves as you make your presentation. You have approximately half an hour. Whatever you use up in terms of your presentation, the remaining time will be for members to ask questions of you. Welcome and please proceed.
Dr Martin Girash: I'm Martin Girash. I'm a psychologist by profession for more than 25 years, and have been executive director of the Windsor Regional Children's Centre in Windsor, which is a children's mental health centre, part of the children's mental health centre service network. My colleague today is Mark Donlon, executive director of Glengarda Child and Family Services. I'd like to turn it over to Mark to begin the remarks.
Mr Mark Donlon: At the beginning, I'd like to thank the committee very much for this opportunity to speak to you today about how the children and families in Ontario are doing. We represent an association of agencies in Windsor which collectively provide treatment services to some of the most disturbed and special-needs children and families in our communities.
It is increasingly clear that changes in our society and our economy and in family structure itself have had a significant impact on how families are doing in terms of their ability to raise children to be healthy and productive adults. There is clear evidence in our society that our approach and our values are not being successful in meeting an increasing number of children's and family's needs.
The purpose of our presentation today is twofold. First, we would like to provide you with some concrete and specific information on how children and families are doing; second, we would also like to provide information regarding recent and new approaches to the difficulties that we are going to allude to. The submission concludes with three specific recommendations to the committee regarding possible and innovative responses the government could consider to some of these issues.
Certainly, when you talk about children in Ontario and how they are doing, it is relevant to talk about the impact of poverty. There is little question that poverty has a detrimental impact on the positive development of children and families. As such, it is reasonable, in assessing how children are doing in Ontario today, to examine how well we are doing as a society in helping them to avoid this collectively being in poverty. Unfortunately, there is clear evidence that we are not doing well in this regard.
In the last five years, there has been a 53% increase in the rate of child poverty in Canada. There are now 1.3 million poor children in Canada, enough to form the fifth-largest province. Poverty strikes six out of 10 children who live in a single-parent family, and where the eldest parent is 30 years of age or younger, the child poverty rate has increased by 39% since 1989. Two out of every five children in a young family are poor. There are 1.1 million children who depend on social assistance for support. This reflects an increase of 61% since 1989.
Canada has the second-highest number of poor children among 18 industrialized countries, with more than one in seven living in poverty today. The United States is the only country of the 18 surveyed that has more poor children.
If you look at what happens to children when they are poor, there are specific statistics that tell us how they're doing. The child mortality rate is twice as high among families at the lowest income level. Drowning is 3.4 times more common among boys of low-income families. Low birth weight is 1.4 times higher. Children from low-income families are 1.7 times more likely than children from other families to have a psychiatric disorder, 1.8 times more likely to do poorly in school and 2.1 times more likely to develop a conduct disorder.
Ontario teens in lower-income families are 1.8 times more likely to smoke, 1.8 times more likely to have an alcohol problem and 1.4 times more likely to use drugs than in higher-income families. The high school dropout rate is 2.5 times higher among children who live in poor families than it is for other families.
The rate of completed suicide in young male adolescents is four times higher than it was 30 years ago. The rate of completed suicide in 10- to 14-year-old boys has doubled in that time. Canada has the third-worst adolescent suicide rate in the world.
Violent crime by youth and school violence are continuing to rise dramatically. The incidence of serious problems and control of aggression by children as young as three years of age is currently 22%, which is three times higher than what it was 20 years ago.
On the other hand, a number of studies have shown there are some things we could do that are successful in having an impact on poor families. High-quality prevention and early intervention programs are successful in helping poor children to achieve far more positive results. One recent American study showed that the longer a disadvantaged preschooler received high-quality child care and education prior to grade 1, the more likely that child was to do as well as other children who are not disadvantaged.
In the Perry Preschool Project in Michigan, 33% more of the severely disadvantaged children who received high-quality child care as preschoolers completed high school. Tremblay's prevention study for seven- to nine-year-old boys noted as disruptive in kindergarten produced better academic performance and fewer delinquent behaviours when children reached the ages of 10 to 15. In the Ryerson outreach program, three times as many teachers stated that respect of children to teachers increased and that vandalism was down as a result of that outreach service.
These are all examples of programs that can have a positive impact and have been shown by research to have a positive impact in intervening in some of the grim statistics I just quoted to you.
Dr Girash: What we'd like to talk to you about today is changing the way we do business. We know that the basis of how individuals act in their communities as adults is established during childhood. This is no longer just an opinion; it is well documented through decades of research on parenting and child development. It is also now clear that responding to our children's needs in ways that specifically reinforce their sense of personal accomplishment is central to their development into adults who are able to function to their best ability. This, in turn, is central to whether we will have an effectively functioning society.
Traditional mental health services have been based on a curative philosophy whereby a problem is identified and a treatment is prescribed. Although this approach may be helpful in specific situations, it has not, as the above data illustrate, been very effective in meeting the needs of children and families, particularly those within lower socioeconomic conditions and also those with complex needs. Paradoxically, it is these children and families who consume the majority of our public service resources.
Fortunately, a new model is emerging which is based upon a radically different approach to meeting the needs of children and families. A basic tenet of this new approach is that children and families who are supported in meeting their own individualized needs have greater success than when they are totally dependent on traditional programs and services to meet their needs. Characteristics of this approach include:
Building on family strengths.
Providing support early.
Viewing the child in the context of the family and the family in the context of the community.
Empowering parents to better meet their own needs and those of their children.
Utilizing traditional programs and services as components of the overall plan but not the sole answer.
This is a key one: Primary participation by the parents, the child and significant others in their lives in identifying their goals and specifying their needs.
Finally, having available flexible resources, both financial and otherwise, which can be used as options in meeting their personalized needs.
The above principles are currently being used in innovative communities across North America and are referred to aggregately in the literature as "the wraparound process." There are approximately 20,000 families in the United States currently benefiting from this process and it is estimated that 40,000 families will be involved within a year.
Preliminary research is indicating that this approach can be significantly more effective than traditional approaches, which are, in turn, more effective than no services at all. However, the research also is suggesting that the effectiveness of the outcome is closely associated with the degree to which the participants are true to the defined characteristics. This is consistent with research generally which ties effectiveness to high levels of training. Here we're talking about not just training professionals, we're talking about training parents, and that's a key to this new approach. It is not enough to say that we follow a particular approach; we also must be well trained in doing it.
The Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres, of which we are members, has been a catalyst in bringing to Ontario innovative ideas and strategies, such as the wraparound process, to address the most complex issues in family and child development. For example, just last week the OACMHC brought Dr VanDenBerg, one of the pioneers in the wraparound process, to Ontario to introduce this new approach to its 97 member agencies. This type of leadership and innovation has been a characteristic of the OACMHC since its founding in the early 1970s. Through their work, those of us in the children's mental health field have been kept abreast of the latest best practices.
Another group within our province, which is instrumental in ensuring that approaches to children's mental health are based upon solid research and the most current best practices is the Sparrow Lake Alliance. The work of the Sparrow Lake Alliance and the Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres and its member agencies focuses on enhancing the positive developmental forces that exist in every young child and in families. These forces must be nurtured and allowed to flourish if they are to become the currency of our society. We could never have sufficient external resources to rekindle these forces after they have been snuffed out. Evidence that the work of the children's mental health centres in our province is effective is beginning to be collected through the OACMHC. But more important is the fact that the literature on effectiveness of children's mental health work is being closely linked to best practices and family-centred approaches, both of which the alliance and the OACMHC are committed to facilitating.
In summary, and based upon the information presented here, we respectfully offer the following recommendations:
(1) That the government of Ontario use as guiding principles in its work the child- and family-centred characteristics described above.
(2) That the Ontario government establish as its highest priority the enactment of legislation and the establishment of policies which support children and families in meeting their individualized mental health needs.
(3) That the Ontario government work with the Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres and the Sparrow Lake Alliance in developing and implementing these policies.
Thank you for the opportunity to address you today. We'll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
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The Chair: Thank you kindly for the presentation. We have 15 minutes, five minutes per caucus. We begin on the government side.
Mrs Ecker: Thank you very much, gentlemen, for coming and putting forward some very good ideas and some interesting concepts which I think will be very helpful.
I have two questions. I was very pleased to see your comments about building on family strengths and trying to make families stronger in order to ensure that children are brought up well. Is employment of the head of a family, male or female -- being able to be employed, having a job, whatever -- one of the things that would predict whether a family can be strong or not, one of the parents having a job?
Mr Donlon: The research we're most familiar with alludes to several things as contributing to healthy family functioning; among them is a minimum standard of living. Certainly employment is the most typical way people achieve that.
In the data on families that are not doing well, when you are talking about the unemployed, typically you're talking about people who fall below that perceived ideal standard, so I guess in short the answer is yes, if you have paid employment that is of a sufficient minimum level to support healthy family functioning, then they are more likely to function in a healthy way.
Dr Girash: Could I comment as well? I think in terms of the wraparound process, the way in which that gets translated is flexible resources. One of the reasons poor people don't do as well is that they don't have as many options, and you need options when you're raising kids these days. Some of them are very specific, some of them are financially driven in the sense that you have to be able to do some things. I'm not talking about just giving money; I'm talking about being able to do some things to your health, to your transportation situation, to whatever, to deal with the specific individualized needs you may have with the child you're trying to raise, particularly a special-needs child.
Mrs Ecker: You talk about the wraparound concept, and I'm not sure if this is similar to what the Ministry of Community and Social Services is looking at, what we call individualized funding where funding goes to a family. It follows the child, follows the family. Is that similar? Is that approach that we're looking at very seriously now because of the need for flexibility, because of the need to empower families, similar to the kind of thing you're recommending?
Dr Girash: It's starting to approach that concept. The problem is, if the funding follows bureaucratically, which is still part of the system we operate in, we're still going to have a problem. The funding follows, but is the funding really available for nontraditional service-type purchases or necessities? Even though the funding may follow, it may say, "If this kid needs psychotherapy, then we should be able to purchase that for this child with this flexible funding." The wraparound process goes beyond that and says we're not talking just about psychotherapy.
Mrs Ecker: So the money goes to the individuals, as opposed to organizations, is that what you're saying, more directly?
Dr Girash: It has to be available to individuals, whether it actually goes to them. Whether or not in the process they actually write the cheque is not as important as it being available for a whole host of flexible options, including nontraditional clinical issues.
Mr Donlon: If I could give an example that might be helpful, in one American study, using single parents who were on social assistance in a particular state, they trained and hired people to serve as friendly visitors to them. They followed them for five years. What they found was that where in essence the only difference between the one group and the other was that this one group received a friendly visitor on a weekly basis, five years later -- as a result of that service, one assumes; there was no other significant difference between the two groups -- the rate of referrals for child abuse was half in the group that received that friendly visitor.
If you make funding available for programs such as that, that are attached to services directly to the people, to the family involved, that's sometimes the result you will see.
Mrs Ecker: Yes, and that's very consistent with some of the things that we're doing both in health and community and social services.
Mrs Julia Munro (Durham-York): My question probably relates very closely to the one already given, but on page 4 where you talk about empowering parents, I just wonder if you could give us some example of the way in which you see that actually coming forth.
Dr Girash: Yes. Dr VanDenBerg shared some of those examples, and we actually had some parents at the conference where this was worked through. It very much depends on how it's presented. In other words, we are sometimes I think somewhat reluctant to really see some of these people as having resources -- personal resources I'm talking about -- so we treat them as underprivileged and do things to them, as opposed to working with them and helping them meet their needs. The empowering process is one whereby there's respect and a great deal of support. They will tell you what that support is and what they need, and if we listen to that, then we'll be able to meet those needs, but we don't often listen. We often think we have the answers to what they need rather than listening to what they need.
Mrs Sandra Pupatello (Windsor-Sandwich): Thanks very much for coming up from Windsor. The other government members, I hope, will know that the children's agencies in my community have worked together and have formed an alliance of sorts to initiate a number of projects to use their money wisely, despite the cutbacks in recent years of agencies, including yours.
Dr Girash, maybe I could start with you. In your agency, in this last year, what is the result of the cutbacks felt by the Windsor Regional Children's Centre?
Dr Girash: We specifically had to close an adolescent program, actually take it out of existence.
Mrs Pupatello: Where did those children go?
Dr Girash: We were able to phase it out so that the work with the actual children was completed. The ones who would have come into our program would then be served by Maryvale, but they have an added waiting list because the resources, of course, weren't there to serve them, so they took over the mandate without the resources.
Mrs Pupatello: The more the community agencies struggle to do the service with less, and you find very innovative ways to do it, you're sort of proving the point that you really don't need more money to provide these services. How do we know you really can't afford to take any more cuts to your agencies?
Dr Girash: What we're doing with the new approaches is we're getting our house in order and we're doing that fairly quickly, I think. Once we start, on a widespread basis, working this way and we still have more demand than the resources available, then I think we can clearly say we need more resources.
We didn't want to come here asking for money, because everybody is asking for money, but I think the allocation of money for children's services -- one of our recommendations is that the Ontario government identify children and families as the highest priority -- $160 million I think presently is allocated in the province to children's mental health services, throughout the entire province, and there's something like $16 billion or $17 billion in health generally -- you don't have children as a priority, and that's some of the concern we have. So yes, number one, we want to be more efficient, and yes, we realize that we can do business differently and more efficiently, but we're doing that so we can then say clearly we need the resources that we need and you can't come back to us and say, "You guys can be more efficient." We're doing that work.
Mrs Pupatello: Can I ask, Mr Donlon, if you could describe your best argument for why it's economically smart to spend the money on children's services.
Mr Donlon: There are, I am sure, others who have said to you that for every dollar you put into children's services there are studies that suggest you save $7 down the road in terms of costs for some of the programs that work with adults who have not been able to achieve a level of positive functioning.
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I think that speaks in and of itself to the fiscal costs, but I think morally it certainly is -- there are studies now that are saying that about one in four children in our society will not achieve their potential. Aside from the financial cost, there is the human factor in that, and the morality perhaps of knowing that about 25% of our children are not going to do as well as they should. That doesn't just harm us economically, it's a human tragedy. It is part of why we are suggesting that if sufficient funding can be attached to some of these innovative new approaches, we can actually do them, we can make a difference. The research is clearly saying we can do some stuff that will work.
But you have to understand also that in our business the most needy children are the most expensive to care for and treat. If you put a child in a residential program who is the most disturbed in their functioning in your community, it costs a great deal of money to treat them. If you could go to a preschool program and provide prevention and early intervention services, your chances, and research supports this, of not having that child requiring residential service 10 years down the road go way up, and that saves the taxpayer a great deal of money.
Mr Floyd Laughren (Nickel Belt): To follow up on that very point, that argument isn't working. It's not convincing people out there, society, because right now if you did polling I suspect people would say the government's on the right track. You crack down on welfare rates and you get tough on young offenders and you end the parole system for adults. It's all on the one side of the spectrum, if you will. I call it the preventive-versus-cure argument. That may not be the correct term. Not just now; I don't think society's ever bought into the arguments you're making, because the evidence isn't as living for them as the dollars spent are.
I don't know how we do that. I don't know how we convince the world out there that prevention's more important than cure, and a lot cheaper. I don't know whether you've got any help on that, but it really is frustrating.
Dr Girash: If I could just personally say, I don't think we are really committed, nor do we really believe that children become adults. We don't believe that. I don't know if it's because we've denied our own childhood or what we've done, but we really don't think of our children as eventually running our businesses, paying into CPP and helping me be in a long-term facility.
Mr Laughren: Occupying our jails.
Dr Girash: Exactly. I don't think we really, truly believe -- we haven't had the research until recently to come back and say, "We've got the hard research on that." We're talking about kids growing up into adults, and there's no question about it, how they're treated as children -- that treatment needs to be sensitive, it needs to be firm, it needs to be guidance, but it needs to be respectful. The member asked about respectful for families. The children need to be respected as well. If they're not, they will turn out -- many of them in our area will be put in jail. We're talking about $50,000 to $100,000 a year for a child in jail or in a residential treatment facility versus the Ontario Association of Children's Mental Health Centres member agencies' average cost of $3,000 per child.
Mr Donlon: I think we've done a poor job of communicating the results of us not doing this. I think, for example, most people today are very concerned about the escalating amount of violence in schools. Everybody's worried about it. Anybody who has a child they send to school, and they come and talk about somebody being horrendously beat up, is worried about that. What we need to do better is to communicate that there is a connection between things.
The escalating violence that's being seen in children, as I quoted earlier, as early as three years of age, is being identified as problematic at the age of three, and what we are talking about is linked. They are. If we don't want to have a society where you need a tank to go to the store, then we're going to have to do a better job of meeting children's needs, and we're not doing that job right now.
Mr Laughren: To what extent is there a breakdown of the severity of the problem of child poverty in jurisdictions, not just Ontario but even within Ontario, with the rest of Canada?
Mr Donlon: I'm not clear on what you're saying.
Mr Laughren: Is the severity of child poverty worse in a place like Toronto than it is in a place like Sudbury or some other part of the province, and how does Ontario stack up with other parts of the country?
Mr Donlon: In short, I don't know.
Dr Girash: We do know Canada doesn't stack up very well compared to the other countries. That was in our data.
Mr Donlon: Canada is very poor.
Dr Girash: We know Canada doesn't stack up very well to other countries in regard to that.
Mr Laughren: I was trying to get a picture of Ontario.
The Chair: Thank you very much, gentlemen, for that presentation. It was excellent. Thank you for coming all the way from the Windsor area. We appreciate it.
PAUL STEINHAUER
The Chair: I'd like to call our next witness, Dr Steinhauer from Voices for Children and senior staff psychiatrist at the Hospital for Sick Children. Welcome again, Dr Steinhauer. I see you have your children's tie on again today.
Dr Paul Steinhauer: Yes, sir.
The Chair: I should have remembered to put mine on.
Dr Steinhauer: Going back to Mr Laughren's comment, I think that after having worn this tie for four years, stewardesses are suddenly starting to notice it consistently. So maybe we're starting to get them aware of children and -- anyway, ladies and gentlemen, I was here less than a month ago. I'm going to take that into account in presenting to you today. I've prepared a fairly extensive, for me, brief that I put before you. I took the mandate that I was given in the letter inviting me rather seriously and I'm going to talk specifically about the effects of the cuts. What I'm going to do, however, is start by talking a little bit about some general comments, because I think many of the figures I have in there speak for themselves.
First of all, it's got to be faced that not all children are going to respond to the results of funding cuts in the same way. Some families, like the families of psychiatrists and lawyers and probably MPPs and business executives, are not going to be affected very much because they can purchase privately the kinds of supports and services that are going to be lost to others. Even some families that aren't affluent are going to have better coping skills and they're going to be psychologically less vulnerable and they're going to be more cohesive and more flexible and more resourceful, and they may have a better support network. So not all people are going to be affected evenly.
It's going to be very difficult to predict the effect of a single cut, because multiple cuts are going to have a cumulative effect and you won't be able to sort out how much of what you're seeing is the result of loss of income, loss of job, loss of housing, loss of counselling, loss of special education for one of the kids, and loss of mental health services.
Secondly, repeated cuts are going to have a cumulative effect. The latest of a series of cuts is just going to be the straw that breaks the back of a camel that's already on its knees because of repeated cuts when it comes to children's services.
Finally, there's going to be a lag between the timing of cuts and the appearance of many of the effects. Some effects I think we can expect to see quite soon, such as increases in spousal abuse, increases in child abuse and an increase in the number of children who will die at the hands of their parents. However, some of the effects on children's intellectual ability and their ability to learn as a result of cognitive deficits which result from undermining of the quality of parenting and family life in the first three years may not be apparent until those children get to grades 1 and 2, whereas a child's inability to control his aggression, which may lead to violent and/or anti-social behaviour if the abuse isn't picked up, may not show up until that's an older child or even into adolescence. It may not show up until quite a bit later.
I think one thing we can predict with confidence, though it's going to take some time to accumulate the evidence to prove it, is that the cumulative effect of multiple and repeated cuts will be to undermine the development of vulnerable children and to increase the incidence of family dysfunction, spousal and child abuse, chronic health problems, mental health problems in children and their parents, serious academic problems, anti-social and violent behaviour, substance abuse, teenage pregnancy, adolescent alienation and decreased productivity, a decreased number of productive adults who are able to contribute to rather than just take from society.
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I would suggest to you that this is going to serve as a Pandora's box, and it's going to be harder and it's going to be more expensive, both in human and economic terms, to undo the damage to our teenagers of 10 years from now who are showing the effects of today's multiple cuts to incomes and supports and social services.
I would suggest that there's a historical precedent here. In the late 1960s, the Ministry of Education, over the strong objections of many of its finest educators, decided to take away most of the standards in high school education, and as you know, we've been struggling for 30 years to build up standards of education again as a result of cuts that were made overnight with the stroke of a pen.
When we come to number 6, let's look at some of the specific cuts after those general comments. I'm going to say very little more about poverty, because it's been well talked about by the previous speaker. I have given you a graph prepared by the Centre for International Statistics -- it's on your page 3 -- that shows the difference in outcomes for children who are poor and children who are not poor. I would suggest to you that this is partly an issue of the economic deprivation of poverty, it's partly an issue of the lack of hope in the future that particularly those who can't see their way out of poverty experience, it's partly an issue of the increased rate of family dysfunction and particularly maternal depression and levels of violence and abuse within families that are highly concentrated in poor populations, and it's partly some of the effects that were being mentioned earlier such as the smoking, the drinking, the increased rate of teenage pregnancy. These are issues that are partly related also to peer pressures.
I'm not going to say much about cuts in the child care and junior kindergarten areas because I spoke about those exclusively the last time I was here. However, to remind you, I've reincluded two tables, one suggesting that the prerequisites for school readiness are the very prerequisites that tend to be increased by a good experience in child care, and I don't care whether it's parent care or whether it is home care or relative care or child care in a registered child care centre, whereas bad child care -- and again I don't care whether it's bad parent care or bad care in any one of those areas -- is likely to undermine the achievement of the skills they will need in order to learn successfully and also the capacity to control their aggression.
Finally, I've repeated the single sheet on the Perry Preschool Project to suggest to you that ensuring high-quality care in the kids who are most at risk of most of the outcomes that we would like to avoid can be achieved by high-quality child care over an extended period. I can't think of any investment that is more likely to pay off for the individual children and for the country and for the province than an investment in high-quality early childhood care and education.
Before we go on to page 6, here I'm talking about the effects of cuts in treatment for children's mental health problems. I want to remind you once again, as you would have gathered if you were at my previous presentation representing both the Sparrow Lake Alliance and Voices for Children, that our primary interest is not in just more treatment; we're very much interested in health promotion. We think it's better to get children off to a good start than to wait until they have entrenched problems and then try to spend long periods of time and a great deal of money trying to work the problems away.
However, you did ask for the effect of cuts in treatment for children's mental health problems. I think the first thing that I've listed on page 6 is the request for outpatient service in the department of psychiatry at the Hospital for Sick Children. The important column here is the last one, and it shows that in the last four years we have approximately four times as many coming to the hospital seeking treatment as was the case four years ago. In addition, there has been a doubling of the calls for so-called crisis intervention. This is when a family says, "We have to have help now because we can't live with this situation any longer." There are only three places in the Metropolitan Toronto area that give this kind of crisis care. It's given by the Hospital for Sick Children for anyone up to the age of 18; for younger children it can be given at the George Hull Centre; for older adolescents it can be given at Youthdale. Youthdale and the George Hull Centre now have waiting lists because they just can't keep up with the demand.
At the top of the next page I'm giving you the lists, the waiting time for an assessment -- that's not for treatment; that's just for an assessment -- in some Ontario facilities.
Fourth, in addition to there being longer waiting lists, there are decreased resources because staff and budget cuts have been going on for quite some time and, as a result, service availability has decreased. My own hospital, for example, if you look down to the fourth point, has cancelled a number of programs. It's cancelled an adolescent and pre-teen, it's cancelled a preschool treatment team and it's cancelled outpatient assessment and treatment for psychotic children which used to be given five days a week. It's now down to two days a week. Nobody else has made up those services.
The other problem, and this is not directly because of the cuts, is a lack of coordination throughout the children's mental health system. It wouldn't matter if one setting was cutting down on something if another setting was picking it up and you could balance things off. However, although representatives of the various settings have been meeting, nobody has or has been given the authority to coordinate resources except on a voluntary basis, and at a time when service demands far exceed service resources, resources are repeatedly being cut.
What you have in effect is a two-tiered system. If you happen to be wealthy, you can go out and purchase private care in the children's mental health area because there are lots of psychologists and child psychotherapists who can provide it, whereas if you aren't able to do that, you have to go on one of these long waiting lists regardless of the urgency of the situation.
Finally, at the bottom of that page I talk a little bit about the fact that families' perspectives are not particularly positive about this and they see roadblocks being thrown up all over the place. We're starting, our intake workers tell us, for first time to get calls from your colleagues, MPPs who are trying to see why there is such a logjam in the system and where they can go, and frankly we can't tell them where they can go because we don't --
Mr Laughren: Just opposition MPPs would make those calls, I assume.
Dr Steinhauer: I don't know. I'm sorry.
Finally, on page 9, I want to talk about the effects of reduction to funding of children's aid societies. I think that when you look at the effects of reductions of funding in children's aid societies, you've got to consider them in the context of the multiple stresses to which the families involved with child welfare issues are exposed. This leads to economic stresses for some families, housing stresses, neighbourhood stresses, employment conditions becoming stressful, mental health problems, child-related problems, adult relationships. The combined effect of multiple chronic stresses is more than the sum effect of the individual stresses taken singly.
There is, as a result, a rising and cumulative stress level that affects individuals and families by exaggerating existing personal psychological and interpersonal areas of weakness. That's how stress affects people. Any weaknesses they have as individuals or any weaknesses in their major personal relationships become inflamed and their ability to cope becomes whittled away if they're loaded with more stress.
Think of it. When you're particularly stressed, you're not going to be at your best in your human relationships or in the way you're functioning. If at the same time that you're increasing the stress, you're cutting down on the kinds of supports and services that vulnerable parents can use to get things back under control, the combination can be somewhat explosive.
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I think the combined effect of the exposure to multiple stresses and the diminished social supports and services for those families who experience both can be predicted: It's going to push many vulnerable but coping families past the breaking point, and for families that aren't coping well, it will make them cope even more poorly.
Children's aid societies, due to the effect of repeated budget cuts, are handling the pressure of increased demands for service -- and that's demands by families, demands by doctors and by mental health services -- by raising the threshold before which they will get involved. They are not getting involved these days -- and I've heard this from both Bruce Rivers and Dr Colin Maloney, the heads of the two children's aid societies in Toronto, and also from the director of the society in Simcoe county -- just not getting involved in kids who would have been in care for their own protection 10 years ago.
We're concerned here, first of all, about the number of children who are going to be abused, but we're also concerned particularly for infants and toddlers about the quality of parenting they receive in the first three years of life, when they are so vulnerable to the effects of poor parenting. This is one reason one of the first changes I think we're going to see is an increase in rates of child abuse and an increase in the number of children who die in their own homes.
Due to the cumulative effect of yearly cuts over the last few years, the quality of care that can be provided -- I should mention to you that for over 30 years, one of my major areas of interest has been consultation to children's aid societies to try to improve the quality of their understanding and functioning with some of these most disturbed children in society. I think things have reached a point where you can no longer count upon the fact that a child who is taken into care is going to receive even only adequate quality of care.
Children's aid societies of course are indirectly affected by cuts to other community support services as well. What is being dropped are programs designed to prevent children from coming into care, to support families who are at risk for neglecting and abusing, to support them to parent effectively, and to help youth in care who've had such a difficult time to prepare for independence successfully.
Finally, I want to comment briefly that the reduction in funding for programs for children with disabilities is basically having the effect of limiting the potential of many of those children, and taking the additional stresses and the additional demands these children create away from society and putting it on their families, to sink or swim.
With that having been said, I would welcome any comments or any questions.
Mr Gerard Kennedy (York South): I want to compliment you on your report. It brings together a lot of the academic and learned work about children with what is the day-to-day experience out there. It describes in some detail and with some technical support the feelings I have seen parents, in food banks particularly, unable to really articulate, the pressures they're feeling, the multiple sources for those pressures.
Given the changes, particularly in the last year -- as you note, there are pre-existing pressures which recent budget cuts have been performed upon -- but strictly in the last year, can you comment on the minimums in the act which governs child welfare in this province and the objectives of the welfare in providing basic minimums for children. I wonder whether we've gone below an acceptable state and, if so, how far below? How much accelerated can we see the risk for most of these factors, which have been identified by research which is now several years old, for different times? For example, the offered research is at a time when we had many fewer people out of work, many fewer people on welfare and many fewer children as part of those families.
Dr Steinhauer: I wish I could answer your question, but I can't say how far below. I certainly feel we were already below, even before the latest round of cuts, and we are getting further below all the time. That isn't that I'm saying the answer is just to handle everything by specialized treatments. My goal primarily -- I've devoted the last seven years to trying to help parents get most children off to a better start and to mobilize the community to support families to do this.
It's unacceptable. It's hard to acknowledge that your child is having a major problem. Most people would hate to go and get help for that, and they avoid it until someone, often the school or a family doctor, finally presses them into it. Then to get to the point where you've actually done this and be told, "Sorry, but we can't do anything for eight months," and the child may at this point be out of control or his anxiety is so great that the child isn't attending school -- this represents an intolerable situation. It shouldn't be this way.
Mr Kennedy: You certainly agree that we are beyond the point of minimums, where we're now starting to generate problems that are not to do with the natural environment out there but have to do with how we respond to it.
Dr Steinhauer: Absolutely.
Mr Rick Bartolucci (Sudbury): Doctor, thank you very much for the excellent material, and certainly it does reflect reality in society nowadays. You've commented that children's aid societies can't keep up with the demand for their services so they raise their threshold. You and the previous speaker and previous speakers on other days have indicated that adolescent programs have suffered, and we all are concerned with the rise in youth crime. Is there any correlation, or could you give us some reasons there is this increase in youth crime?
Dr Steinhauer: I presented last week to the standing committee on justice and legal affairs in the House of Commons, and I think there are a number of factors. I think one of the major ones is the decreased time parents have to spend with children during that critical first three years. Two of the qualities that have been very strongly correlated with not becoming delinquent are the capacity to form empathic relationships and the ability to control feelings and not have them bubbling over all the time.
Someone mentioned Dr Richard Tremblay, who's done outstanding work in prevention of violence in the public schools. He lists a triad of three factors which allow him to identify in kindergarten children who are likely to go on to become delinquent and/or violent in adolescence. If there is a capacity for empathy with others, which is a direct result of having had a satisfactory attachment, which in turn is a direct result of having had high-quality parenting and child care in the first two years of life, the risk is cut by four fifths. That's one major factor.
A second factor has got to be the frustration that everybody in society is feeling.
Another factor has got to be the overloading with violence on television, which for some reason or other seems to tend to create violent behaviour in kids who are poorly parented but not in kids who are well parented. I don't know whether that's because the well-parented kids aren't allowed to watch as much of it, or whether having had a good attachment serves as a protector against it.
But certainly the degree of selfishness, the tone in our society -- if you look at the letters to the editor of a paper, people aren't just putting a point forward, but in roughly a third of them every day, someone is trying to rip out somebody's guts in the process of making a point. We have not become, if you look at the way people drive these days, a society that is interested in understanding somebody else's point of view and working things out. We want what we want, and to hell with everybody else.
Mr Laughren: You've seen Bartolucci drive.
Mr Bartolucci: Only after question period.
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Mr Laughren: I know everything doesn't come down to dollars and cents, but there's no question that the cuts we've seen, and I don't think the government would deny this, are to save money; it's not to give us a better society so much as to save money. They would argue that at the end of the day that gives you a better society. I understand that. But you say in your paper that for every dollar spent on kids in these areas, there's a $7 saving. How do you deal with the time lag there? Everybody would jump at spending a dollar to save seven; even crazy finance ministers would jump at that opportunity if they were convinced they'd see that saving in their lifetime -- or in their first mandate.
Dr Steinhauer: I would say two things, Mr Laughren. First of all, I don't think a dollar spent on children is going to save $7; I think it's a dollar spent in certain ways on children, and on a certain group of children, the most high-risk children. Otherwise, the savings are going to be less dramatic, although I think the savings can still be there.
I recognize that there's a need for cuts, and there are areas where cuts could be handled if they were solidly based, if what we know from research were used to direct the scalpel. But my concern has been -- and this is not just this government; our problems didn't just begin when this government came into office, although they have accelerated since then. But the problem has been that the cutting has been with a blunt axe rather than with a scalpel. Research can tell us some of the things we could safely cut without doing violence to too many people. But I think we haven't been using those principles.
Next, as far as the public is concerned, I think the public has to hear things again and again.
As to that time lag, we've got two problems there. One is politicians, who tend to think in terms of, "What can I do that will bear fruit by one year before the next election?" The other thing is the general public; the general public has to be much more on side.
You talked about the attitude in the general public, which I think was beautifully analysed by the Ekos research group up in Ottawa, who talked about the number of people who themselves are feeling embittered. They're working harder, they're taking home less, their real income is less, and they're angry about it and they're insecure about their future. They've needed a scapegoat, and they've taken two groups; one of them is big government and the other is anyone who is getting anything from government.
I don't think it's fair to say that we don't care about children. I think we care about children, but I think we care mostly about our children and our friends' children. We've got that North American attitude that other people, the people who screw up when it comes to bringing up their children, are responsible and they should be ashamed and that's not our problem. Well, it is our problem, because we have to live with the effect of those kids on our streets.
Mrs Munro: We appreciate the opportunity to have you here again and listen to your comments. There are a couple of questions I have, and they relate directly to the comments you just made when you were talking about the fact that this is a fairly long-term thing, in terms of the fact that we're looking at cuts for a long time. I noticed in the material you brought the chart that was 1983, so obviously there are some long-term things that you have identified here. I have two questions. First, could you identify for us a time when you think it was a better time in terms of an appropriate level of funding?
Dr Steinhauer: I think, of course, in the late 1970s and in the early 1980s. I can't talk about all systems, but I do think, from the two systems in which I've worked, which have been the children's mental health system and the child welfare system, it was possible. I can remember in those days thinking it would be really useful for a child to bring that child into care. Now I really shudder before I take a child into care and I would only consider it when I am so sure that that family is going to be so damaging. I've always been reluctant about taking kids out of families. The point is that at one time I could be sure there would be careful planning and continuity and that workers would have the time to work well with the child and the foster parents. With the amount of time each worker has now to spend on each case, I think the situation has deteriorated greatly since then.
Mrs Munro: My second question is related to the fact that obviously this government has made a commitment to the reinvestment of dollars. We're talking about $5 million for the children's nutrition program and the reinvestment of money in health care, as well as $600 million in child care. When you talk about the scalpel approach, how would you spend that $600 million?
Dr Steinhauer: I think the first thing I would do is sit down with a number of leading people, preferably people who weren't the director of a particular service or weren't limited to a single service area or a single profession, and I would really try to get them to give the pros and cons of a number of alternatives. Certainly some of that money I would commit to the kind of prevention services I was talking about last week, home visiting, which I know is an area you have earmarked some money for.
Second -- I really haven't resolved in my own mind the best way of getting more kids who need it high-quality child care, but that certainly is something where the payoff is great. As you get to children who are older, who have more difficult problems, they represent a less satisfying investment, because you're going to get less bang for your buck. On the other hand, those kids are much harder for society and they're much harder on society. Somehow, it's the balance between dealing with established problems but with a good healthy emphasis, purely on health promotion, for children at risk.
The Chair: Doctor, thank you very kindly for coming again today and giving such excellent testimony and information. We really appreciate it very much.
The committee will recess to set up our teleconferencing call with Chris Sarlo from Nipissing University.
The committee recessed from 1648 to 1721.
CHILD POVERTY ACTION GROUP
The Chair: We reconvene the committee meeting and call our next witnesses, the Child Poverty Action Group. Welcome. Thank you for taking the time to prepare and come visit us. I ask that you introduce yourselves, and please proceed.
Ms Christa Freiler: So we're on before your teleconference?
The Chair: Yes. We have to reschedule it.
Ms Freiler: My name is Christa Freiler, and I'm the program director with the Child Poverty Action Group. I am joined today by my colleagues Susan McGrath and Dr Brigitte Kitchen, and we're going to be sharing the presentation. We hope to take no longer than about 15 minutes in presenting, and then we'd have time for your questions.
The Child Poverty Action Group, as you may know, is a public interest advocacy and research organization committed to ending child poverty in Canada. We were founded in 1985 and we are active members of Campaign 2000, which you may have heard of. We'd like to thank you very much for the opportunity to appear before you today.
In our presentation, we would like to focus on three points:
(1) The social spending cuts in Ontario reflect, from our point of view, a policy of both abandonment and betrayal of families and children being carried out by both the federal and the Ontario governments.
(2) Municipalities, communities and individual families cannot possibly compensate for the withdrawal of support from the two senior levels of government.
(3) It is not only individual families and children who will suffer; it is all Ontarians. Social cohesion and the quality of life in our communities will deteriorate.
First I want to talk briefly about the federal abandonment, which we think happened first, followed by provincial betrayal. The cuts to social programs couldn't be occurring at a worse time. Not since the Depression has the labour market been less successful in providing economic security for families. We've all heard about the high unemployment, corporate downsizing, the growth of the contingent workforce and public sector dismissals, which are all contributing to the increasing vulnerability and poverty of families.
In the past, we've had social programs to protect family incomes and to support families in times of stress. Now just the opposite is happening. The social institutions we all built up over the last four or five decades to protect against risk are being dismantled at precisely the same time as the risk of insecure or no employment is growing for families.
With the introduction of the Canada health and social transfer, the most recent changes to unemployment insurance and the withdrawal from its child care commitment, the federal government has virtually abandoned families with children to the provinces. So how has Ontario responded?
The question I think is partly answered by your terms of reference, which list the cuts we've seen in the last year. There is no question that the federal government set the stage for the assault on families with children which we're seeing in some provinces, yet not all Canadian provinces have responded in the same way. Provincial governments do exercise choices about how they address the CHST. While Ontario and Alberta are cutting services and benefits, British Columbia and Saskatchewan, for example, are currently introducing new provincial child benefit programs for modest- and low-income families.
I'll turn it over to Susan McGrath to talk about municipalities, communities and families.
Ms Susan McGrath: The second point we want to make is that these municipalities, communities and families cannot fill the gap that is left by public withdrawal of support. We've already seen that municipalities are stretched to their limits. They're having to deal with the fallout from the decisions of the other two levels of government. As we saw on the weekend, the Toronto Star recorded some difficulties that municipalities are experiencing in trying to cope with reductions. The Metro Toronto community services commissioner has been quoted as saying: "When will we have cut too much? What is the critical point when we will have done too much damage?"
Reduced funding has severely constrained the capacity of municipal governments to maintain public services which they deliver. The coping mechanisms used by municipal governments include user fees, cutting staff, replacing highly skilled workers with less skilled staff, reducing hours of operation and closing some public facilities such as parks and conservation areas completely.
The second group runs community agencies. They feel less able to assist the people they wish to serve with the cutbacks. The community agency survey done here in Toronto found that over 100 programs had already been cancelled in 1995. Again, the agencies are using similar strategies as the municipalities: They are increasing user fees, reducing paid staff hours, increasing volunteer staff hours, and despite these compensating strategies they cannot cope with the reduction in government funds. There's an attached table here that shows you that a 15% government cut means all other sources, such as the United Way, must contribute 50% more money. The capacity is not there.
The third area is that we're expecting more and more of families in terms of informal supports. I think you've heard about the difficulties families are having in struggling to survive. There's increased use of food banks, clothing depots and shelters, which reflects the erosion of a basic income floor that was once provided by our social security system.
Pressures on families struggling to survive provide a glimpse of what is going wrong in our communities. In the end, we will have to pay for the damage done to the children and their parents by these unwise spending cuts. Brigitte will address the third point.
Dr Brigitte Kitchen: We see these changes as a serious threat to community cohesion. There is mounting research evidence showing the relationship between harmony or cohesion in a society and a healthy community. Trust, reciprocity and limited disparities in income are all essential to wealth generation.
How do social spending cuts threaten social cohesion? First, social spending cuts have sharpened the social divisions in Ontario society even more than the disparities poured on by the economic recession of the 1990s. Significant income disparities existed prior to 1995, as the table we have attached shows. Incomes of the bottom 60% of families with children fell from 1981 to 1993 while incomes of the top 40% went up. Welfare rate cuts and tax cuts will only exacerbate these inequalities.
Second, as more people are driven into poverty and desperation, we can expect to see an increase in what are being called crimes of poverty. A Nova Scotia study found that the number of charges for theft under $1,000 generally increased in August and peaked in December, times when mothers could be under unusual pressure to supply school clothes and Christmas presents.
Third, social spending cuts of the magnitude and sort we have seen in Ontario impede the healthy development of children. It is well known that poverty poses a major developmental risk for children. In addition, many service cuts have been to preventive programs which might have ameliorated some of poverty's effects. For example, some municipalities have had to eliminate public health programs which provide support to new moms.
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We cannot afford to squander the lives of children growing up in poverty. We need everyone's talents and contributions. A healthy society requires healthy children.
We have a choice. "We either invest in civic development and social cohesion as common goods or provide services to contain disparities (such as prisons and gated communities) and protect the civil enclaves of the advantaged."
We join Michael Novak, a conservative theologian in the United States, in calling for a new ethic in corporate and government responsibility to strengthen the moral basis of the market system. Neither government nor the business sector can shut its eyes to the social destructiveness of current unrestrained market forces.
What should Ontario be doing? In the short run, we recommend two things: First, support the western premiers in calling for a national coordinated strategy to end child poverty, a priority item the premiers will be addressing at the first ministers' meeting in Ottawa later this week; and secondly, place a moratorium on further cuts to social spending in this province.
In the longer run, Ontario should heed the words of the editor of the Global Competitiveness Report, "The more market forces come into full play at the global level, the more governments and corporations will have to rethink, recalibrate their social role."
Recalibrating their social role requires the Ontario and federal government to be active and provide leadership in social policy. For the provincial government, this means preserving and enhancing the integrity of public institutions in our cities and across Ontario. The government of Ontario has a moral and constitutional responsibility to invest in the wellbeing of all Ontario's families and children.
Mr Laughren: I don't know all these folks well, but I certainly know of some work that Dr Kitchen has done, which is invariably good work, and I appreciate that.
You used some very tough words in your brief such as "abandonment," "betrayal," "assault on families." I wonder what provokes that kind of very strong language and I couldn't help but notice in your paper and in your comments references to limits.
Where are the limits on cuts to social programs and who knows where those limits are and when they've reached the point where society as a whole rebels and says -- right now there's a fair amount of applause for what the government is doing out there; I don't think anybody should kid themselves about that, but I don't think the ramifications are being felt very much yet. I wonder whether or not there's a way you have, or anybody you know, of tracking the way these things happen when cuts occur, what the ramifications are out there in the community, given all the things that can happen with cuts. Is there any way that can be tracked and some kind of analysis done on it?
Ms Freiler: There are probably 75 or 80 tracking projects going on in Metro Toronto and there must be hundreds across the country. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities, for example, being at the receiving end of a lot of this, has a project that's going to track the impacts in about eight or 10 municipalities across the country because some of these are provincial problems; a lot of them are national problems.
The Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto and a number of other organizations and Metro community services were involved in tracking the impacts on agencies. Part of it has to do with getting information. The biggest problem I think is tracking the cumulative effects. Metro community services has been very good in pointing out that nobody seems to be aware of the fact that cumulative effects of federal and provincial changes, cuts to agencies, are really very serious; people may be tracking the impact of the CHST or provincial cuts, but it's obviously going to require collaboration and a longer time frame to track cumulative cuts. There are all sorts of organizations that have begun to do that.
Dr Kitchen: The basic measurement is, do we have healthy, productive children in the end or don't we? We look at what is happening in the United States, where more and more people are forced to live on the margin, what has happened in Great Britain and what has happened in New Zealand. Of course there is a limit to what you can do to people, and the limit is when the destructiveness of the policy decisions that are being implemented do such damage to the social fabric of society that they become totally unacceptable.
We can argue, in the interests of whose children are these cuts being implemented? If my children are going to benefit on the backs of poor children who are denied a future in this province, I don't think I want to be part of these kinds of decisions. That is a very dangerous kind of society and that's why we're using such strong language. We are very perturbed by what is happening.
Mr Laughren: I remember years ago talking to the head of a large company who had just gone through a massive downsizing and layoffs and I asked him how he knew when he had laid off too many people; it was a very big company. He said, "Well, the intention is to lay off more than you should because otherwise you'll never know how deeply you could have cut." When I look at what's happening here in Ontario I wonder whether that's not the thinking that underlies these cuts as well, not just the cuts to welfare rates to pay for a tax cut for well-off people but also the cuts in programs that are out there. I wonder whether or not that's what is behind it all: to adopt that corporate philosophy of cutting deeper than you know you should, otherwise you'll never know how deeply you could have cut.
Ms Freiler: It's interesting you should use the example of the corporate philosophy, because we've probably all been reading in the papers recently that a number of architects of corporate downsizing as a strategy have recently said they're sorry and regret having done it. A number of them have admitted that they've made a mistake, so maybe if we wait long enough the same realization will occur within the government. It didn't work in the corporate sector. They feel they've gone too far; they see what's happening. As Brigitte pointed out, we don't need to look at just our own social indicators. Given that there are a number of countries that have been trying this strategy, we need only look to them.
Mrs Ecker: One thing I'm a little concerned about is the use of figures and statistics when we discuss what's happening. When you look at the use of the Daily Bread Food Bank, some of the figures they were releasing, for example, under the Liberals in 1989 it had doubled from what it was in 1986. In September 1989 you had the Toronto Star talking about a 100% increase in the number of people using food banks since 1986, and under the NDP there were dramatic increases in the number of people using food banks at the same time that welfare rates and spending on social programs were going up. Why would food banks and that kind of use go up when social assistance spending is going up and now you're saying that it's going up because social assistance spending is going down?
Ms Freiler: You probably have greater expertise around your table than we do around ours on that one, but there were other things happening. There's an elasticity in food that there isn't in shelter costs, for example. Housing costs were also going up at that time. Welfare rates were going up because housing costs were going up.
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Mrs Ecker: Money paid to welfare recipients was going up.
Ms Freiler: I know, but it was partially covering their housing costs. Remember, housing costs went up for many, many years in Ontario, and partially, welfare rates went up so people can afford a place to live. It seems that what always has had to go is people's spending on food.
Mrs Ecker: So rent control didn't help during that time?
Dr Kitchen: Can I answer this? Our group, with family services and the Metro social planning council, did a study called The Outsiders. We followed a statistical group of younger families, those under the age of 34, over a period of three years, and these were the so-called good years when the economy was growing, when we were prospering as a society --
Mrs Ecker: And welfare rates were going up again.
Dr Kitchen: And you're quite right. That's when there was also an increase in poverty, which was purely the product of what was happening in the labour market. Since the 1981-82 recession, we have never caught up economically, so the younger families were never given the same chance in the 1980s that the previous generation had in the 1970s. You have this already very weak labour market, as far as the younger families are concerned, and then we were hit by a recession. Of course the major driving force for the economic security of families is the labour market, it's the economy, and then comes government. But when the two fail families, then we have a disaster on our hands, and that's what we're here to draw your attention to right now. We're not saying that it is entirely because of the betrayal of government. It's also because of the downsizing and restructuring that was happening in the labour market.
Mrs Ecker: Even the previous government made comments about the increase in spending on welfare. Tony Silipo talked about recognizing the problem of needing to spend the welfare money better because it was inefficient, wasn't creating the kind of support you needed. How much welfare spending do we need? How much is enough? We're spending more now than other provinces per capita. How much is enough?
Dr Kitchen: We would agree that it is impossible to try and save the economic problems. The people displaced by the corporate sector, just with government social programs -- the two have to go hand in hand, and that has always been the Canadian tradition since 1945, that we had a full employment policy and a very strong proactive social security policy. The two have to be seen as being connected, and you can't treat them separately.
Mrs Ecker: I agree. Economic growth and employment growth would be very helpful.
Mr Newman: My question is for the speaker on the far end. I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name.
Dr Kitchen: I'm Brigitte Kitchen.
Mr Newman: You mention children and their futures. I think we all care about the future of children. My question is, what effect do the $100-billion debt and $10-billion annual deficits have on the future of children in Ontario? Do you feel it robs our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of their futures?
Dr Kitchen: I think I already addressed this issue. We perfectly well realize that the debt is a problem, that it is a problem for us, that it is a problem for future generations. What we're trying to point out is that there are other ways of addressing the very serious problem of the debt, and we cannot fight the debt problem on the back of poor families and poor children.
Mr Newman: How would you solve it? Where would you make reductions?
Dr Kitchen: Where? Instead of having a tax cut --
Mr Newman: Would you increase taxation?
Dr Kitchen: The NDP government, and I blame them for this, had a Fair Tax Commission set up which produced a great number of proposals that would have increased the revenue to the government of Ontario. They didn't follow it.
Mr Newman: So is increased taxation the answer?
Dr Kitchen: No. A fair and equitable tax is, though.
Mr Newman: You mentioned an increase in revenue --
The Chair: I'm sorry, Dan, you've gone over your time. The Liberal caucus has the floor
Mr Kennedy: I don't want to take away from your time, but a question was raised about the use of food banks. I think it's very clear to anyone who wants to look closely at the record that food bank demand went up because of the cost of high rent, because of the fact that welfare wasn't increased for inflation in the 1970s by the Conservative government and there was catch-up that had to be done. Only a partial catch-up was possible. Immediately upon welfare being increased, food bank demand went down. It's there to be seen in the same clippings Ms Ecker cites. There is a relationship, obviously, to the amount of support available.
I was interested in Dr Kitchen's comments about the idea of government trying to bring back some ethics, that it can't just sit quietly and supinely when there's a 54% increase in children going hungry directly attributable to its policies, the direct connection between the cost of a loaf of bread, the cost of rent, which is 30% to 40% higher in these cities, and then have that government, with its resources, still cut the money away from those families and from those children and still act puzzled about it.
The ethical part -- you talked about a conservative theologian in some of the questioning. I know there's a lot of it going on in cities around Ontario, the different non-partisan groups that have been formed to try to look at the whole question of, how can we sit by when so many people are in evident suffering? I wonder if you could comment on that a bit more perhaps to help this committee when it goes behind closed doors trying to find some common ground on direction, the ethical part of what you raised?
Ms Freiler: Just one example: There is a momentum to create a conscientious objector status for people who don't want their tax cuts, and I think that's one of the things we're seeing across communities in Ontario. A number of church-led organizations are trying to come up with a way for people to give the money to something else and not take it, in the same way that conscientious objectors would object to other things that they feel morally opposed to.
Mrs Ecker: You can do that on next year's income tax form. There's a box for you to do that.
Ms Freiler: Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought what you have on the income tax form is something that allows people to give it back and put it directly towards the deficit. That's not what I'm talking about.
Can I just quickly say something about raising taxes? The province of Saskatchewan managed to balance its budget not that long ago, essentially in the same climate as we're in now, by raising taxes. It's not an unheard-of thing in this country in the last five or 10 years. They raised taxes and the government was re-elected. It is possible to do.
Mrs Ecker: No, it wasn't.
Ms McGrath: I'd like to add that I think the issue around the moral responsibility as a society -- and we're talking about, what's the bottom line? Where are we going to fall? It seems to me as if it's going to be dependent on popularity polls, and I think we have to have a richer and more meaningful discussion than around that.
People are not truly informed. People are looking at the short-term needs and in terms of, whose children are benefiting? That's the discussion we have to have. Look at the children who are not benefitting. If a government and a society are prepared to sacrifice one generation of children -- it seems the generation now it's prepared to sacrifice -- then it's prepared to sacrifice any generation of children. To think we're doing these cuts for some future child is very shortsighted and is not being honest. Either we protect and serve the children of today, or our responsibility to children is being questioned in the long term.
Mrs Pupatello: Thank you so much for coming today. Many of the presentations that come forward deal with statistics, and I think we can all use statistics one way or another to serve the message of the day that the government is trying to get out there. Can you put something in more of a format that really means something to people? What are the negative effects of the current Conservative government on children in Ontario? Getting away from numbers -- because it's very hard to comprehend; millions of children is just too big to comprehend -- give us a specific example, for example.
Ms Freiler: We've deliberately chosen not to come at the question like that because we're assuming you've got a lot of people -- you had Paul Steinhauer talking earlier, you've had the children's aid societies, you've had all sorts of people --
Mrs Pupatello: A lot of statistics, that's the thing.
Ms Freiler: Do they just give statistics? We're not an organization that works directly with families and children. We hear anecdotally, we read what's in the newspapers and we also know the statistics. What we were trying to do is get the committee to look beyond just what the impacts on the individual people are -- not that that isn't important -- but to point out that the impacts to our society as a whole are as important.
If we were to make a recommendation, it would be that when you're writing your reports, expand your mandate and your focus, not just to focus on what's happening to individual people. That may be devastating, but I think what's going to happen to the province of Ontario in the future is equally devastating, and I think it should be an equally important focus of your deliberations and your recommendations.
Dr Kitchen: You see, you don't need statistics, you just need common sense to know that children need to have adequate food, that they need to have adequate housing, that they need a stable environment where they can feel safe to develop as healthy, productive future citizens.
Mrs Pupatello: Would you say now the majority of children in Ontario do not have that?
Mrs Helen Johns (Huron): The majority?
Mrs Pupatello: What are you saying, that that's what we need? Where are we at now?
Dr Kitchen: We are saying that 1.2 million children in Canada are living in poverty. The vast majority of them live in Ontario because this happens to be the largest province, so the majority of poor children live right here. Their future is at risk and we would argue that because their future is at risk, so is the future of all children, because I think the harshness, the cruelty, the destructiveness really filters down. What kind of example are we setting for future generations?
Ms Freiler: We talk about child poverty and we call ourselves that, but we're not only concerned about those children below that artificial line. "Poverty" is a relative term. People see themselves in relation to other people.
Mrs Pupatello: One of the presenters today made that point.
The Chair: Sorry, folks, our time is up. We're limited to a certain amount of time at committee. I want to thank you very much for your preparation, your presentation. You've stimulated a lively debate, and thank you very much for coming.
We will recess until Monday at 3:30. The subcommittee will convene across the hall in 210.
The committee adjourned at 1752.