WELLAND AND DISTRICT LABOUR COUNCIL
ST CATHARINES AND DISTRICT LABOUR COUNCIL
NIAGARA REGIONAL CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE
ONTARIO SOCIAL SAFETY NETWORK WORKFARE WATCH PROJECT
JOHN HOWARD SOCIETY OF NIAGARA
GOLDEN HORSESHOE SOCIAL ACTION COMMITTEE
CONTENTS
Tuesday 18 August 1998
Prevention of Unionization Act (Ontario Works), 1998, Bill 22, Mrs Ecker /
Loi de 1998 visant à empêcher la syndicalisation (programme Ontario au travail),
projet de loi 22, Mme Ecker
Welland and District Labour Council
Mr Bob McCallion
St Catharines and District Labour Council
Mr Ed Gould
Niagara Regional Chambers of Commerce
Ms Kathy Bissell
Mr Peter Jurmain
Ontario Social Safety Network; Workfare Watch Project
Rev Susan Eagle
Hamilton Against Poverty
Ms Julie Gordon
Mr Willie Lambert
Mr Gary Shillington
John Howard Society of Niagara
Mr Jim Wells
Golden Horseshoe Social Action Committee
Mrs Linda Rogers
STANDING COMMITTEE ON ADMINISTRATION OF JUSTICE
Chair / Président
Mr Jerry J. Ouellette (Oshawa PC)
Vice-Chair / Vice-Président
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte PC)
Mr Dave Boushy (Sarnia PC)
Mr Bruce Crozier (Essex South / -Sud L)
Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold ND)
Mr Gerry Martiniuk (Cambridge PC)
Mr Jerry J. Ouellette (Oshawa PC)
Mr David Ramsay (Timiskaming L)
Mr E.J. Douglas Rollins (Quinte PC)
Mr R. Gary Stewart (Peterborough PC)
Mr Bob Wood (London South / -Sud PC)
Substitutions / Membres remplaçants
Mr Dominic Agostino (Hamilton East / -Est L)
Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent PC)
Mr Frank Klees (York-Mackenzie PC)
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North / -Nord PC)
Clerk / Greffier
Mr Douglas Arnott
Staff / Personnel
Mr Avrum Fenson, research officer, Legislative Research Service
The committee met at 1002 in the Ramada Parkway Inn, St Catharines.
PREVENTION OF UNIONIZATION ACT (ONTARIO WORKS), 1998 LOI DE 1998 VISANT À EMPÊCHER LA SYNDICALISATION (PROGRAMME ONTARIO AU TRAVAIL)
Consideration of Bill 22, An Act to Prevent Unionization with respect to Community Participation under the Ontario Works Act, 1997 / Projet de loi 22, Loi visant à empêcher la syndicalisation en ce qui concerne la participation communautaire visée par la Loi de 1997 sur le programme Ontario au travail.
WELLAND AND DISTRICT LABOUR COUNCIL
The Chair (Mr Jerry J. Ouellette): Good morning. I call the standing committee on administration of justice to order. I'd like to welcome everybody to St Catharines this morning.
We would call upon our first presenter, the Welland and District Labour Council, to come forward. Just so you know, there's a total time allotted of 30 minutes. At the conclusion of any presentation you have, the time is divided equally between the three caucuses. If you could identify yourself for Hansard, we would greatly appreciate it. You may begin.
Mr Bob McCallion: My name is Bob McCallion. I'm the president of Welland and District Labour Council. Good morning.
I'm appearing today on behalf of the Welland and District Labour Council. The Welland labour council is a voice for approximately 4,000 unionized workers in the Welland area. We also speak on behalf of those who have no collective voice, people who are systemically attacked by our present governments, both provincial and federal: the poor, unemployed, people on social assistance, injured workers, the working poor and children.
The legislation we're discussing today has no place in this province, country and indeed in this century. It is, in its ideological zeal, punitive, repressive, anti-human rights; quite simply, it is an abomination, an unbridled, unwarranted attack on the least fortunate citizens of our community.
Perhaps the members of government have forgotten that the union movement has been a most powerful force in improving the quality of life, upholding workers' dignity, improving health and safety and fighting for a fair wage for the majority of our citizens. Unions are about raising people up, not about pushing them down. Perhaps that's why our government is bringing this legislation forward: because they care more for the corporate agenda than they do for justice for ordinary people.
Bill 22 violates the spirit and letter of the law in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such areas as section 1, guarantees of rights and freedoms; section 2(d), freedom of association; section 7, life, liberty and security of person; section 15, equality rights.
It further violates the spirit and letter of these International Labour Organization, ILO, human rights core conventions: 29, the forced labour convention; 87, the freedom of association and protection of the right to organize convention; 98, the right to organize and collective bargaining; 100, the equal remuneration convention; 105, the abolition of forced labour convention; 111, discrimination of employment and occupation; and 138, the minimum age convention. These violations alone are ample reasons to rescind this law.
The notion that mandatory workfare promotes self-sufficiency and self-esteem deserves a close second look. In North America, as in most societies, meaningful work serves as an important role in people defining their self-worth. It is therefore not unusual to have some workfare participants expressing satisfaction with their work. But the question remains, if workfare jobs are useful, and not all are, do they not deserve a rate of pay which reflects their value to society?
Upon examination, the term "self-sufficiency" implies economic independence, of being free from dependence on government assistance. The fact is that workfare programs do not promote this. Participants in workfare programs continue to receive their social assistance cheques. Workfare reinforces dependency on the state, locking the poor into unskilled, unpaid work. In the state of New York, which has had a workfare program since 1971, some welfare recipients have worked for welfare for years.
When we carefully analyze the assumption that workfare teaches new skills and training opportunities and increases the participants' employability, we find that this has not been substantiated by the evidence. In the United States, the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp evaluated several workfare programs. One such evaluation of the San Diego county workfare program concluded clearly that, "Most (workfare) jobs were entry-level and did not result in substantial skills improvement," and further overall, "Neither program led to consistent or substantial increases in employment or earnings."
Workfare participants are specifically excluded from the Employment Standards Act, and with the passage of the Prevention of Unionization Act, Bill 22, they will be denied the legal right to freely join a union or collectively bargain. These measures put workfare placements at the mercy of unscrupulous employers who will be happy to exploit and abuse the most vulnerable in our community for their own profit. The bad boss hotline set up by the Ontario Federation of Labour documented that cheating, exploiting and abusing workers is common and widespread in many Ontario workplaces.
"All people in Ontario are entitled to an equal assurance of life opportunities in a society that is based on fairness, shared responsibility, and personal dignity for all. The objective of social assistance, therefore, must be to ensure that individuals are able to make the transition from dependence to autonomy and from exclusion on the margins of society to integration within the mainstream of community life."
From our perspective, we have always believed that as a society we have a responsibility to each other. An important vehicle for accomplishing this is government. For us, government has a responsibility to ensure that the people of Ontario have access to quality services when and where they are needed. At the founding convention of the Ontario Federation of Labour in March 1957, a resolution was passed which called on the Ontario government to: "...accept their responsibility and bring about a realistic program of public welfare based on current needs...a program that will provide and maintain a minimum standard of health and respectability, both physical and emotional."
This government has shown that it's quite willing to engage in the exercise of identifying and punishing a particular group as a means of building and maintaining political support. The name for this is "scapegoating" and throughout history it has often been successful. In this case, it is the poor and needy who are the scapegoats. By not sharing the facts, the government encourages the belief that the decent, hard-working people of Ontario are being defrauded by the people on social assistance.
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A simple point to be made is that an administrative error which results in overpayment and underpayment should not be equated with fraud. In 1997, in the course of the hearings on Bill 142, the standing committee on social development was given information on the experiences of a number of organizations -- the Ministry of Community and Social Services and Metropolitan Toronto -- which had examined their case files for cases of possible criminal fraud. In both cases the result was that less than 0.5% of the caseload was involved in any criminal referral to the police.
Of particular interest is the record of the government's own welfare fraud hotline which was established in 1995. As of March 1997, of 18,655 calls, a total of 92 had been referred to the police, 32 had actually been referred to a crown attorney and there had been 18 charges and nine convictions. This was at a time when over 600,000 people were getting social assistance every month as singles or as heads of families.
The 1992 experience of Metropolitan Toronto with its fraud line found that less than half of the people reported were on assistance.
What people want and need are opportunities to upgrade their education and skill levels. They want and need employment --
Mr Peter Kormos (Welland-Thorold): Excuse me just a minute, Brother McCallion. Mr Klees, the co-parliamentary assistant, has abducted the only journalist here.
The Chair: Order, Mr Kormos.
Mr Kormos: Well, wait a minute. In the eyes and ears of the public, why should Mr McCallion --
The Chair: Order, Mr Kormos. Mr McCallion, you may continue.
Mr McCallion: I'd just like to state for the record that maybe that's indicative of how he feels about the working people in Ontario. I'm absolutely outraged. Thanks for drawing my attention to that, Mr Kormos. It's obvious the guy doesn't have any concern for us. I've spent a lot of time preparing this. I'm speaking on behalf of 4,000 workers, and if he doesn't give a damn, he shouldn't be taking his salary. I'm really outraged.
Mr Kormos: Were it anybody other than the parliamentary assistant --
The Chair: Order, Mr Kormos. This is the presenter's time.
Mr McCallion: I'll certainly be issuing a press release to that effect. In fact, if there's any way I can lodge a formal complaint -- this guy is getting good money here and he's not doing his job. If he worked in an industry, he'd be in some sort of problem. This ain't a game for me. I've taken a tremendous amount of time and I'm spending the workers' money to be here today, so this guy should be here to damn well listen.
I'll carry on, now that I've regained my composure.
What people want and need are opportunities to upgrade their education and skill levels. They want and need employment supports such as access to quality, affordable child care when they are seeking or when they're at work. This should be seen as an investment in the future social stability and prosperity of our province.
Instead, this government is attracted to the concept of workfare, which to us means conscripted labour as a condition of social assistance. With the demise of the Canada assistance plan and its replacement by the Canada Health and Social Transfer Act, provinces can now implement programs such as workfare.
Workfare schemes are useful for governments because they make the system more complex. They provide more opportunity to disqualify recipients, thereby decreasing their numbers, thereby saving money. It is a form of punishment imposed on some of our fellow citizens who have not got the resources to resist its imposition. It creates a pool of second-class workers and citizens who can be used or ignored, depending on need or whim of the rich and powerful in our society. We are being ignored now by Mr Klees.
In Ontario, the conscripted workers under this program will organize themselves in order to be treated as the first-class citizens they are. They will be assisted every step of the way by the labour movement and by a wide variety of fair-minded groups and individuals. The continuing actions against workfare in communities across Ontario are only the beginning of this process.
In conclusion, Bill 22 will stop no one from working for a better, more inclusive Ontario for all the citizens of this province.
The government should implement a variety of positive initiatives, such as (1) scrap Bill 22; (2) scrap the workfare program; (3) engage in meaningful consultation -- talking but, more important, listening; maybe he'll read my remarks later on when he gets time -- with a wide variety of groups and individuals to implement labour market policies which would assist citizens in Ontario in their time of need to build a future; (4) adopt an economic and social strategy like that put forward in the alternative budget.
The workers of Welland and district are telling you there's no place in our province for this legislation. In fact, it is an affront to the people of this province and should be scrapped now. It's strange that this is the legislation that's brought forward. Like many pieces of legislation brought forward by the present government, its theme seems to be "Blame the victims." These are the same people who brought you free trade, NAFTA, and decimated the industrial base of this country. Now they're going to blame the unemployed workers for the problem and try to focus on them.
I would respectfully suggest that you move to strike this onerous piece of legislation.
The Chair: That affords us approximately five minutes per caucus. We begin with the official opposition.
Mr Dominic Agostino (Hamilton East): Thank you for the excellent presentation. I share the disappointment you and Mr Kormos have expressed with regard to the fact that for the first presentation of the day the parliamentary assistant to the minister, who in effect represents the minister at these committee hearings and should be the eyes and ears of the minister here, has chosen to dismiss himself from being here. I think that is a shock to organized labour and to the organization you represent here today.
I think you have some great points as to the aspects of the particular acts or treaties this bill may violate. I guess the question becomes -- and you've touched upon it -- the motivation behind this piece of legislation, which most people didn't see as necessary.
Workfare basically has been a miserable failure. The numbers on the surface look good. The difficulty we're trying to get at -- and the minister doesn't seem to have the answer, which I find amazing -- is the fact that we're asking how many people were involved in programs at the municipal level with the various regions before workfare came along. The reality is that many municipalities had great programs in place, programs that were specified, that were not forced, that were chosen to help people who had that special skill or need. So the program itself, although the numbers sound good, has not been a success by any stretch of the imagination. If you want to measure it, you have to look at the number of people involved in programs at the municipal level through social service departments before workfare and the number now. The number is not that significantly different, except this is just adding millions of dollars to the cost.
In your view, what do you think has motivated this government to bring in what is seen as another bill that attacks the needy and the poor in this province?
Mr McCallion: My feeling is when you go back to classic Thatcherism, they're going to create a bunch of people in society who are going to be pariahs, people who are going to be blamed for everything. This is really a crass political thing. They're trying to paint the people who are on social assistance and the labour movement as enemies of society.
When you talk about the participation at the municipal level, obviously the reason they're more successful is that people participate voluntarily. They come forward and they see some value in it. This is nothing more than conscripted labour. In fact it's a real insult. It goes along with the idea, when you look at the legislation on the WCB, of blaming the victims. There's a multitude of legislation: the attack on the Occupational Health and Safety Act and so on and so forth.
If you go back to what happened with Thatcher, she was lucky. She won the election because she had the Falklands War. I guess it's not appropriate. I don't think Mike Harris can declare war on anybody other than the poor and the unemployed. That's what he's done: He's declared war on the poor and organized labour and he's trying to paint this picture that we are to blame for the wrongs of society.
It's quite obvious they don't have the proper policies. When you look at the devastation in the community, how anybody has the audacity to cut people's income by 24% and then give him and his cronies a 10% raise -- people are not stupid. We'll be giving the message out and we'll be fighting workfare all the way. Any business it tries to bring to people, we'll have an information picket. We'll be there. This is an attack on basic dignity.
The other thing is, to attack the labour movement -- you might not necessarily have to subscribe to all the precepts of the labour movement, but certainly from a historical perspective it has been one of the greatest associations for improving the quality of life in Ontario and every country that's ever been allowed to organize. I know in some places where they haven't been allowed to organize, it has made dramatic changes. When you look at the changes it has made in Poland, the changes it has made in South Africa, the labour movement should, instead of being outlawed -- I think he has made a critical error in judgement if he thinks he can outlaw the labour movement.
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The Chair: About 30 seconds.
Mr Agostino: OK, just one quick question. Was there any consultation that you're aware of with any representative labour organizations, labour councils, anything such as that, before this bill was introduced?
Mr McCallion: Not to my knowledge. I've certainly been conspicuously absent from all the meetings they've had. Maybe they had meetings with somebody in a telephone booth, or behind a telephone booth, who belonged to a union, but they certainly haven't met with organized labour.
Mr Kormos: Brother McCallion, I want to let you have an opportunity to make it perfectly clear -- because you've made references here to mandatory workfare. I trust you have no quarrel with people getting co-op-style training in any number of workplaces.
Mr McCallion: Certainly I think there have been some great benefits in that. When you look at high school students getting co-ops, people getting introduced to an industrial environment, people learning some basic health and safety, sure, I've got no problem with that.
Mr Kormos: I presume you have no quarrel with the fact that there are some people who find themselves unemployed who are in need of, among other things, upgrading, retraining.
Mr McCallion: No, no problem with that.
Mr Kormos: Do we have any problems here in the Niagara region, in view of the downloading and the cuts, about access to adult education, acquisition of what they call the GED?
Mr McCallion: Because of the downloading, because of the cuts, one of the things they've done -- I guess I can't speak on their behalf, but I happen to be a member of the local training and adjustment board. I certainly can speak as a labour member, that some of the basic programs -- now we're in a position where people just don't have access to the same type of training. It's simply not there.
Mr Kormos: Mr Klees is back now and perhaps this is an important time to indicate to you and others how this bill ended up in this committee.
You see, this is the justice committee. It's not the committee on social development that considered Bill 142, the so-called workfare welfare reform bill. This bill, one page, is getting more days of public hearing than Bill 142 did. Bill 142 did not receive as many days of public hearing as Bill 22 is receiving. Now, the opposition parties did not ask for two days in Toronto and four days of travel on Bill 22. Among other things, we had the impression that it was pretty much a done deal. Public hearings haven't been particularly effective in the past.
Mr McCallion: I wonder where you got that impression, if the parliamentary assistant deigns not to appear here.
Mr Kormos: You wonder, wonder, wonder, wonder why. Let me tell you why.
While this bill was still in the House on second reading, I brought an application under standing order 124 for the justice committee to devote, as the standing orders require, 12 hours to consideration of and inquiry into the role of the Premier, the Premier's office and the Premier's staff in the slaughter of Dudley George at Ipperwash Park, now almost three years ago. That was as of right, because there was no agenda before this committee, the justice committee.
That application was made, notice was served and a closure motion promptly appeared in the House which not only terminated legislative second reading debate on Bill 22, but also forced it into this committee -- the justice committee; not the social development committee, where welfare bills and welfare-related bills belong -- and not just for one day or two days, but for a total of six days of public hearings, with the sole purpose of knocking out, circumventing what would have been this committee's obligation to inquire into the Premier's role, the Premier's office's role and other governmental staff's role in the slaughter of Dudley George at Ipperwash Park almost three years ago now.
I'll tell you, that's why this bill is in the justice committee rather than social development. That's why this bill is receiving more days of public hearing than did Bill 142. In Sudbury we managed only five participants. We didn't start until noon or so, beyond noon, and went until early afternoon. In Cornwall there was a similar dearth of participants. Yesterday, Chatham was an interesting day, wasn't it, Mr Carroll? We were in Mr Carroll's bailiwick, and today it's going to be undoubtedly interesting.
The committee, at what Ms Pupatello constantly would refer to as "at great expense," has been set up to deal with this bill solely for the purpose of avoiding an inquiry, an investigation, into the slaughter of Dudley George and the Premier's role. I tell you, that's why we're here today, that's why we were in Chatham yesterday, in Cornwall last week and in Sudbury last week, and that's why we'll be in Toronto tomorrow. Heck, we aren't even going to start sitting until 1 o'clock or 1:30 tomorrow, and again that's because of the closure bill that the government forced through the House.
Mr McCallion: Yes, I would tend to agree with that, and I think probably one of the biggest outrages is the treatment of the Dudley George family. It's an abomination. Certainly it shows a complete disrespect for Mr George and his family. At the very minimum, we should have a public inquiry.
Mr Toni Skarica (Wentworth North): Regarding the fact of Mr Klees's not being here for a few minutes of your presentation, I might indicate to you, sir, that there are two parliamentary assistants here for the minister. Jack Carroll, who was referred to by Mr Kormos, and as he has indicated, is the eyes and ears of the minister. It's very rare that two parliamentary assistants for the same ministry will go on committee hearings. I know I did numerous education hearings and I was the only parliamentary assistant for the Minister of Education there, and in fact there was another one and no one felt hard done by that I was the only one there. Mr Klees wasn't exactly in the pool while you were talking. He was talking to the press, and really the purpose of these hearings --
Mr Kormos: He could have picked a little more opportune time.
Mr McCallion: Excuse me, I'd like to answer that.
Mr Skarica: Just give me a chance here. You'll get a chance.
The purpose of these hearings is to let everyone in the community know what's going on. Mr Klees, I did notice, has reviewed your entire brief, and after the day's hearings we have a procedure where we go over the presentations and discuss them. So there's just no way that your submission is going to be ignored by anyone, and in fact Mr Carroll is here as the eyes and ears of the minister. In my opinion, nothing that you've said will not be considered.
Mr Frank Klees (York-Mackenzie): If I might, Mr Carroll, I left at the top of page 5, and since I've come back I've completely read your submission. I appreciate your submission very much.
Mr McCallion: I'd just like to say for the record that I consider everybody around this table my employee. I've made a special trip to be here. The least you can do, unless you're ill, is stay in the room while I make my presentation, because I'm paying your wages.
Mr Klees: So is everyone else in the province. You're not the only employer that we have. I can tell you that Mr Agostino left just briefly. The proceedings around these committee tables are that from time to time we have other things to do. I want to assure you that this was nothing personal. Your submission will be taken to heart, will be seriously considered, and we do very much appreciate your attendance here today.
Mr McCallion: I feel that what you've done is you've raised arrogance to an art form, and I'll close my remarks with that.
Mr Agostino: On a point of order, Mr Chair: Mr Klees mentioned the fact that I left the room. I didn't leave the room. I went to the back to grab a coffee. If the machines were a little closer I wouldn't be as far away, but I could hear from the back of the room. I was not outside the room, for clarification.
Mr Klees: Why didn't you bring me one?
The Chair: That's not a point of order.
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Mr Jack Carroll (Chatham-Kent): Mr McCallion, thanks very much for being with us this morning. You state in your brief, "The objective of social assistance, therefore, must be to ensure that individuals are able to make the transition from dependence to autonomy and from exclusion on the margins of society to integration within the mainstream of community life." I don't think any of us would argue with that particular objective. It's in quotes in your paper here.
There are three components of Ontario Works. I'm sure you're aware of this. One is the job search component, one is the training and education component and the third one is the community placement component. Those people who find themselves in need of help from the government and are part of Ontario Works can participate in one of the three components.
Mr McCallion: As a point of information --
Mr Carroll: I'm going to ask you a question here, sir. The necessity of participating in one of those three components, how is that at odds with your stated objective of moving people from the margins of society to the mainstream? How are those two things at odds, sir?
Mr McCallion: If you look at the reason that we're in such financial trouble and such -- we've not got a social problem, we've got an economic problem here. If you go back to what happened with the free trade agreement --
Mr Carroll: We're talking about workfare; we're not talking about free trade, sir.
Mr McCallion: We're talking about why you brought this onerous piece of legislation in, because you and people from your ideological background destroyed the economy.
Mr Carroll: Wait a minute. I'd love it if you would answer my question. How is your stated objective inconsistent with asking people who find themselves involved in Ontario Works having to do either job search, training or education or participating in community placement? How is that at odds with your stated objective of moving them into the mainstream of society?
Mr Kormos: He's trying to tell you.
Mr Carroll: Can you explain that to me, Mr McCallion, because I don't understand that. How are they inconsistent?
Mr McCallion: They're inconsistent because what you've done is you've got people and you've frogmarched them into your system. You've brought in outside employers. You've brought in people who are going to exploit them. You've turned around and said to them: "When you go into this work environment you have absolutely no rights. You've got no rights to organize collectively" --
Mr Carroll: How about the job search part of it, the training?
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. We very much appreciate your coming forward today.
ST CATHARINES AND DISTRICT LABOUR COUNCIL
The Chair: We call on our next presenter, if representatives of the St Catharines and District Labour Council could come forward. If you could identify yourself for Hansard, we would greatly appreciate it. Thank you for coming. You may begin.
Mr Ed Gould: Thank you. My name is Ed Gould. I'm president of the St Catharines and District Labour Council. We represent thousands of workers from across the region. Our members live and work in all sectors of this economy.
On behalf of the St Catharines and District Labour Council, we would like to thank the opposition members here today for taking the time to listen to the people of Ontario. Again, thank you for giving us this opportunity to appear before the standing committee on justice to discuss Bill 22, the Prevention of Unionization Act (Ontario Works), 1998, which was introduced on May 14, 1998, by the Minister of Community and Social Services.
We are here today to make this presentation concerning Bill 22 because our elected government is not listening to the people of Ontario. It seems that bullies and cowards are running Queen's Park these days. It's truthfully there, when you look at the squeegee kids and the problems of the street kids right here in your own backyard in Toronto.
Bill 22 represents another example of how the Conservatives at Queen's Park have undermined our basic human rights as Canadians. I guess that freedom of choice and our human rights are not important to the Conservatives at Queen's Park. If you're taking away someone's rights, you could be considered a dictator by some around the world. To take away someone's rights concerning the right to join a union, by decree, sounds a bit like something many Canadians fought against during the war years.
This government has also ignored the rights of aboriginal peoples over the circumstances and issues surrounding the Ipperwash shooting of Dudley George. I ask you here today, when will this government have open dialogue on this issue of Dudley George's death?
Putting people to work in menial labour groups or in work teams will fail, as it is failing at this time. To address the real obstacles for workers who are out of work, we need to look at the causes. One cause that has troubled the nation for some time is the lack of jobs and the high unemployment rate.
Why would someone believe the government today, after all the cuts to areas that include health care, education and WCB changes? Bill 22 is not just a reform of welfare laws; it is a mean-spirited scheme to reduce the government's welfare costs. At the same time, basic rights of association are being denied to persons in the Ontario Works program through this legislation.
Workfare was designed to punish the people of Ontario, especially the poor, the people with no privilege, and Mr Harris and his Conservative government want us to believe otherwise. I've already listened to one speaker give quite a few facts.
Mr Harris claims the old system was not working and that the system didn't offer real help. The Tories cited things like too many people on welfare and that their rates were too high, and that too many people had access to the system. With those statements, does he not realize that with no jobs in the province and rents so high and no training programs offered by the federal or provincial governments -- no wonder things are going wrong. Again, it boils down to economic problems.
Has this government not noticed the street kids and the homeless in Toronto going without food and housing? What about these citizens and their rights to equality? If the government was really interested in putting people back to work, training the unemployed workers with real skills would be a better system than wasting time here today.
It was a disgrace to cut welfare benefits by 21%. These financial cuts have caused children to go to bed at night hungry and to go to school in the morning hungry also. This was no doubt the cruellest act this government ever made. Shame on you. The city food banks have been picking up the slack for the government, and only those who can get to them or those who have the use of them in their communities are thriving. This is unacceptable, considering you have raised the election rate of contributions for the next election to $100,000. It seems like there's lots of money from your rich corporate buddies to get elected next time. Maybe someone should have said for every dollar collected for the next provincial election, two dollars must go to feed the children and the homeless, the important issues. Many cities are having morning breakfast programs because kids are going to school hungry in the morning. That's an important thing. I'm sure if we talked to many of the women with kids, they'd understand that.
Some people, through no fault of their own, live on welfare because of mental illness. This is a problem that no one seems to talk about, including your government.
Let's talk about the Quebec workfare program, which violates human rights. The Quebec Superior Court has ruled that Quebec's employment enhancement programs, their workfare-type programs, violate sections of the Quebec Charter of Rights which guarantee equality in employment and the right to provision of just and fair employment conditions. The evidence showed that the training promised under the placement programs was non-existent and that participants were in fact performing regular work requiring minimal skills. The decision is being appealed by the provincial government. While Ontario's Human Rights Code does not prohibit discrimination on the grounds of social conditions, it should.
Workfare affects all of us: people on welfare now, those who are working, or unemployed receiving unemployment insurance. People who are working and never expect to go on welfare may think workfare doesn't affect them. Many may even think it's a good idea. But workfare undermines the wages and working conditions of those very working people who are in the communities.
Workfare isn't the only threat to wages and working conditions. Programs like unemployment insurance and social assistance provide support for people when they can't find work, but they also give people some power to refuse bad pay and poor working conditions. Part of the purpose of lowering welfare benefits by 21% in October was to make sure that the large number of desperate people are ready and willing to work at low wages and under any working conditions.
Some of the myths and realities of the workfare program: Here are some of the arguments we hear for workfare, both from experts and ordinary people, and some common sense answers:
"People on welfare are just lazy. They'd rather live like kings on welfare cheques." No one lives like a king on $520 a month. I dare each and every one of you to live on $520 a month. It's really an event. Almost everybody on welfare used to work. They are on welfare because they lost their jobs; they can't find new ones. Many studies show that the vast majority of people on welfare want to work and are doing everything in their power to get a job, but there are no jobs.
Another myth: "There is too much fraud and abuse. Everyone on welfare is scamming the system." Study after study has shown that the amount of real welfare fraud is very tiny. I'd like to argue that today, if you really want to.
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"People who get welfare should contribute something in return for their cheques." This argument seems to make sense until we ask what it means in practice. After all, we are all used to the idea of working for our wages. But if workfare produces goods and services that we want, either paid workers are losing their jobs or the rest of us are getting a free ride -- goods and services we value but are not paying a proper wage for. If we are trying to avoid this by giving them work of no value, then they are not contributing to society; they are just being punished for being poor.
There is no way around this problem. Work either has value or it doesn't. Far from benefiting the community, workfare may actually hurt the economy. Those workers who lose their jobs and only get welfare benefits instead of wages don't pay as much in taxes and the community loses their spending power. Workfare does not get people out of poverty. In the long run, poverty costs far more than welfare. Poverty increases health care costs, emergency services, police services and costs in lost human potential.
Did you know for a fact that in New York City they've had a type of workfare program for years and it has not decreased the welfare rolls at all? I don't know why we're going south of the border when there are other countries in the world that are probably prime and better examples. Some Scandinavian countries -- has anybody ever gone there?
Children were arbitrarily affected by the government of Ontario when it slashed the welfare rates in October 1995. The problem of children going hungry still continues to this day. We should be talking about improving benefits for families and children in Ontario, instead of starving kids at breakfast time.
We believe these hearings are important to the public and the democracy of this country. As individuals and unions, we must be given the chance to come forward and share our views.
We regard Bill 22 as your Armageddon for the next election and the last straw. Your days are numbered. The Mike Harris government's most graphic example of power was the fact that no public consultation was given on Bill 7, the Labour Relations and Employment Statute Law Amendment Act.
We believe employers friendly to the government will be given the access and licence to exploit citizens under the guise of workfare.
We also believe Bill 22 should be seen for what it is: an attack on the labour movement and citizens on social assistance. The corporate mentality which controls this government is shining through.
Bill 22 violates the spirit and letter of the law in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such areas as -- as the previous speaker said, there are some violations of the international laws on labour and everything else.
This government is also not sharing the facts and encourages the belief that the decent hard-working people of Ontario are being defrauded by people on social assistance. Why are you talking that way, not telling it for what it really is out there? There's very little fraud, yet you just keep picking on women and children and the underprivileged in this country.
The government could implement positive initiatives, such as scrapping Bill 22 and the workfare program and adopting economic and social policy that will actually put people to work -- and the younger generation -- at skills they will continue to use in the future.
We urge this committee to call upon the government to withdraw Bill 22 immediately. I hope you've been listening.
The Conservatives have adopted the policy of blaming any and all who do not fit into their mould of what a good corporate Ontarian should be. That I'm not, but I do believe business has to thrive, but on an equal playing field. Women and children and the underprivileged of this province have a right not to be forced. Somebody has to make the government wake up and understand that the issue here today is a lack of jobs, real jobs.
This is respectfully submitted by the St Catharines and District Labour Council.
The Chair: That allows us approximately five and a half minutes per caucus. We begin with the third party.
Mr Kormos: Thank you, Brother Gould. I suppose we should take some comfort, because every indication is that at the very least the prohibition of the right to unionize will be struck out by courts. So at the end of the day, even though lawyers, for better or worse, will make a whole lot of money, that part won't be considered valid. I suppose if that part is invalidated, the remaining sections are too, because then it's the Ontario Labour Relations Act that will determine who is in a worker-employer relationship such that they can collectively bargain.
This government has been questioned significantly about the legal advice it's received and the parliamentary assistant has said that legal advisers have assured it that this is A-OK. But look at their history in the courts. This government's lawyers have blown virtually every bit of litigation this government has found itself in, and they haven't got a very good track record when it comes to legal advice. If I were them, I'd ask for my money back from Charlie Harnick, for that and a whole lot of other reasons.
I asked the presenter on behalf of Welland and District Labour Council about the whole prospect of voluntary participation in co-op programs. Do you have any quarrel with that?
Mr Gould: No, Peter, I would have no qualms with that. Again, if we go back to the cause, if we go back to the root of the problem and there are no jobs, and at the same time the government is cutting back in all areas, and if you're cutting back in all areas obviously other staff are being laid off in all areas, so at the same time this high unemployment rate is hidden there. Unfortunately, the federal government has changed the way they gather unemployment statistics and everything else, but there is still a high number of workers out there with skills who can't find work. So I don't know how a mother with a couple of kids, maybe with only grade 12 and very few skills, would get out there and get a job unless there was provided at least some day care and some school training of some sort.
Mr Kormos: What about jobs here in Niagara? I understand Fleet manufacturing just announced the termination of 80 jobs?
Mr Gould: Peter, I haven't read that right up to this date, but there are many jobs that have been lost in the community. General Motors, they've lost jobs in the past, 4,000 jobs. I don't see anybody here talking about those 4,000 jobs that were lost in the community, high-paying jobs that paid taxes and put some effort into different --
Mr Kormos: Then there was Mott's.
Mr Gould: Mott's was 400 jobs.
Mr Kormos: And those jobs are gone?
Mr Gould: They're gone.
Mr Kormos: Fled to warmer climes?
Mr Gould: Well, the Ford glass plant too, also in Niagara Falls, went to Mexico under the free trade. So obviously we're having a situation here where there's a downturn in the industry at the same time. If you look at the past, people were hunters and gatherers and then we moved on to the farms and we had big families, so that was our pension, and the many children we had would take care of us. Then we moved into the city and we had industry and we had the pension plans. The pension plans seem to be dissolving literally around us and of course the corporations are fleeing this country. It's an economic problem.
Mr Kormos: There's an item in one of the Toronto papers this morning written by a journalist, who, as a result of freedom of information, obtained surveys that were done that indicate this work-for-welfare scheme is very popular out there, very popular, that there's strong public sentiment on behalf of the proposition of people not getting a "free ride." What it doesn't indicate, as has been pointed out during the course of these committee hearings, is that the government fudges the number. You see, only 3% -- and we don't even know the nature of these placements -- of workfare participants are involved in this so-called community placement.
The government really has tried to pad the roster of participants. They wanted to have people come and talk good about workfare. My God, they issued a press release today saying Mr Carroll and Mr Klees are going to go visit a workfare site in Niagara Falls. What's remarkable is that when we were doing 142 they produced the -- what did those ads cost, the workfare ads, you know, the glossy ones with the smiling workfare participant faces? They were the same sort of photos that Stalin used to have of happy state-farm workers, you know, back in the 1950s, those smiling Slavic faces, wonderful ladies like my grandmother, with bandanas, so happy to be working in Stalin's state farms. There were the same sort of ads during Bill 142 that the government produced at hundreds of thousands of dollars. Whether they were actors or not I don't know.
I've talked to people involved in these workfare programs and it seems that there are some people who are gratified by their workfare placements. We had a woman from the Heart and Stroke Foundation in Chatham who seemed to be a very good host, but we also heard about a workfare site up in Sudbury, the reforestation that displaced --
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Kormos.
Mr Kormos: These workers didn't even have washroom facilities.
The Chair: We now move to the government members.
Mr Skarica: Sir, I heard you say that these hearings are important to you and other people because you want unions and other people affected by this legislation to have their say. That's right?
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Mr Gould: I think any hearing on any bill is important and I believe that sitting here today we're speaking from our side, the way we see workfare and the way we see that the Premier is attacking the poor and underprivileged here daily in the media and also some of the paid ads here. I mean, it just doesn't work, and you know it doesn't.
Mr Skarica: I can tell by your presentation that it's not something you slapped together last night; you worked on it for some time, as did Mr Bob McCallion, right?
Mr Gould: Yes, I did work on it for a bit.
Mr Skarica: All right, and it would have been outrageous, would it not, if these hearings had been cancelled at the last second and you wouldn't have had your say. Don't you agree?
Mr Gould: I would say that any hearings that are cancelled -- but I'm still waiting for the Dudley George hearing. Again, would you comment on that?
Mr Skarica: Are you aware that the opposition in fact brought such a motion, that they wanted these hearings cancelled? They brought that motion yesterday in my presence but also before that.
Mr Gould: I can understand their frustration over that, because we know that today -- you know, I've had the feeling right now that the reason you're having these today is to put the Dudley George issue aside. So why don't we just skip all that questioning right now. Let's go straight to Dudley George and let's get the truth out there, because I think it's important when someone has been shot here in this province that we get the real situation and the issues out. Is there something the government is scared about?
Mr Skarica: Those are my questions.
Mr Klees: I'd like to address the purpose of these hearings, and that is Bill 22 and the many people in our province who are without work today whom I'm sure you and your council empathize with.
I hear some of your criticisms about the workfare program. I'm not representing, neither has anyone in our government, that this is a perfect program. But welfare recipients have been with us for every successive government for too many years, without hope many times. What we're trying to do through this program is give some people some hope, a first important stepping stone to a job.
You may not agree with all of the technical aspects of the program. Is there any reason that we can't work together, labour and government?
Mr Skarica: Excuse me. On a point of order, Mr Chair: I would just like the record to note that Mr Klees is in fact here and he's speaking and Mr Kormos has left the room.
The Chair: That is not a point of order.
You may continue.
Mr Gould: If we're talking about hope here and you're trying to give people of Ontario hope, then voluntary would be a lot better system, if I volunteer to do it. Second, if you wanted to give people hope, then you would spend some more money in education and put a lot of these unemployed workers back in the mainstream and teach them skills that they can use.
Mr Klees: Are you aware that this program does in fact include an educational component?
Mr Gould: How much money are you spending on it? I was looking through the value here. Is it $500 million for the entire province?
Mr Klees: We are spending in the various regions whatever it takes to move this program forward. Every region has developed a business plan that includes an educational component, that includes support for day care, that includes support for transportation, that helps individuals' transition through this program with a view to moving into paid employment. Every region submits their budget to this province. It is reviewed on the basis of what the requirements are.
Mr Gould: So you're saying that if a mother on welfare wants to go back, say, to a school of nursing, and now that's up in Hamilton, you would cover all that?
Mr Klees: It depends on what the circumstances are.
Mr Gould: No, I'm asking directly here.
Mr Klees: I don't know --
Mr Gould: You said, "Whatever it takes." So now I've come back and asked you, sir, if a woman with two kids wants to enter back into a productive life after the children have grown to a certain age and she wants to go to a nursing college somewhere in this province, are you saying that's covered?
Mr Klees: Let's be reasonable --
Mr Gould: Because there are a lot of women out there with two kids who would find that very important. So I'm asking you. You said, "Whatever it takes," sir. I'm putting it directly to you. That's what it takes right now, because I can go out and tell some women, "Yes, they'll take care of your kids and you will be going to Toronto or Hamilton, whatever it takes for you to enter the nursing."
Mr Klees: I'm suggesting to you that even your question is unreasonable.
Mr Gould: I don't think so, sir.
Mr Klees: What we're trying to do is help individuals take that first important step. That's what this program is. Unfortunately, past governments have failed to have the courage to do that. You, sir, and your council should be coming alongside this government, not asking unreasonable questions, but should be willing to work with us and the people on welfare in this region to do what is right for them, rather than continue to make political statements that everyone sees through.
Mr Gould: Frank, you said, "Whatever it takes." I gave you a scenario. I still haven't got a straight answer.
Mr Klees: You got a straight answer.
Mr Gould: For the record, they had workhouses and everything in the 1800s, and it still didn't work.
Mr Klees: Why don't you join us at noon and see at first hand --
Mr Gould: "Whatever it takes," Frank. You said, "Whatever it takes."
Mr Klees: Why don't you come with us and see first hand how the program works?
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Klees. We now move to the official opposition.
Mr Kormos: On a point of privilege, Mr Chair: Reference was made to my having left the committee room, and indeed I did. I didn't take any of the press with me, as Mr Klees did earlier, and I used the facilities. Any further details as to what I did in them would be intrusive.
The Chair: That is not a point of privilege, Mr Kormos.
Interjections.
The Chair: Order, please. We now move to the official opposition.
Mr Agostino: Maybe we can solve the problem by putting a johnny-on-the-spot in the corner and we won't have to leave the room.
Thank you for the presentation. I think you've made some excellent points in regard to the impact that this type of legislation is having on the poor and on the needy in this province. I guess the frustrating part with this is that somehow this government thinks it has come up with a brainwave here of this wonderful program that all of a sudden is taking these individuals off welfare.
The reality is that welfare numbers often match economic conditions. Programs, and very successful programs, have been there for this government, and the Reform-minded members of this government decided that workfare was a good idea. The reality is that many municipalities had excellent programs in place. They were geared to individual needs. They had educational components to them, they had retraining programs to them, and they were working, but they were not across the board, where everybody has got to dive in whether it's going to benefit you or not. They were chosen by caseworkers, they were followed up properly and there were some excellent success stories. This is not some brainwave that they've come up with here. All you've done is put a political tag on it to score some cheap, sleazy political points, and you call it workfare. That's the only thing you've done. Then you've forced everybody on to this thing.
To sit here and talk about the merits -- again, I challenge any of the parliamentary assistants to give us the numbers, the real numbers. Tell us how many people were involved in retraining, educational and upgrading programs across this province before you brought workfare along, and how many people are involved now. Give us the real numbers. You didn't even want to set targets. When we asked at the beginning, your minister said the business plans don't have to include targets. How can you spend $500 million on a program and say, "We don't have to put targets in to see if we're accountable and if it's successful or not"? That would go against everything you believe in as the business-minded government that you are. But you don't apply that principle here, and you don't come clean and tell the people of Ontario what your targets are, how many people you expect to have in there, because you know you can't meet those targets and you have failed. We are still waiting, a year later, for those numbers we've been asking for.
They are now moving workfare to the private sector. As you know, they started with the non-profits, and I think one of the greatest tragedies in this province has been, over the last two years particularly, that many agencies that are in the business of helping the needy have gone into the business of exploiting the needy, through this program. I think that in itself is a tragedy, and many have been forced into this. Now they want to move the slave labour into the private sector, which means that now the corporate community will be able to use welfare recipients to offset the cost of operating and, in many cases, will displace workers, because those rules around that are so lax that you're not going to be able to prove whether or not it was a paid position earlier. So you're now giving the private sector free labour, courtesy of Mike Harris. How do you think that is going to impact the employment situation in this province, the ability of people to get into the workforce and these rules that are now going to be in place when you expand workfare to the private sector?
Mr Gould: The only thing I can say is that in New York City right now the city workers are almost one for one in the workfare program. As I said earlier, it's a spiral thing; it's not going to fix welfare. The only way to fix welfare is to offer that woman or husband and wife some education and some meaningful -- bad word, but to offer that woman, say, a nursing skill so that later on, when the children get older, she can move into health care, where there has been a big exodus of the nurses from this province because of what's taking place in the health care sector.
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Right now I would say, like Frank says, whatever it takes. We have to find some women out there who want to take nursing. In St Catharines, obviously it's in Hamilton. There's some daycare, there's travel, there's transportation. But all of that wasn't discussed. Again, it's picking on the needy and the poor here.
In Toronto, right where Queen's Park sits, there's a great magnitude of street kids. I don't see anybody worrying about them, other than just making sure they can't clean windows. I don't know where they're going to be pushed to or how they're going to survive.
Again, if the government really wants to make people productive in this province, offer the skills for a later date. Obviously, daycare would promote daycare workers. Going to school to further educate would cause an increase in teachers, and at the same time, later on, she would come back and work in the health care field. I'm just using that as an example here today because I think it's an important issue, since the media and the news have now portrayed that the nurses are fleeing southward, and the nurses in fact are saying that themselves. Anybody in this room here who understands the cuts that have been taking place in health care and education understands that in the next three to five years there could be a great shortage in the nursing staff or the health care workers. It's not just nursing. There is some training in a two-year health care course, RPN, or whatever that could be. I'm just using that as an example because I understand it and am a little bit more familiar with it than with anything else.
For the males of this province, there are skills of apprenticeship. There are college courses and upgraded skills for kids who left school before grade 12, or maybe they never finished that college course and could be reintroduced as electricians or millwrights or whatever so that in those future high-tech industries we would have the electricians for tomorrow. This is the way to go.
The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward today. We very much appreciate your taking the time to present.
NIAGARA REGIONAL CHAMBERS OF COMMERCE
The Chair: We now call on the next presenter, the St Catharines Chamber of Commerce, if you or your group could come forward.
Mr Klees: Chair, while the next speaker is coming forward, I would like to just clarify a point. Mr Kormos made reference to the fact that the committee will be observing a community placement location in Niagara Falls. That's not true. I know that he didn't mean to mislead. It is here in St Catharines.
The Chair: That's not a point of order. We will continue with the presenters.
Mr Kormos: You're misleading people again. This committee hasn't made any commitment to visit with anybody. If you want to set up a photo op for yourself, God bless.
The Chair: Order, please. If you could identify yourself for Hansard. Thank you for coming. You may begin.
Ms Kathy Bissell: Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee on Bill 22, the Prevention of Unionization Act (Ontario Works). In the interest of time, we will have two people representing 10 chambers of commerce from the Niagara region: myself, my name is Kathy Bissell, and I am the manager of the St Catharines Chamber of Commerce; and Mr Peter Jurmain is from the Thorold Chamber of Commerce, and he is their president.
In order for us to voice the opinion of the regional chambers of commerce membership, we sent out a fax poll, which I have included in your package -- it's at the very back of the paper -- a brief description of the history of the bill and the amendment, and the following questions were asked: What is your position on the Ontario Works program? What is your position on the proposed Bill 22?
The total number of businesses that would have received the survey was 2,500. This is a membership size that is worth listening to. The total number of replies that were received was approximately 250. This signifies a response rate of 10%, which is considered fair representation. Some 95% responded in favour of the Ontario Works program, and 89% responded in favour of Bill 22. As you can see, this represents a favourable response to the act.
Welfare, as we all know, should be a system of temporary support that focuses on getting people back to work so they can support themselves. It is meant to be neither a permanent nor a bureaucratic nightmare.
The importance of the Ontario Works program lies with the government to successfully reform Ontario's welfare system by continuing to make welfare a way back to work. This program also means that welfare recipients will develop new skills, have the dignity of a job and contribute to their local communities. It is imperative to provide valuable work experience so they can go on to respected careers.
An important point for the proposed act of preventing the unionization is that individuals of the Ontario Works program are not employees of the employer with whom they are placed. Therefore, they should not be included in the bargaining unit. In order to be a part of a bargaining unit, one must pay union dues. These dues would then be paid out of the government's purse. Just when the provincial government has made the commitment to decrease welfare spending, the expectation will be to increase their monthly payment to cover the cost of these dues. Is this a reason for union objection: in search of more dues? I don't know.
This will also instil the obligation of the recipients to their municipalities and community and social services that they are seeking to be less dependent on the system. Until the participant completes the program and competes for actual employment and joins the regular workforce under the rules of their regular employer, should they consider being part of a union?
There are some caveats to this, however. The government must continue to ensure that the participants benefit from health and safety programs. The government must ensure that these jobs are meaningful and the jobs will allow them to compete for real opportunities in their business communities. The government must ensure that they will not be replacing workers with lower-paid employees, such as these recipients. They must ensure that employees who already possess skills will not be replaced by unskilled recipients. The government must ensure that it will continue to run the program so that participants do not become victims; by that, I mean giving them completely meaningless jobs. The government must ensure that the tasks performed by the participants do not impact the existing unionized employees, for example, reducing overtime requirements by allowing these people to step in.
If the union objects on account of fearing that Ontario Works workers, if non-unionized, could help keep a plant open or going in the event of a strike, the government could make assurances that these workers will not be permitted to work under the circumstances of a possible strike.
Another comment that was raised in these fax polls was that the program was demoralizing and against freedom of speech. Possibly what the government could do, and I don't know if it's already in existence, is follow up, whether it's via survey or telephone call, with each and every participant to get their feedback on how they feel the program is working for them and then publish the results honestly to the community so that everybody can be at ease regarding whether or not this is a good program.
Mr Peter Jurmain: As indicated to you, my name is Peter Jurmain. I have a business in the city of Thorold and am currently the president of the Thorold Chamber of Commerce. I'm very pleased to be here, very pleased to see our MPP, Mr Kormos, is on this committee. I'm pleased to see Peter here.
I'm delighted to welcome you to Niagara and to have the opportunity to participate in this committee meeting. This is the first time I've had the opportunity of addressing a parliamentary committee. It's democracy in action, and I'm pleased to be here.
The Thorold Chamber of Commerce has been addressing the needs of the business community in Thorold for over 100 years, incorporated in 1893. Hopefully we do so in a timely and responsive manner. We currently have over 200 members, ranging from sole proprietors like myself to multinational corporations.
Our chamber, like all chambers, is politically non-partisan. I'm not here as an apologist for the governing party. We are here to express our needs as a chamber movement. We are business oriented, and we make no apologies for that.
The Thorold chamber supports any initiative which will enable people to progress from dependency to self-sufficiency with their dignity and self-respect not only intact but enhanced.
The Thorold chamber has already had experience; it's not just theoretical. We've had two community placements with our organization. The first was very successful. The individual left after a month for a full-time job. The second is currently becoming familiar with the position. Both individuals are intelligent and well-motivated. Hopefully they'll profit from their involvement with us and we from their work for our organization.
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The old saying is quite true, as you probably all know: It's much easier to get a job when you have a job. We've heard that for years, and I think it's very true.
The Thorold chamber, like the St Catharines chamber, surveyed its members on the Ontario Works program and Bill 22. I can't say all our members understood all the vagaries of the legislation. Obviously that's not correct. But as a general view, they understand the thrust of the legislation. We had a reasonably high response rate of about 17%. All but one were in favour of this initiative from this legislation.
Our chamber is particularly concerned about the comments directed by those opposed to this legislation to community non-profit organizations. We find those actions totally unacceptable. The vulnerable and the disadvantaged will be the ones most affected if community agencies are harassed or intimidated. We trust that there is a change of policy from those opposed.
The Thorold Chamber of Commerce supports the philosophy of the Ontario Works Act and further supports the Prevention of Unionization Act. We say to the Legislature have your hearings, pass the legislation, monitor the results. As Peter knows, if you forgot the rule against perpetuities, you can wait and see. Let's see if it doesn't fulfil its promise; if it doesn't, either amend it, modify it or repeal it. If passed, the people, not organized labour, not the business lobby but the electorate will determine and will judge the efficacy of this initiative. No doubt, it'll be the next government which won't proceed with it.
In summary, the Thorold Chamber of Commerce supports the initiative before you.
Ms Bissell: Just as a final note, theoretically the right of an individual to join a union should be made by them. However, in these circumstances, it is the public purse which is the core funding. I guess the goal is to be able to work together with all the unions.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. That affords us approximately six minutes per caucus. We begin with the government members.
Mr Carroll: Thanks very much for coming forward this morning. I enjoyed your presentation.
I want to philosophize with you a little bit. It picks up on the last comment you made. There's no question the government is in favour of this initiative. There's no question that the job creators, business, are in favour of this initiative. I have talked to numerous people who are participating in community placements, and they're in favour of the initiative.
Mr McCallion came forward this morning and stated in his presentation, "The objective of social assistance, therefore, must be to ensure that individuals are able to make the transition from dependence to autonomy and from exclusion on the margins of society to integration within the mainstream of community life." We also heard from Mr Gould, talking about the need to assist these people to get back into a better standard of life.
We all seem to want the same thing. My personal feeling is that if we could all work together, if somehow organized labour could see their way clear to assist business and assist government in helping these folks who find themselves disadvantaged temporarily, for whatever reason, we could have a much more successful program. Once these folks get adequate training and they find jobs, then the union movement could move in and unionize them if they see fit, if that's appropriate.
We have the union movement threatening social services agencies. Have you any suggestions as to what we could do or what anybody can do to get organized labour to lay down their guns on this issue and help us to help you to help these folks to a better way of life? Have you any suggestions for us?
Ms Bissell: I think they see this as a demoralizing, unconstitutional thing. Our suggestion about possibly following up on every single participant, hopefully it's going to be positive feedback, presenting these to the unions, that these people aren't being abused, that they're happy to be there. Maybe that is a start, and then the defences might go down, in that direction.
Mr Carroll: Would you subscribe to the theory that if somehow organized labour would support this initiative -- and as Mr Klees said initially, this isn't a perfect initiative. There are no perfect initiatives. But it's better than what we had, where we allowed people just to stay home and spiral down into a feeling of total uselessness. This is a better initiative than that. Is it perfect? It's probably not perfect. Do you think it would be better, more successful, if organized labour would come on board and help in this particular instance rather than fighting it every step of the way?
Mr Jurmain: No doubt some day the lion will lie down with the lamb. Whether it is going to be in this world or the next, I don't know. Unfortunately the submissions you hear from whatever organized lobby group is in front of you represent another agenda, more than the one before you, and it's unfortunate that has to be so.
I think this is a worthwhile agenda and, as I say, if abuses occur, if employers are not fulfilling what you want them to do, if they start to abuse people -- I speak for the business lobby, but I'm a small-l liberal, have been all my life. I'm a lawyer. I represent refugees. I don't want to see anybody abused. I want to see people benefit from this program. If it doesn't turn out they are benefiting, if it turns out it's a source of cheap labour and they're cast off, then obviously it's not working. You have to give it a chance. The people who administer it at the local level now, I've been talking to a few of those people and they seem to be -- the ones I've talked to, at least -- behind the program.
You get some individuals who are temporarily down on their luck, others who have been out of work for many years and have lost the ability to look for work, have lost the internal discipline to get up in the morning and find their way to work. As Peter will know, in this area it's somewhat difficult. Our transportation system is poor. There are a lot of logistical problems. We have to give some support to these people. I have many clients who get up here in St Catharines and go out to Vineland. They work in the greenhouses, which is a growing industry down here. They find a way to do it. We don't have very good intercity transportation. The big picture has to be looked at. If you're in Toronto, you get on the subway in Scarborough and you can get a job probably out in Etobicoke. It may take you an hour and a half to get there, but you have public transportation. We don't have that here. That has to be recognized. Those things have to be calculated in.
It is unfortunate that people are digging in their ideological heels; because it's an initiative from this government, therefore it has to be opposed because there are other initiatives they don't support from your government. Certainly we don't have the answers for it. You can try to be conciliatory. You can try to modify it where it should be modified and monitor the results.
The Chair: We'll move to the official opposition.
Mr Agostino: Thank you, to the chamber, for the presentation. I have just a couple of questions. The point of working together, which you have stated and government members have stated, part of the problem has been that the government is trying to reach out to organized labour and say, "Work with us," when they have never consulted or spoken to organized labour about any piece of legislation they've brought in; and when they did, they frankly ignored the advice they were given and simply did what their agenda was in the first place. If you're going to talk about working together, it has to be a two-way consultation and there has to be a responsibility on the government as they bring in legislation to speak to all sides if they really want a truly co-operative, consultative effort. You can't keep people on the outside of the door and then say, "Now that we've passed this, work with us," the "Can't we all get along?" sort of thing. I think it has to be part of the responsibility of government to do that, not just listening to people who tell you what you want to hear.
I have a couple of points on the brief. It said that welfare should be a system of temporary support, focusing on getting people back to work; it should neither be permanent nor bureaucratic. I don't know if you're aware of the fact that most welfare recipients in this province are on welfare for an average of about six months. Most welfare recipients in this province are on it as a result of a lost job. There is a small percentage of what we call generational welfare recipients. The vast majority are there as a result of economic downturn. Can you explain to me how you see the laid-off steelworker or the laid-off construction worker in my riding, who has worked for 15 or 20 years, has held a job, has done his best to raise his family and pay the bills and everything else, and as the result of a shutdown or as the result of economic downturn is forced, after UI and savings are gone, on to welfare? Can you help me understand how the laid-off steelworker in my riding who has worked for 20 years, has got job ethics, job skills, has maintained a job, is going to benefit from being forced into a workfare placement program?
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Ms Bissell: I guess the other side of the coin to that is, is it feasible to say that he's allowed to sit at home and collect these benefits for his family, watching his favourite TV show or golfing on the golf course? Should he not be put back out into the workforce? It's not a forced issue. Most of these recipients do want to be there.
Mr Agostino: I'll just follow up on that. Your last comment there is, I think, insulting to welfare recipients.
Ms Bissell: I'm sorry.
Mr Agostino: Going on the golf course and sitting at home watching TV, that's part of the myth, that's part of the perception. When Mike Harris cut the $38 a month from pregnant moms, it was because they were using that money to drink beer. That is the myth that I think people keep forcing and stereotyping on to welfare recipients. Again, I think that's part of the problem with this whole thing, that we believe that it's OK that they're victims. Frankly, the steelworker who has worked for 20 or 25 years and is laid off and has no job paid into that welfare system that he's now drawing from, through his taxes.
Ms Bissell: What you just said to me, I apologize if I insulted anybody. You're saying they're not playing golf, they're not sitting at home doing anything. If these qualified workers are collecting welfare, what are they doing 24 hours a day, seven days a week if they aren't trying to better themselves, getting out, back into the workforce? That's what I mean. I don't mean to say that they are watching TV or they're golfing.
Mr Agostino: I understand that, and I appreciate your clarification.
Ms Bissell: But what are they doing during those productive hours if they aren't looking for work?
Mr Agostino: I presume they're doing what they were doing when they were on UI: looking for work, trying to upgrade themselves. But the difference is that now they're being told: "Here's what you must do. Here's the program you must go into."
Would you agree that things such as adult education, literacy training and flexibility in funding for tuition and things like that to get people back into the workforce are extremely important and are a key component you have to have if you're going to retrain people or upgrade their skills, that you have to have adult education easily available to people, a funding formula for tuition or high school and so on for people who can't afford adult education, and you need good literacy programs? Do you think that's a key component of any retraining?
Ms Bissell: That is certainly a key component, but experience is a very key component to getting a job as well. If you have people who are welfare recipients -- and I hate using that term -- and you put them into a course, it doesn't guarantee them a job. They have a better chance working as an assistant to the general manager of the Thorold Chamber of Commerce, getting that hands-on experience to walk in and apply for a job, rather than saying they went to the BEC and took some training in marketing. Nobody is going to look at that resumé as seriously as they will at someone who does have work experience. I say that from a manager's perspective as well.
Mr Agostino: In those areas, which I think are important, you need the combination. Adult education has been cut by this government. Literacy programs have been cut by this government. The rules for OSAP and other rules that would affect adults going back to school have been cut by this government. Unfortunately, as they talk the talk about retraining and getting people back into the workforce, the reality is that many of their actions have made it much more difficult and have forced people out of programs. We had thousands of people who were in programs who were forced to drop out of training programs as the result of rules that have been changed.
Before workfare came along, were you aware of programs at the local level here in the Niagara region through the Niagara region social services and so on that were effective and working and helped people who were on welfare get back into the workforce?
Mr Jurmain: I'm not aware specifically of certain programs, but we do have a new fiscal reality, not only in this province but in this country. We're all going to have to do a little more with a little bit less. That seems to be common in the western world. If we had our druthers, certainly there would be unlimited money for retraining, unlimited money for education. We would boost welfare. I know that people who receive government benefits are not living high on the hog. It is a subsistence level. I've never said and never thought that people take their money and get the taxi to the Beer Store. One person may do that, so that brands everyone with that aura. I know that doesn't happen, and it is a subsistence level.
The Chair: We move to the third party.
Mr Kormos: Gosh, we're especially pleased to see the Thorold chamber represented here, and very competently. I'm very familiar with the members of the Thorold Chamber of Commerce, be it Elio's shoe store on Front Street, where I buy my cowboy boots, which has the biggest selection of cowboy boots, I'm convinced, in southern Ontario, Canadian made, union made, and wonderful prices, or Gaspari's Fashions, another place. You may not believe it, it's called Gaspari's Fashions, but I buy clothes there. Again, they're union made and reasonably priced. We've also seen places like Gallaher Paper revived with new leadership, an industry that people had abandoned now revived because of participation and investment by a trade union, CEP, through the First Ontario labour venture fund, put back on its feet in Thorold.
I've got to tell both of you -- and I don't want to dismiss you, Ms Bissell, but I have to reflect on some of my favourite chamber of commerce members in Thorold -- your conclusions, or your recommendations, are to the largest part remarkably similar to those that have been made by CUPE and other trade unions that have been at the forefront of the fight against Bill 22, with its non-unionization, and the whole workfare issue. Again, I certainly can't and won't quarrel with them.
Assure health and safety protections: Again, that's something that opponents to workfare have been insisting on.
Make sure that the jobs are meaningful: Dead on. I suppose you can split hairs. Is painting park benches meaningful? I suppose to somebody who has never held a paintbrush before, ever.
You're interesting, because you're talking in the same way that -- remember Ms Laperrière in Cornwall, Chair, and the woman from the Heart and Stroke Foundation? The woman from the Heart and Stroke Foundation in particular; she had hosted workfare placements in her Heart and Stroke Foundation and appeared to be almost the ideal host, because she was talking about office management, a whole plethora of skills. But she also left the strong impression that these were willing participants in these programs.
You didn't address the issue of voluntariness versus mandatory, but my impression is that a voluntary participant and voluntary participation is going to be far more effective than literal forced participation. I don't know if you want to respond to that or not, and I don't know whether you agree or not.
Ms Bissell: I don't know the statistics on how many people are actually abusing the system, and when I say that, I don't mean the people going to the Beer Store; I mean the people who are sitting at home not looking for work. How many people would volunteer? That's the question. Probably not a whole lot, if they had an option to not work, to not look for work.
Mr Kormos: I don't have hard statistics either, because one of the problems we've had, and it's not new but it certainly is enhanced, is tracking the flow of people on social assistance. There was a significant drop in people on the rolls when the rates were reduced and when new thresholds were created. Those people couldn't be tracked, because the only polling that was done was people with telephones. There was a significant number of them who didn't have telephones.
Look, I'm going to be the first to admit there hasn't been an effective tracking program in terms of who is on social assistance and where they go. We do know that the average stay on social assistance, historically, is for a relatively short period of time. We do know that the number of people who are on there in perpetuity -- thank you, because I had forgotten all about perpetuity; it has been 20 years, and I'm going to have to look up the niceties of it -- who had been on social assistance in perpetuity, I think the data is pretty clear, are a significantly small number.
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The number of people participating in community placement is only 3% at this point. My impression -- and, again, I find your remarks remarkable, even though you and I disagree about Bill 22. But as I told Brother Gould from the St Catharines and District Labour Council, it's all for naught anyway because there's been a whole lot of good, qualified legal opinion expressed -- not mine, nor Charlie Harnick's -- that the right to unionize, for instance, is going to be contrary to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms etc. The bill is going to be all for naught anyway. But then nobody forces a union on people. We've seen illustrations recently in this area where unions have embarked on drives and workers have voted against it. We've seen other illustrations where they support it.
It seems to me this is very strange legislation and I'll tell you why: The Ontario Labour Relations Act determines who can and who cannot collectively bargain and join a union. I'll be the first to concede that people in classical or historical volunteer positions -- and I'm using a candy-striper in a hospital, those we have left, as an example -- wouldn't be, according to the Labour Relations Act, in a position to unionize.
Why we're concerned about Bill 22 is because it doesn't reflect workfare as you contemplate it or as others contemplate it, but it reflects workfare American-style getting into the private sector. Mrs Ecker said she'd never do it and now she --
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Kormos.
Mr Kormos: Are you sure, Chair?
The Chair: I'm more than sure.
Mr Kormos: Now she says she will, American-style --
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Kormos. Thank you very much for coming forward today. We very much appreciate it.
Mr Kormos: Are you sure that I get all of my time?
The Chair: And then 22 seconds.
Ms Bissell: May I just make one quick comment with regard to Mr Kormos saying our statements were basically the same as the other people's? That is a perfect step forward into why we could work as a team. We don't need an actual union in place to support these because it's across the board. Everybody wants the same results.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation.
ONTARIO SOCIAL SAFETY NETWORK WORKFARE WATCH PROJECT
The Chair: We would call upon our next presenters, the Workfare Watch Project, Ontario Social Safety Network. If you or your individuals could come forward, we would appreciate it. If you could identify yourself for Hansard, we would appreciate it as well. Thank you for coming. You may begin.
Rev Susan Eagle: Thank you. My name is Susan Eagle. I come from London, Ontario, but I'm here in the capacity today of representing the Ontario Social Safety Network and also the Workfare Watch Project. I have a printed brief that I am going to read from today and I believe copies have been distributed to committee members.
First of all, I'd like to express my thanks to you for this opportunity to appear before the standing committee. The Ontario Social Safety Network is a provincial organization formed to protect the social programs that make up our social safety net and to advocate for progressive social policy reforms. The network includes low-income individuals, faith communities, people with disabilities, labour groups, legal clinics and other interested individuals.
The Workfare Watch Project is a joint project of the Ontario Social Safety Network and the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto. It was established to provide information and research on the implementation of workfare policy in Ontario; also to try to do some tracking, because we're very conscious that there is not much tracking and statistical data being collected.
First of all, I'd like to speak to the consultation process. We feel obliged to comment, if only for the record, on the misuse of the public legislative process which has resulted in this bill coming before the standing committee on justice. It is an abuse of the privilege of serving in government to use this process to avoid a legislative committee inquiry into the death in 1995 of Dudley George at Ipperwash.
Also, it is remarkable that Bill 22 will receive twice as many days of public hearings as Bill 142, the Social Assistance Reform Act. Bill 142 embodied a complete reversal of the values that have governed welfare policy in Ontario for more than 30 years. This profoundly significant piece of legislation received only a few days of perfunctory committee hearings.
The tradition of consultation derives from the recognition of the need to test legislative prescriptions against the real-life experiences of those affected by the issue. However, this government seems to pride itself on not consulting with affected groups, at least when that group is low-income people. This government appears to view consultation with opposition parties, interest groups and the general public as unnecessary since the answers are known in advance and the policy process already driven by received wisdom.
Brief opportunities to appear before standing committees such as this one are increasingly undertaken for the record only, with no expectation that our concerns and suggestions will be taken seriously or even heard. We have, I might mention, continued to exercise our right and our privilege to attend public hearings and to be on the record because we consider that process so important but we're under no illusions that what we say to you will in any way affect the legislation that comes out the other end.
Our concern is, though, that when this is used in this process it leads to a cynical and apathetic public who rightly understand that their views count for little, that politics happens somewhere else where they have no access and that democracy amounts to no more than an opportunity to cast a ballot every four years or so. Those are our thoughts on the consultation process.
In terms of community participation and the legislative protections: From the beginning, people performing community participation under Ontario Works have been excluded from the Employment Standards Act. The government has imported some of the standards from the Employment Standards Act into the policy guidelines for the Ontario Works program. However, policy guidelines do not have the force of law and therefore are not the same as being protected by legislation. In essence, this sets a lower standard of protection for people working under the workfare program than for regular workers.
Increasingly, when the government has wanted to ensure that workfare participants are not covered by legislation, it goes out of its way to amend the legislation to guarantee it. Witness the Employment Standards Act and now Bill 22. On the other hand, when the government wants to argue that people are protected, for example, by occupational health and safety laws, it simply claims that's the case, without bothering to amend the relevant legislation to explicitly include them.
Bill 22, and similar attempts to exclude workfare participants from legal protections afforded regular workers, is not about preventing the spectre of workfare participants going on strike for higher welfare benefits, which is a patently absurd claim. Rather it's about preventing workfare participants or a union which represents the employees in a particular workplace from making the claim that workfare workers are, in fact, employees in every sense of the word since they perform substantially the same work as paid workers.
I see a letter from Mrs Ecker that was just handed to me when I came in today, identifying that workfare workers will have a limit of no more than eight hours per day and no more than 44 hours per week.
People engaged in workfare are doing work of value and they deserve to be recognized and paid as regular employees, but they're treated as a lesser tier of workers at a lower standard.
The minister now is evidently contemplating extending workfare to the private sector. We're not quite sure what the status of that is. I've been in her presence when she told us that it was going to happen and we certainly took seriously all the news releases we saw a couple of weeks ago. We now have received further word that she's not doing it or that it's not happening yet. Maybe somebody on the government side can clarify for us today what is happening in that area.
But if it does move to the private sector, this raises very serious issues. It is offensive enough that the government sees fit to force people to work in the not-for-profit sector without pay or legal protection, but does the government intend to compound this by compelling people to work in the for-profit sector without being paid and without legal protections of the kind afforded to other workers?
Again, it is ironic in the extreme that this government that trumpets its desire to move welfare recipients into paid work would actually create legal roadblocks that prevent exactly that. Many of the welfare reform measures introduced since 1995 have made it more difficult for people to leave welfare for work, not easier. Even municipalities responsible for delivering welfare programs recognize that many aspects of the new welfare program are regressive and counterproductive to the province's stated purpose of facilitating people's transition back into paid employment. Those municipalities have even gone to the length of joining together to publicly criticize the program.
Officials from a number of municipalities across Ontario recently publicly recognized the health and morale problems for which the new system is responsible. Clients and caseworkers will become increasingly demoralized as the more punitive aspects of the program, become apparent. Those dealing with social assistance clients are overworked, frustrated and stressed.
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Government members may know that as a municipal councillor in London -- London has sent in its concerns to this extent. Next week AMO will be meeting, and there are a number of municipalities that are also expressing concern about these more punitive aspects of the program and I'm sure that will be addressed at next week's AMO meetings.
Legal issues: It's evident that Bill 22 violates the spirit and letter of the law in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. I'm sure you've heard from others on the legal implications of Bill 22, so I won't go into great detail there. The brief lists freedom of association, sections 2, 7 and 15.
Bill 22 is also in violation of a number of international agreements to which Canada is a signatory. Those are listed: the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the International Labour Organization, and I'm sure you've heard from labour organizations of those.
We also know -- I guess this is part of our cynicism -- that we came to you and expressed concern, many of us, about aspects of Bill 160 that we thought were a violation, but you have discovered later that that was so, and just most recently, this past week, the case before the Social Assistance Review Board about the spouse in the house where, again, we had to use the legal process to challenge decisions the government was making that we saw were illegal. We think it would certainly save time, energy and a lot of money if the government would pay more attention when people raise issues and say, "We believe this is illegal," and sit down and talk to us seriously about what we consider to be the illegal aspects of proposed legislation.
Finally, to speak to the welfare reform that we don't need, which is an area that we in the social safety network are very conscious of, and that is the negative stereotypes and the contempt and the punitive approach to welfare reform that seems to have undermined many of the programs in the province in the last couple of years. Budget paper F that was released with the provincial budget is just the latest illustration of this. The word "dependency" or "dependent" is used 10 times in six pages. Is this accidental or casual use of language? We don't think so. The word "dependency" has been carefully deployed in Canada and the States to cast people on welfare as morally defective and lacking a work ethic. This aids in recasting the debate over welfare reform in terms of individual failings and defects, not ones of structural issues such as unemployment and poverty.
The welfare reform we don't need is the kind that is needlessly punitive and geared simply towards reducing caseloads by ensuring that every administrative pretext is used to deny people benefits and force them off the system at every turn. I also work as a community worker and so I have personal experience on a daily basis of how this happens.
The welfare reform we don't need is the kind where employment programs are narrowly focused on the so-called shortest possible route to paid employment. Increasingly, the social assistance caseload in Ontario is made up of people who face greater barriers to employment. Cheap job search and basic education and skills will do little to get them into decent, stable jobs with good future prospects. At best, Ontario Works simply promises to cycle people in and out of the low-wage labour market, I guess for free, and in and out of the social assistance system with little chance of moving up.
I'd like to finish today with two or three specific illustrations that have come to us in the social safety network of how legislation, when the rubber hits road, affects people in real life.
Recently a woman was cut off benefits for refusing work as a phone sex operator. She was reinstated on appeal, but in the meantime she was forced to move into a shelter. For every person who locates an advocate and manages to appeal in this new and more restricted system, there are many others who do not. What happens to them?
Another situation, and this is particularly interesting because we just heard from the chamber of commerce that people really need to have job experience if they are going to get jobs: One of the men, and I know this story personally, performed janitorial duties as part of an Ontario Works placement. Then he applied for a job as a janitor and was told that workfare didn't count as real job experience.
A third story: A woman with two children left family benefits to take a part-time job out of town. After she lost her transportation, she wasn't able to keep working and had to apply for welfare. First welfare wouldn't give her benefits for three months because they said she had quit her job, and so she went to work in a body-rub parlour. Welfare would only then give her benefits as a single person because she didn't have birth certificates for her children. So she was given welfare as a single person at $520 a month, even though she had been on family benefits as a family.
When she asked them how she was supposed to feed and house her children on an income as a single person, she was told to go to a food bank. The food bank, since they look at the welfare stub to confirm how many people they need to provide food for, looked at hers and said that since she was a single person, they would only give food for a single person. She then was informed she had to fulfil Ontario Works employment obligations. When she asked about child care, she was told that wouldn't be provided since she had been assessed as a single person on welfare. That is the reality of welfare reform on the ground.
The welfare reform we do need would recognize that people cannot effectively plan for the future, acquire new skills or even do job searches while they are desperately impoverished. It would recognize that quality on-the-job training means compensating people adequately for the work they do and ensuring they get access to real skills training. Real reform would take a longer-term view of the skills upgrading people need to be competitive in today's labour market, so it would include reinvigorating the apprenticeship system in this province and allowing access to post-secondary education, rather than this so-called shortest possible route to paid employment.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. That affords each caucus a little under five minutes. We begin with the official opposition.
Mr Agostino: Ms Eagle, thank you for the presentation. I've had the pleasure of working with Ms Eagle as social services critic for my party for a couple of years, and certainly I know the commitment. This presentation today explains that commitment and that involvement that you have in helping the needy in our community.
Just from your experience, as well as what I have seen, if you listen to government members, they will tell you that all of a sudden workfare has brought about all these wonderful community programs, municipal programs, that for some reason were in a big black hole before 1995. I know from my own experience chairing the social services of Hamilton-Wentworth for five years that we had some tremendously successful programs, things like Helping Hands that took hard-to-employ young people who had drug and alcohol dependency problems and put them into a fairly intensive program, people who chose to be in those programs, in resumé writing, in retraining and literacy upgrading, and we had a success rate of about 70% for very-difficult-to-employ individuals. There are programs like that right across Ontario. The big difference was that people chose to be in those programs. People chose the programs they wanted, the route they wanted to take to get off welfare and back into the workforce.
In your own community and the work that you have done, are you aware of municipalities doing this type of work with people who chose to be in those programs before 1995 and the type of successes that occurred as a result of a structure of voluntary involvement rather than mandatory, forced involvement?
Rev Eagle: I know the situation in London best in terms of some of those programs. I know that before the whole workfare thing came into place in London, where people were able to voluntarily sign up for job placement, job training, apprenticeship or any kinds of possibilities like that. They always had a waiting list of people they couldn't place. That's why I was particularly distressed at the chamber of commerce comment that if people didn't have to be forced to do stuff, they wouldn't be out there doing it, they'd just be home doing the proverbial drinking of beer. It distresses me that there is that stereotype that's further perpetuated by the suggestion that there have to be mandatory programs. It has been oversubscribed every time by people who have some job training and want placement or people who are looking to get the job training or acquire particular skills.
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Where it has moved into the mandatory stuff, what's happening is all the energy is going into the administrative stuff of assessing people. This guy I just described who took the job as a janitor is trained as a carpenter, but somebody decided there was one place willing to take a workfare placement for a janitor, so they stuck this guy in there. The other thing they told him when he got over there was to make sure he didn't hurt himself on the job because there was absolutely no coverage in case he did hurt himself.
A lot of energy is going into misplacing people or to forcing people to try and do things. I know in London right now, because I also serve on the board of the children's aid society by virtue of being on municipal council, somebody from the welfare department came to see us at the board level at children's aid and asked us if we would take workfare placements. Of course, the issues for children's aid would be issues of confidentiality, client sensitivity, children with special needs and that kind of thing.
We also asked about the confidentiality with the welfare clients. The person at welfare said to us, "Look, anybody who self-assesses that they're in a workfare placement, we consider that they are placed in a workfare placement and we don't even check with the employer that they're placed there." So again, when we're talking statistics of how many people are placed, we're actually talking about people who have fewer requirements than previously, when they had to bring in the job search things.
So there's a lot of stuff happening out there, with municipalities just desperate to get people placed so they can say, "Yes, we're complying and we've got all these people moved into workfare placements."
The Chair: Thank you. Mr Agostino.
Mr Agostino: So Mr Klees doesn't raise it, I'm now going to leave and go to the bathroom. I'll be back in a minute.
The Chair: That is not a point of order.
Mr Agostino: Just a point of interest, I guess.
The Chair: We'll now move to the third party.
Mr Kormos: You raise a number of things that I think are critically important. One of them is that under welfare reform that we don't need is this whole new concept of poverty as somehow deviant behaviour. That's a remarkable phenomenon, because part of the whole message -- I don't know how you feel about this -- is to create the imagery of people who are poor as somehow being lesser than you or me, more slothful, less motivated etc. What's your response to the creation of this class of poverty as deviant behaviour?
Rev Eagle: It's a very emotional issue for me because I get incredibly angry. I work with low-income people. They are friends; they are neighbours.
The third story I told about the woman who had to take the job in the body-rub parlour, she came to me as an advocate after she had worked for three months in the body-rub parlour just to feed her children, and then for two more months had survived as a single person on welfare. At the point at which she came to me and said, "Can you do anything to have them recognize that my children are my children?" she was malnourished, she was emotionally fragile. The first thing we did was go and sit down and eat, just so she could calm herself and try and deal with the situation, because she was literally over the edge.
I don't see what the point is in pushing people so far over the edge that eventually children's aid has to move in and take the kids away. We've had a massive increase in the number of children who are now being identified as children's aid clients because the families can no longer cope.
I don't see what we gain by taking human beings and pushing them down so far that they no longer even seem to be human beings to us. Even the polls are telling us now that people who have supported this government, who believed that poor people were doing too well in our system, have now said there's been enough poor-bashing. There's just been enough. That's the point at which I say not only has there been enough, there has been far, far too much.
Mr Kormos: The other observation that's so compelling, and the absurdity of this whole debate, is that we live in a country that has a stated policy of maintaining high levels of unemployment. It's an expressed, stated policy. In the fall of 1997, when unemployment stood a chance of dropping below 9%, at least according to the official numbers, a crisis occurred in the eyes of Parliament Hill and they responded by raising interest rates. God forbid that unemployment should drop below 9%. So we have official policies in this country of maintaining high levels of unemployment. Why I find this absurd is that we should be debating that and the morality of it and the stupidity of it from an economic and human perspective instead of talking about ways to make poor people's lives more miserable.
Rev Eagle: I don't think anyone denies that that is so, and those in charge of our economics have acknowledged that publicly. So I think certainly that is true, but as long as we can target and victimize low-income people, we can make them the problem, rather than looking at systemic issues and structural issues around unemployment.
I might mention too that not only do we have the reality of unemployment in this country, we also have an astronomically high percentage of children living in poverty. That has become an international embarrassment for us, the number of children living in poverty. These programs, whether intentionally or unintentionally, end up targeting women and children and the disabled.
The Chair: We now move to the government members.
Mr Klees: Thank you, Ms Eagle, for your presentation. First of all, I'd like to say that the three experiences you've cited here distress me as well. As a member of Parliament, I deal on a regular basis with welfare recipients who, in the course of trying to get their lives worked out, on occasion experience frustrations.
I would say that these cases you've cited are not as a result of welfare reform; they show that welfare reform still has a long way to go. What it tells us is that in spite of what we're trying to do to streamline the program and make it more effective to help people, there are still gaps in terms of how we can more effectively come to meet the needs of people who really need help.
I don't like to hear this. I appreciate your bringing it forward. I would like to know where this took place so that I as well could follow up, because we don't want this kind of thing to happen.
I can also tell you, and for the record I want to say that in all of the travels I've done over the last year and a half in this province speaking with caseworkers, this is not representative of the kind of work that's being done on the front lines in this province with welfare recipients. I believe our front-line caseworkers are doing the best they can and want to meet the needs of people, not set up more barriers in their lives and make their lives more complicated. But having said that, I would appreciate getting some details from you with regard to these so that I can follow it up as well.
I'd like to just comment very briefly on your reference to poor-bashing. Regardless of how often we attempt to set the record straight about the fact that under the workfare program no one in this province is forced to do something against their will, no matter how many times we reassure people in this province, people like yourself, that the responsibility of the caseworker is to sit down with welfare recipients and ensure that the community placement is appropriate for that individual, regardless of how many times we reiterate the fact that the program involves supports to overcome barriers, whether that be day care or transportation or other issues, the recurring theme by those who are opposed to the program is to bring these issues up as if they were a reality.
If I was on the outside looking in, if I didn't understand the program and know what was really there, quite frankly, I'd be sitting beside you opposing the program, because how cruel can any government be to do this kind of thing? The truth of the matter is, that isn't what the program is.
I would appeal to you, particularly as someone who is a leader in your community, to work with us to set the record straight, to work with us where there are perhaps some issues where we can improve the program. By the way, we have been continually making operational changes and changes to guidelines, over the last year and a half, to the program, where advice has come forward. We have a standing committee of Ontario Works, comprised of people from around the province who meet on a regular basis, advising us on changes to the program that could improve the program and make it more effective.
So it's not that we're not listening. We are listening and changes are being made. As I've said before, this isn't a perfect program. But, the poor-bashing that's really taking place --
The Chair: Thank you, Mr Klees. Thank you very much for coming forward today with your presentation.
Rev Eagle: I'm wondering, Mr Chair, if I'll have a chance to respond to the comments. If this is a hearing where you want to hear from us, I would hope you would not allow Mr Klees to make those remarks and not allow some response.
The Chair: I'm afraid that the time allotted to each caucus is --
Mr Kormos: On a point of order, Chair.
Rev Eagle: Is it your policy to allow members to continue to take up the time --
The Chair: It is not my policy at all. It is the policy that the individual caucuses determine how they will use the time that is allotted to them.
Rev Eagle: And this particular caucus uses its time to speak and not listen?
The Chair: That is --
Mr Gerry Martiniuk (Cambridge): Mr Chair, I move adjournment.
Mr Kormos: On a point of order, Chair.
The Chair: On a point of order, Mr Kormos.
Rev Eagle: Mr Klees personally took issue with some of the facts that I brought in the presentation and I was hoping I'd have a chance to clarify.
The Chair: I'm sorry, the time allotted is the time allotted. I have no ability to determine how each caucus will use that time. We will hear Mr Kormos's point of order.
Mr Kormos: On a point of order, Chair: We were scheduled to begin our lunch at 12:00 noon, till 1:30. In view of the nature of Mr Klees's comments and in view of the qualifications that Ms Eagle has, surely this committee would give unanimous consent to give Ms Eagle an opportunity to respond. I'm calling on the Chair. The only democratic thing to do would be for the committee to give unanimous consent to do that.
The Chair: Is there unanimous consent to -- I heard a no.
Rev Eagle: Mr Chair, I would like --
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation.
Mr Kormos: You guys, your sense of democracy is when you hear jackboots go marching.
The Chair: This committee is recessed until 1:30.
The committee recessed from 1202 to 1331.
HAMILTON AGAINST POVERTY
The Chair: Our first presenters this afternoon are representatives of the Hamilton Against Poverty organization. If you could identify yourselves for Hansard, we would appreciate it. There's a total time allotted of 30 minutes, and at the conclusion of your presentation, the time is divided equally between the three caucuses for questions. You may begin.
Ms Julie Gordon: I'm Julie Gordon, from Hamilton Against Poverty. I'm a single parent. I'm on family benefits. I'm here to introduce Gary Shillington from the Halton Social Planning Council, and Willie Lambert from the Oakville District Labour Council.
Mr Willie Lambert: I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the committee on this bill. I think this bill, more than any other bill that has been put through the Legislature in the life of this government and prior to it, has more ramifications on the lives of those people who are trying to find their way in a world that's oftentimes quite economically irrational and trying to make some rational sense from it.
On that basis, it is a bill that impacts on those same people. It is punitive, and it is really quite anti-human, by my determination anyway. The whole idea that someone would carry out human work effort, whether they be working for an employer -- in this case, they don't even have the benefit of that. In fact, they do not have those basic fundamental requirements for their human work effort to be carried out under the opportunity of accessing proper health and safety requirements. Their inability to engage in that same human work effort and have the right to freedom of some level of democracy in that so-called workplace where they would carry out those duties is an affront to the small vestiges that our society determines to be some level of democracy: the ability to associate and get some level of economic security from that.
That in itself, when I'm looking at it from a labour perspective or a working-class perspective, is the one thing I think the bill is flawed for. Beyond that, though, I think of the irrepair it's going to cause people who are, as I mentioned earlier, already in a situation where they're trying to find their feet, trying to support their loved ones, their families, pay their rent, trying to get by. That is an impact on those same people.
Employment is essentially really quite irrational. The economy, whether we can argue it ideologically one way or another, is really quite irrational. It goes up and down and all around. Consequently, if those people are to engage in some form of human work effort, it ought to be directly for an employer, making a day's pay, and not working through some maze concocted in any fashion by any government or any agency that essentially takes those dollars they earn and pockets them for itself.
The utilization of people who are on welfare, even in the caregiving sector or the social services sector, is really a perverted use, misuse and exploitation of people for that same rendering need and service delivery. If we're trying to cure some social ill, if we're trying to offer some support to people, if we're then exploiting somebody to render the delivery of it, we really have to give ourselves a shake.
Beyond that, this bill also falls into the realm of the stereotype and the bashing that is really following more than anything public opinion based on ignorance and insecurity. Working-class people today know the irrationality of the economic life we live and have to live in, the world we find ourselves in, and they feel rather insecure. On that basis, they would look at somebody who doesn't have a job as, more than anything else, somebody who is unfit and should be dealt with severely. Meanwhile, though, those same people are obviously one step from that very same reality.
This is the confounding political issue of something that's a lot more ethical than a political issue really is. It's more about somebody's ability to sustain themselves and to live. The government is going in a direction, in dealing with this legislation, that more or less blames those same people who have been in a great mass disadvantaged and disenfranchised; it is not dealing with the problem from the root cause, more than anything else, as an out-falling symptom or consequence of it. That's really flawed.
If you really want to solve a problem, you go to the prime source, the root of it, to fix it. That essentially is the problem with the bill as well. In offering any kind of an opinion that I could on the basis of dealing with it, I would say that repealing the bill is absolutely essential, but not just to do that and nothing else; to do that and to legislate a bill. If the government is concerned with expenditure, and this government is -- most are -- I would say look at the actual public institutions, corporations, both those the government administers and those beneath it, and look at performing liposuction on the tiering of management structures within those organizations. The government talks a lot about direct or front-line services. I can tell you, from my own experience and the experience that I share with others, that we're really not seeing any of that.
If we're interested in improving public services, it would stand to reason that if any cost saving can be derived, we would derive it from the structures of administration. The hang-up that we have on hierarchical structure has to be looked at with more than just a passing glance, rather than looking at an expenditure by comparison for those people who already have lost a job.
I would say also that restoring the 22% cut, which was one of the initial moves of this government, would be an absolute essential. The other thing that correlates is that if we want to talk about consumption and so-called job creation via tax cuts, it's obvious to say that somebody making a meagre allowance, a meagre living, is going to spend every cent they have. They're not going to play mutual fund purchases and all the rest of the gobstopping capitalist baloney; they're going to deal with their immediate needs, and therefore they're going to create employment through their consumption. Restoring welfare to a living -- never mind the 22%, but to a living -- would do a hell of a lot to increase consumption and, by comparison, job creation.
Targeted tax cuts: Obviously, if we're going to talk about tax cuts, I would disagree with it on the face of it. But if it was applied to those people who, again, will spend, in fact oftentimes more than they should, that would be more an argument than cutting taxes for someone who is already well-enough-to-do.
Finally, with, as we mentioned, a firm re-evaluation based on administrative -- I say liposuction, but just a firm reduction and a more comprehensive review -- some kind of targeted hiring within the realm of the public side of the economy would do the government a great deal of good service and provide some people who need employment the opportunity to engage in it and not to work through this really draconian maze.
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The last thing I want to mention is that the sister who spoke earlier, the woman who spoke earlier to the committee, gave me the opportunity to respond to the question she didn't have an opportunity to respond to. She wrote out something I'll read aloud. She's saying:
"It is indeed unfortunate that the hearing process is blatantly displaying indifference to the views of certain people in the public, when the committee members are allowed to fill the question time with comments, misinformation, and the witnesses are unable to respond to those same comments.
"A couple of comments for Mr Klees:
"(1) Indeed, the present welfare system, Ontario Works, has many problems. The stories shared today are not unfounded or exaggerated; nor are they isolated incidents. Regularly, welfare recipients across the province are penalized while on the same system, or delayed or prevented from receiving benefits. This is a direct result of the government's policy changes to begin with.
"(2) Caseworkers are in many situations trying very hard to deal with a cumbersome, punitive system with little time to carry out the additional functions they are required to perform. It is not fair to blame caseworkers for bad programs.
"(3) Since the days of the Thomson report, Transitions, social policy analysts and advocates have been making the point that those giving support to clients cannot also be the ones required to police them. One of the inherent weaknesses of Bill 142 is that it conveys even more policy power to caseworkers while also designating them to do job placement workfare supervision."
She's just thanking Hamilton Against Poverty for giving her the chance to answer Mr Klees.
We still got that answer off.
I'd like to pass it over to a friend of mine who is the president of the Halton Social Planning Council.
Mr Gary Shillington: Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me speak. I came here not prepared to speak, but then I figured I would be remiss in just sitting back and not saying anything.
For the last three years, I've been president of the planning council/volunteer centre and very active in Halton region. Two years ago, we started an anti-poverty coalition. In our first meeting, 200 people showed up in Halton, which is considered quite a wealthy society to be in. What I have seen in the last few years contradicts what Mr Young is saying and other people about what a great thing this whole idea of workfare is. Halton has been one of the areas where they've kicked it off, they've started it. I can feel the increased pressure and tension from the people around me in society. I see people who are working with the food banks, which are exhausted all the time, and the attitudes of the anti-poverty coalitions and the stress that we have in our very wealthy society in Halton.
I don't know what more I can say about it. We're upset at the fact that it's not going to be possible for these people to organize themselves. It doesn't feel right. I've known over the years that if something doesn't feel right and doesn't look right to you, it generally is not.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Is that the conclusion?
Mr Lambert: Yes, that is.
The Chair: That allows us a little over five minutes per caucus. We begin with the third party.
Mr Kormos: Are you going to participate in the presentations?
Ms Gordon: I already made a submission in Toronto.
Mr Kormos: Quite right.
You're right, Halton is considered a pretty prosperous part of the province, monster homes and a lot of BMWs, I suppose. At least, that's the imagery. What's the other side of that coin? Here's a very prosperous community -- and I don't think that's an unfair characterization. What's the other side of the coin in terms of the reality, as compared to the mere imagery?
Mr Shillington: The other side of the coin is a food bank that's exhausted. The different places where people go to get services are not working. They're not getting the services they should. I wish I had prepared myself better. I just found out about this thing last night. I could have brought a lot of information about who is not getting what, right from public transit to the exhausted food banks.
Mr Kormos: Let me put to Brother Lambert, because your background is in industry in terms of the workplace: You saw the newspaper item today in the Toronto papers and I presume some local papers indicating that the polling the government had done indicated some widespread support for their so-called workfare scheme, the whole revision, which I'm prepared to accept includes getting tough on welfare recipients. What do you say to that, the fact that there appears to be, based on polls at least -- and let's be candid: Based on you and I in our conversations with a whole lot of people, people who in other respects would condemn so many things this government had done to health care, to education, in terms of seniors etc, by God, there's still some currency out there for making sure you talk about restoring welfare rates to what they were before the 21.6% cut. What do you say to those people -- and again, I'm not telling stories out of school; some of them are perhaps your workplace colleagues -- who say, "By God, they're right; we're in debt, and we've got to cut welfare benefits to get out of debt"?
Mr Lambert: It comes down to, as I said before, an insecurity that people feel in this economic environment, the recessions we came out of, the downsizing, the absolute dominance of corporations to do as they may and be as mobile as they are. People are well aware of that. Rather than turn their sense of resentment, frustration or anxiety against those very same people who have the power, they turn against those people beneath them who have already lost from that same problem.
I think also, very candidly, the reason why things are the way they are is that working-class people, organized and unorganized, voted for the Tory government, and particularly this legislation. They haven't moved a great deal from supporting it, because essentially they're not seeing the kind of alternative that we can, as a society, never mind political party, present to them. They're going to continue to believe in it until they fall into that trap. There are public service workers who could be easily displaced by welfare recipients ultimately if this program finds its full definition. I understand initially it wasn't meant to fall into the realm of the private sector, but now apparently it has.
People have to become more conscious of the social policy ramifications of workfare. Anyone who has a social conscience ought to be able to break that down for others so they can understand that and make a more ethical judgement based on that.
Mr Kormos: I don't know if you were here earlier when I spoke with several participants about the federal government policy of maintaining high levels of unemployment, the raising of the interest rate when it stood a chance of dropping below 9%, as I recall, in the fall of 1997. Why do you think this provincial government hasn't confronted that particular policy? Why do they appear to be collaborators in a policy of high unemployment, when at the same time they want to talk a big game about getting people off social assistance and getting people to work?
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Mr Lambert: It all depends on what side of the fence you happen to see your ideological partners, or your alliances with those others. Obviously, a cheap labour strategy would be looked at with appeal by a holistically business-minded person.
I don't think it's necessarily a constructive way down the road, but in the immediate period it's looked at as an attractive alternative. I don't think that is an unfair characterization.
The Chair: We now move on to the government members.
Mr Carroll: Thanks for the presentation. I have a couple of issues that I would like to clarify the record on before I ask you a question.
This morning Reverend Susan Eagle made comments in her presentation that it's remarkable that Bill 22 will receive twice the number of days of public hearings as Bill 142. The actual numbers, for the record, are that Bill 142 had 40 hours and 35 minutes of public hearings; Bill 22, by the time we finish today, will be at 20 hours and 44 minutes. I just wanted to set the record straight on that.
I would also like, when Mr Kormos has a chance some time in the future, him to show us where this official policy of high levels of unemployment is written somewhere. He referred to it several times. I would like it if Mr Kormos could in fact show us that official policy so we can comment on it.
As far as you folks are concerned, there are three components to the Ontario Works program: the job search component is part of it, which is all somebody is allowed to participate in for the first four months they would be on social assistance; there's the training and education component of it; and there's the community placement component of it. Bill 22 deals with unionization as it regards that third component, community placement.
I take from your comments, especially from the gentleman representing the labour council, that you suggest that labour's position would be that we should also allow unionization of persons involved in Ontario Works relative to job search?
Mr Shillington: I think it's fair to say that anybody who is engaged in, as I said earlier, human work effort should be given the opportunity to collectively bargain.
As far as the official rate of unemployment, I was just reading a letter that Paul Martin sent to the president of the Canadian Labour Congress outlining the strategy of having over 8% unemployment, not to go beneath that threshold, causing inflationary concerns.
Mr Carroll: I'd like to see that.
Mr Shillington: I could source that for you, sir.
Mr Carroll: Getting back to my question on people in Ontario Works involved in job search, involved in the one component, would you recommend, as a person involved in organized labour, that they should also become members of a trade union?
Mr Lambert: If they would like to.
Mr Carroll: So people who are unemployed, looking for work, should be allowed to join a union? For what purpose?
Mr Lambert: A union, whether you're unemployed or employed, is an organization that seeks to help in a number of ways; it's not just a paycheque mentality, where it's a matter of only those paying dues working. We have tried, in the organized labour movement, to engage unemployed workers in a council. We've tried to help those who have been hurt by plant closings. I don't think it's unnatural to believe that people should have some democratic right to choose; I don't think it's unfair to say, how could that be worked out? Legislation is created quickly, and it confounds me a lot of the time.
Mr Carroll: I've got another quick question.
Ms Gordon: Can I say something here?
Mr Carroll: Let me finish this line of questioning with this gentleman first.
As it relates to job search, you believe that unemployed people who are looking for work should be allowed to join a union. Let's go to the next component, which is training. Would you also, then, believe that persons who are unemployed who are involved in a training program should be allowed to join a union? If they do, would you also extend that same right to children who are in school, in education? How far would you take this union membership issue?
Mr Lambert: It's not a matter of forcing unionization on anybody, sir. What it comes down to is somebody having the opportunity to join a union. I don't think any union, if you asked it, would deny an active participatory interest in joining. Children are not adults. Obviously, there's a cut-off point.
Mr Carroll: Let's take university students then.
Mr Lambert: They belong to a student union, I understand that. I don't know what affiliation it has exactly, but they do involve themselves in some form of association.
Mr Carroll: The bottom line is that persons who are unemployed, you believe -- and there's some benefit to them -- should have the right to join a trade union, the CAW or whatever.
Mr Lambert: I hope they would, because they've got to find a friend. They don't have one in government.
Mr Carroll: That's an interesting concept.
Ms Gordon: Can I say something here? I have a letter here from Janet Ecker that was written to Hamilton Against Poverty. She is saying that there's a limit of hours at work placement to eight hours a day and 44 hours a week. When you're looking at these kinds of limitations, there is no room for a job search here, there's no room for education and training. This is a trap. It's a community placement where people are going to be making $520 a month, where they don't have enough to eat. They're going to be going to work and they're going to have a lack of energy from lack of food.
Mr Carroll: But you also understand the other part of that, that 17 hours a week is the maximum and 70 hours a month.
The Chair: We'll now move to the official opposition.
Mr Agostino: Thank you for the presentation. Mr Kormos touched on this earlier. I look at not only workfare but the whole thing of the welfare policy and what it has driven people to and what you're seeing in your own communities. When you look at the monthly press releases by the minister, she trumpets that welfare numbers have gone down. They use a phony survey to show that supposedly most people are off welfare and in the workforce, except they don't tell you that they couldn't reach most people because they don't have phones. That only referred to people who have phones, which obviously means they are probably employed and so on.
When you look at that, the reality is that often many of the numbers have dropped because of regulation changes that have forced people off the system. For example, the limits as far as what you can keep if you're working part-time have changed. Someone who would have been able to get a top-up no longer is eligible, no longer is eligible for a drug card for their kids if they get sick, those sorts of things. So the regulatory changes have driven many people off welfare, although you're led to believe it's workfare that has taken all these people off welfare and somehow magically popped them into some workforce or some great job out there.
From what you see in your own community and dealing with the poor and the needy, have you seen an improvement? If you listen to the government, there's been a tremendous improvement in quality of life and the standards and everything else that poor people face in this province, as a result of workfare. Have you seen that reflected in the people you deal with? Have you seen an improvement in the lives of the needy or people on welfare as a result of government action in the last three years?
Mr Shillington: No, actually I have not. What I've seen is that a lot of people have moved from Halton. So now the problem is in Orillia or someplace else, but it's not in Halton. We were doing a study of the food banks. All of a sudden we have one food bank that's not being utilized at all and then you find out that they've had a cutback of the public transit. Nobody can get there and people are leaving the area. If you move the problem from here to there, it's not settled, it has just moved.
Mr Lambert: The only thing I'd add is that the rental stock and the cost of living in Halton particularly are such that, like Gary is saying, they just end up moving down the road to Hamilton or someplace where they may be able to find accommodation at some reduced rate. Halton in general has a large per capita household income, over $88,000, for example.
The only other thing that concerns me also is the implementation of the regulatory change that scrubs the numbers to make them look better, inasmuch as saying you need a receipt to claim social assistance to show that you're paying rent. Drive around any urban centre and you're going to find a lot of poverty, more now than before. You don't have to be a wizard or a political scientist to understand that those same regulatory changes have caused a lot of those people to be on the street.
Mr Agostino: Just to follow up, as I recall, when the program was introduced, I remember clearly the minister at that time making it very, very clear -- her many press releases and quotes will attribute to the fact -- that workfare was not going to be expanded into the private sector. The concern many people had at that point was, "OK, we can understand how you want to involve people in helping charitable organizations and so on." When you move that to the private sector, what you're then doing is basically exploiting people for the purpose of giving free labour to individual corporations. We were given a sure commitment that it wasn't going to happen. There was no way; it was only going to be that.
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Now there's speculation and discussion. It's gone back and forth. Depending on the poll numbers, the government will decide whether or not they will expand it to the private sector. If their numbers go down a bit they'll pop it up again: "Here's workfare, private sector." It gives them a little blip in the polls, because people like that.
What is your sense of the direction of moving, and the dangers of moving, workfare into the private sector and into corporations that obviously are there, and rightly so, to make a profit if they can? What do you see as the dangers in that, particularly from the point of view of health and safety and protection for workers?
Mr Shillington: There are a number of areas. Health and safety, of course, goes down. The benefits: You don't have to come up with the same benefit package. I worked for the Ford Motor Co for the last 27 years. Now it costs $650 labour to put a Windstar together. That's not a lot of money, but at $85 an hour, I'm sure that company would look at ways of having temporary, part-time help. They've been going for that for years in their contract. I'm sure that given a chance, they would perform the same way they do in Canada as they do in Mexico or any other country. I, for one, have been involved with them for far too long to start trusting private enterprise.
Ms Gordon: May I make a point?
The Chair: You do have a couple of seconds. Go ahead.
Ms Gordon: The same thing applies where they said they weren't going to have workfare for any longer than 17 hours a week and now I'm seeing here it's going to be 44 hours. We know --
Mr Carroll: No, it's not.
Ms Gordon: -- what it's going to lead to.
This is from Janet Ecker. I have a copy and I'll show you.
Mr Carroll: Read the letter.
Ms Gordon: Why would she send us this information if it isn't in the works?
The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward today. We very much appreciate your bringing your presentation forward.
JOHN HOWARD SOCIETY OF NIAGARA
The Chair: We would now call on the next presenters, representatives from the John Howard Society of Niagara. If you or your group could come forward and identify yourself or yourselves for Hansard. You may begin.
Mr Jim Wells: Good afternoon. My name is Jim Wells. I'm the executive director of the John Howard of Niagara. I welcome the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. I know some of you personally, except the Liberal people. I've known Peter for many years, and I know Tony and Frank.
Mr Kormos: You're going to make people think I've been through the program.
Mr Wells: You and I go back far enough and I won't comment on that, Peter. I'm glad you're here today.
By background, the John Howard of Niagara has been involved in employment programs since 1976 with regional social services, so this is my third cycle of going through the welfare boom-bust cycle. In those years, in the late 1970s, the welfare caseload was down to about 2,100 people. If you wonder why John Howard would be involved in that, I should also tell you that in 1979 we also had the lowest jail counts across the province, so that certainly did correspond with the welfare rolls.
Additionally, we were quite involved with the ALERT program that welfare had in the region in the early 1970s, which was very successful in helping hundreds of people move off the welfare rolls into full-time employment. I might add that many of the people had been on the rolls for four and five years.
To speak to the bill today, the Ontario Works proposal was designed, I believe, to help people more rapidly exit the system. My organization, and I personally, have watched what happens to people who stay on welfare for a great length of time, their frustrations and the resultant problems, so I was somewhat pleased when the welfare took a new direction in 1995, since I saw that a number of people, lots of people, were on the rolls for a considerable period of time and not making what I would say is a fair effort to get off welfare and participate in the normal economic life of the community.
Initially we did a lot of planning with the welfare officials to become involved. I feel very strongly that, while each government will have their own initiative and policy, the ultimate solutions for things are involved when a variety of community partners are involved, with indifference to community stripe. It's very important that in the long run I would see welfare as perhaps providing emergency assistance, and when someone approaches the welfare office, that a number of community players come into action to resolve the person's difficulty.
I would hope that where Ontario Works is not leading us is to a huge welfare bureaucracy with its own programs, ignoring the fundamental good work of a variety of community agencies across Ontario that can provide useful resources. After all, there really only is one taxpayer in each community. It's in all of our interests to have people off the rolls and economically and socially buoyant in their society. I hope we have general agreement here around that. Maybe we don't.
What I've done is to prepare just some notes on each page. Can this be interactive? Can you ask me questions at the end or do you want to ask me pieces in the middle?
The Chair: The time is divided equally between the three caucuses.
Mr Wells: Okay, very good.
The Chair: At that time they have the opportunity.
Mr Wells: Can the people interrupt me as I go along?
The Chair: No. It's better at the end of your presentation.
Mr Agostino: Like we need the encouragement to interrupt.
Mr Klees: Don't encourage them. You wouldn't get a word in edgewise.
Mr Wells: I know about one of them.
First of all, Ontario Works has certainly succeeded in reversing the trend of the record GWA caseloads. As you know -- and I'll speak of Niagara, which is my experience -- the welfare caseload was up over 14,000, which is really something else. At our worst time in the 1980s in Niagara the caseload was hovering about 6,700 people. Those of us in the business thought that was astronomical. We weren't ever sure how we were going to reduce this. It really was depressing to be in my business in the mid-1980s and see this, and then to watch this accelerate in the 1990s was really frightening. I didn't know where the bottom was going to be.
As legislators, you certainly see the cost and you wrestle with the system. I see the faces of these people and see the results of this stuff. I speak perhaps at a different level.
The notion that welfare is for short-term assistance is an important one. Too many cases have been on the system three to eight years. I very much like the idea that, yes, there are always going to be situations that people are going to get into. It's not a perfect world. It will not be a perfect world for a long time. People are going to come to government to help them out on a short-term basis.
I feel that welfare as a long-term kind of pension idea is certainly not good for anyone involved. Welfare prevents people from participating in the workplace. As a result, clients do not gain job training or exposure to the entrepreneurial world. The entire community loses with excessive welfare. People do not have sufficient income to remain buoyant. They're not taxpayers. They overuse the health care system. They're certainly overrepresented in the corrections system. The amount of money that's available on welfare for child care certainly isn't adequate. I've watched the people who get in this pickle; it's a heck of a struggle for them to ever recover and become working members of our community. So I very much think that the direction that we're pursuing now with Ontario Works is, in general, a good direction. I'll comment later about the actual workfare aspect of it, if I may.
As I alluded to earlier, as potential work years are lost, so are corresponding job training and job experience. With our youth employment programs, we've found it's very important for people to get any kind of a job, to get experience, to get working, to get used to the workplace. A lot of socialization goes on there. Certainly the longer people can remain employed in any job the more ideas it gives them to develop skills.
I was at a plastics plant the other day, and I saw a young 19-year-old who had been in trouble with the law and the guy who owned this plastics shop had taken him under his wing. That kid, within a year, could run every machine in there and was his foreman and looked after probably a $1-million-a-year operation for him. I thought that was incredible. If that kid had relied on the system, been on welfare, we would never discover that this kid had these kinds of talents. To look at him and to look at his background, you would have summarily dismissed him.
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I already said the community loses its taxpayer base. Also what concerns me with extensive welfare overuse is that the government unwittingly colludes with individuals to keep them in negative lifestyles. We call it co-dependency, and that certainly is the case with alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals or others who are living unusual and unacceptable lifestyles. Giving people a welfare cheque each month is no solution to dealing with their problems. If anything, as I said, it colludes with them and continues it further. So we need to be very much aware of that.
Ontario Works has led to a massive reorganization locally. I've discussed these things with Frank; I'm not telling tales out of school. Locally, it is a good experience. They've spent an enormous amount of time on developing a business plan. An enormous amount of time has been spent in reorganizing the local offices. I feel a lot of that is perhaps overkill, it's too much. The time that has gone into doing the business plan and reorganizing their offices in the HRD centres and building perhaps too many agendas, the welfare caseload in Niagara could probably be 1,500 to 2,000 people less if the time had been spent even using the old ALERT system.
It has also been difficult to determine some of the directions, for example, the proliferation of job placement programs. I have indicated in here that with the youth employment program we could probably have 100 referrals a month. Systematically we've gotten between 10 and 20 clients a month from general welfare assistance referrals. This isn't acceptable. What bothers us is that at the same time they're underutilizing, government-sponsored programs are building their own employment programs modelled after job-finding clubs. We're at a loss to know why this is happening. To us, it's neglecting good existing resources that are easily accessed and have been accessed locally for over 20 years.
For example, I put a small figure in at the back. I had the staff pull out what our success rate is. As MPPs, you should all be heartened by this. Of the young people who come to our centre, 91% of the people at exit have jobs, 89% in Welland. Even at a three-month follow-up, you can see that we're still around the 80th percentile, and in Welland it's even higher. If we had 100 clients from GWA coming into our office on a monthly basis, we probably could take 80 of those people off GWA. We've lost 16 months of referrals, and it's starting to creep into the two-year basis. I'm concerned about that overall direction and the internal buildup of resources and proliferation of programs. I smell a Topsy being built here and I don't like it.
As well, one of the difficulties, to give you some other places where resources are being underutilized, as a board member of Wayside House, when someone is on GWA they're not eligible for residency at our recovery home. To me this makes no sense. We have people the workers know have a long-term addiction history and need proper care and treatment. At the moment, we have almost 15 beds open, but people on GWA can't come there because the allotment of the Ministry of Health only pays for 20 beds. If they could come on welfare, they could come for a couple of months and we could slide them over to the MOH stuff. So we're losing resources there.
I think this is going on around the community. I can't speak for the Y or BEC or other job placement programs, but I somehow feel that the referrals are not coming out of the GWA system as they used to with the ALERT program.
There is one spike in here. In fact, in here you can see on this page that we got a whole bunch of referrals here. Well, our staff went over. We had one of the Ontario Works teams come in, and we told them about our services. It spiked great for a month and then it quit. It just quit. It went right back down to under 20 referrals. It shows that that can happen.
Mr Kormos: I will interject, Chair. Why?
Mr Wells: They're not making referrals. I believe they're feeding their own employment programs and they are not feeding our employment programs. There is no reason. We've been funded provincially to run our youth employment program since the early 1980s, and it has run continuously, as you know, because you've been at a lot of our open houses. It's a problem. I've discussed it with Frank, and we still have not found a satisfactory solution. We're double-paying for something, and that shouldn't be happening.
In general, how I envisaged Ontario Works operating when it started is that a community committee would be formed of business people, of government-sponsored service providers through non-profit, and we would form a strategic team that would implement Ontario Works so that a lot of sections of the community were covered and everybody who could bring something to the table, employers or whatever, would be represented. We're losing a lot of opportunity by their not being represented. Ontario Works is becoming -- I'll choose my words carefully -- the prerogative of the managers rather than serving the broader bases of the community. When that happens, we're losing the opportunity to provide many useful services for people who are on the system and need them that government is already paying for them.
We're quite concerned, for example, that as HRDC federally jettisons its training, Ontario Works staff are positioning themselves to become competitors to the rest of us in the community who are offering job placement services. I don't really want to have to start a turf war. Our job is difficult enough. I don't think the masters of Ontario Works ever determined it to go in that direction, yet we're hearing rumours about it, and I don't think I should be hearing any rumour about it.
In the mid-1980s, when the welfare caseload was around what it is now, around the 6,500 to 7,000 mark, locally they had 70 staff people, and by 1989 we managed to reduce the welfare caseload to about 2,300 or 2,200 individuals. Now they have, I'm told -- and I don't know this for a fact, and I didn't check on it -- in excess of 90 staff.
Finally, the whole notion of putting people on community placements, while it is useful to job shadow -- and we have used that in all of our work programs over time; it's a useful function -- the money that is being spent to develop the community work placements could be better spent on developing actual job placements. The community work placement has caused a lot of misunderstanding and friction within the community. As a United Way agency we received some unflattering letters from various groups within the community, not to participate in it, and that again is drawing away from the central focus of offering people bona fide jobs and good training experiences. So I question the utility of putting a lot of energy into that area.
Another thing, we ran a summer student jobs placement program. We didn't get any referrals from GWA, and yet the employers were banging our doors down. We went through all our subsidy money within two or three weeks. Once again, where were the GWA clients? These are the people who are most in need, and we can't get any referrals.
The Chair: That allows us a little over four minutes per caucus, and we begin with the government members.
Mr Klees: Thank you, Mr Wells, for your presentation. We know each other, and we have had some discussions. I'm pleased that you've come forward today, on the record, and expressed your concerns about a lack of integration into the overall Ontario Works strategy. I will, on the record as well, say to you, as I've said to you before, that agencies such as yours were in fact anticipated by the government to become an integral part of delivering Ontario Works in the community. We intended not to reinvent the wheel, but to build on the good things that were happening in the community already, expand on them and ensure that the right thing is being done for the people in our community.
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I have urged our staff to be in touch with you to ensure that those referrals are made and I will take back the record of your submission and follow this up again. Together with my colleague, we'll get some answers as to why that's not happening. Your point that you made earlier about community partners is precisely the basis on which this should be happening.
I think that contrary to what members of the opposition have been saying, that these hearings are a waste of time, I can tell you that the kind of exchange that we're having here -- you obviously with a view to doing your part in implementing Ontario Works, we being willing to hear positive suggestions about how we can get that done -- is just underscoring the importance of our getting out and having this kind of experience with the public.
I want to thank you. I look forward to some further follow-up dialogue with you and working with you to deliver this program.
Mr Skarica: I suspect what may be happening here, since your referral rate is excellent, is that there is a possibility here that the bureaucracy is building their own little empire and not using the already established successful programs. I guess it's tough for you to comment, but is there a possibility that may in fact be developing?
Mr Wells: Toni, that's what I was saying at the end, that we've heard rumours that they're lining up to compete with the training stuff. That's why they spent a considerable amount of time partnering with HRDC. To us, all that time could be spent on rolling up your sleeves, getting the team working and getting people off welfare rather than reorganizing. When do we get the football team on the field? The time has been passing. We've lost 18 months.
The economy really accounts for a lot of the reduction so far in the caseloads. It's not through good management. They've helped and I know we could be accelerating this. We've lost a lot of time. We've spent a lot of time talking with social services about this. We think we've tried to have positive relationships. We've heard a lot of promises and whatever. Meanwhile, they've recruited some of our staff. It boggles my mind. That's not what we intend to do.
Mr Agostino: Mr Wells, thank you for the presentation. You outlined some facts and talked about the success you've had in placements and jobs and so on. You've had the years 1996, 1997, and that sort of thing. How does that compare to 1995, 1994 and 1993 with regard to the success you've had in placing people?
Mr Wells: Probably a lower dominant because the economy wasn't there. I think it's fair to say that our success rates have never dropped much below 60%. Is that fair, Elizabeth? Even during tough times.
Mr Agostino: But would it be fair to say, though, that the success you've had is a result of the organization, the programs you have, the ability to connect with the community, knowing where the placements are, knowing where to put the people rather than the fact that people are being forced into a program?
Mr Wells: That's right.
Mr Agostino: Maybe you can tell me. Your success, doesn't that often deal with the willingness and the fact that people are there because they want to be there and they're interested and they're keen, and not being forced to be in the program? What I am getting at is, is there a correlation between a workfare mandatory placement and your success rate or the success rate you had before when people were being referred to you, when they were being screened on suitability and not necessarily because you had to fill a certain number of placements?
Mr Wells: Some people come willingly and adapt willingly to the opportunities that we give them; others don't. We have success with both types of people when the system is in sync.
When people get out of the workplace for a long time they develop a lot of fear about going out and talking to employers. They develop a lot of fear about their own personal lifestyle. They may have issues they don't want to confront. Sometimes being teamed up with the welfare worker has made all the difference in the world, if it's done properly.
To systematically cut people off without giving them a fair opportunity to me is useless, if that's where you're getting to. On the other part, I would not want to see all of the coercion go out of this, to use a strong word because some of the people need this. I've done this long enough to know that there are a lot of people who will stay on the system as long as our kindness can be misinterpreted as weakness, I guess would be the simplest way to say it.
Mr Agostino: But your experience, just from what you said earlier, is related, for example, to the same program -- the structure and everything else. The only condition you had that kind of brought your success rate down was the economic downturn.
Mr Wells: That's right.
Mr Agostino: The point I am getting at is the program is a great program and obviously it succeeds, but it's not necessarily succeeding as a result of the fact that it is a workfare program, compared to the fact that it was without workfare, with the economy being what it is. It touched on the earlier point. You made a point here about the numbers dropping and I think there are a lot of factors to that. You made reference between 1985 and 1990 and certainly welfare numbers were low. I certainly don't think it was a result of a Liberal government, that all of a sudden welfare rolls were lower because of economic conditions.
Mr Wells: No question.
Mr Agostino: Then they went up in 1990, 1995. Any government that would have been in power in that time period would have had a hell of a time maintaining low numbers because of the economic downturn. Now we're seeing the reverse of that.
I think that correlation has to be important because I always maintain, if you give me 1,000 jobs tomorrow, I'll give you 1,000 welfare recipients to fill those jobs in a day. The question is economic, the jobs, not necessarily what I think are some regressive programs here that don't work if they're forced.
But I do want to congratulate you on your success because I think those numbers are excellent and hopefully the agencies will work more with you because I think we need to look at agencies that have such a great success rate in place with a follow-up in employment and use those agencies much more effectively.
Mr Wells: I think we bring a lot of experience to the table. Also, we've worked with welfare, kind of analyzing their caseloads. There are a lot of stereotypes people have about welfare. Regionally, probably over 60% of the people have a high school diploma. We know that 13% or 14% of the local people have community college or university. The old adage that there was no hope, these people were lost, they didn't have the ability and that you were dealing with a lot of people who would never be buoyant in society isn't true.
The other comment I would say to you is we have a window with the economic recovery and we need to be taking full advantage of it. Frank and I have had some pretty pointed discussions. We really need to get this thing up and moving. This is the opportunity now.
All the time that people can get job experience and job training is going to buttress them if we have a downturn in the economy. They're going to be a lot more useful having worked for two years and gained two years of skill development and entrepreneurial exposure than if we'd left them on the welfare caseloads because we didn't get to them, because they weren't properly referred, for example, or all community resources weren't employed.
Mr Kormos: We've got up to 1998-99, 1997-98. I'm looking at the modest variations in numbers there, in percentages. I'm assuming that they're close enough that they're basically consistent one year after the other.
Mr Wells: Yes.
Mr Kormos: A 4% difference, not much; that means very little.
So when you're talking about roughly 90% employment status at exit of the program, what are you talking about in terms of the program? Elaborate on that please.
Mr Wells: People can choose at our place. They can come in for information, referral stuff. You've been to the new centre in Welland. It's modern, with all computer-assisted things. People can come in and get their resumés ready. We essentially work with the client to make them job-ready. If somebody doesn't need a lot of work, they don't get a lot of work.
But with the complete resource centre, they can see available jobs, they can tap into the Manpower computer, they have access to our staff. Those who simply need information, that's provided. If people need more, then we run specific workshops to bone them up their skills, whether it's interviewing skills or more in-depth counselling for various problems they may have that could be barriers to employment etc.
But really, all of our centres are user-driven. If you walk into them, you're greeted by friendly people. It's a welcoming place. We make sure that people know how to use the computers and use the resources. There's a positive spirit which I think is one of the bigger factors. The kids come in there with their hair dyed orange and lots of rings in their noses and within a week or so they've taken the hair dye out and some of the rings come out and they're ready to go and talk to an employer.
More important, we have a lot of information, a lot of resources that they need to make intelligent decisions about how best to find work and that's why it's successful.
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Mr Kormos: When we were much younger, the place you went to look for work was the unemployment office, Canada Manpower.
Mr Wells: That's right.
Mr Kormos: How relevant is HRDC now in terms of that role of posting jobs?
Mr Wells: They have a resource centre. In fact, some of our staff work at each resource centre across Niagara, the ones that are left. We have a co-operative agreement with HRDC that we operate the Fort Erie centre. They were going to close it and we put some of our bingo money up and they put some money up and we turned it into a community resource centre for employment and it's really turned the whole thing around.
Mr Kormos: What I'm saying is, how relevant is it now in 1998 to be registered with Manpower?
Mr Wells: It's a different system now. The action is immediate. You walk in. You don't register much with them any more. There's not a whole lot of people actively doing your job search for you. It's a user world. You have to come in and do all the hard work. They present you with the information.
Mr Kormos: A lot of employers here in Niagara use basically privatized Manpower services.
Mr Wells: They do, and Internet.
Mr Kormos: Companies tend not to do their own hiring. Again, can you put those into perspective in terms of whether they have huge banks of job postings?
Mr Wells: We have a lot of banks. Because we offer a number of different job programs in the summer we're able to catalogue employers too. We never lose an employer. We keep a good employment list. We monitor a number of different systems that people are calling into HRDC and registering the jobs, people on the Internet, and our own digging. Of course, when people get jobs they tell us where they're employed and the first question we ask is, "Are there any others?" We also maintain our own catalogue of employers that are actively hiring people.
In fact, just the other day we had a lady who came into our HRDC person and she was really down, depressed. Her husband left her, didn't know where she was going to work. She was a nurse. Janet got on the Internet and by that Friday the lady was on her way to Mexico working for a Club Med as a nurse. So that's how quickly these things can happen to turn people's lives around.
The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward with your presentation today. We very much appreciate that.
GOLDEN HORSESHOE SOCIAL ACTION COMMITTEE
The Chair: We call the next presenters, representatives from the Golden Horseshoe Social Action Committee. If you could come forward and identify yourself for Hansard, we would appreciate it. Thank you for coming. You may begin.
Mrs Linda Rogers: My name is Linda Rogers and I'm the community co-chair of the Golden Horseshoe Social Action Committee. Thank you for the opportunity to present today.
We welcome the opportunity to address you on Bill 22, but I would be remiss not to note before beginning that we add our voice to previous presenters who have expressed regret that the committee has not used its power under standing order 124 to launch a full inquiry into the circumstances at Ipperwash leading to the shooting death of Dudley George.
We're here today to discuss a program that was imported from the USA. We note then in this context that our neighbouring country to the south, which this government seems to so much admire, launched a full immediate inquiry when it was alleged that government workers had stolen mere papers from the Watergate Hotel. Yet this government stalls when there are circumstances suggesting similar links between a man's killing -- not mere papers -- and the top office in the province. This is very regrettable and we urge you to satisfy the public demand for a full inquiry to restore some measure of credibility to this government.
The Golden Horseshoe Social Action Committee is a non-partisan coalition group composed of citizens from Niagara, some members of faith and labour groups, from a geographic area stretching from Hamilton to Fort Erie. Representatives of 47 union locals and community organizations founded our committee in the winter of 1995-96. Our executive board is headed by labour and community co-chairs. Our executive is composed of 15 members, seven labour representatives, seven non-union community representatives and one position that's open to either. I'm the community co-chair. I have not been a member of any labour union for most of my working career and I'm not currently associated with any labour union.
The mission statement of our committee written in early 1996 is as follows: "We collectively want it to be known that we come together in the spirit of solidarity and our collective concern and commitment to build effective action against government cuts to the social safety net, health care network, education and labour legislation. To this end we are dedicated to protecting social gains of the past 50 years."
In furthering our mission, we have held public meetings, formed delegations and participated in consultation processes on issues of local, provincial, federal and international concerns. The unifying principle in our work, which has embraced issues from local democracy to issues such as the multilateral agreement on investment and the issue of child labour, is a simple one: to speak out on behalf of maintaining social justice in our society. Our most recent public meeting, July 5, was on the issue of the Israeli peace process. Those who attend our various meetings and activities are not anti-business or antigovernment but are pro-human rights, pro-justice, pro-democracy.
The background that I give you on the range of our activities is offered to avoid dismissal as a special interest group with a specific agenda to oppose your government.
We believe that it is the job of government to work for common good and not for private interests. Respect for the process of democracy, the government of the day, the party in power and the individual members of that government rises and falls with the extent to which citizens are convinced that government is listening to all the people. Distrust arises when the public perceives a government who listens only to their own constituencies of voters and their vested interests. There has been a tradition in Canada and in Ontario of governments meeting with all those affected by and knowledgeable about issues of policy when changes to programs and legislation are being considered.
Governments of all parties have engaged in this positive tradition. Consultation has made our government work without the complicated set of checks and balances that are necessary in the US system. It's a system built on trust, and that trust has been violated by a government that has walled itself off from opponents. So we call upon you to make this consultation process a genuine one and to open your mind to ideas from viewpoints other than your own.
The government has said that its motivation in introducing workfare is to get people off welfare and into real jobs. If that were true, we would really have no quarrel here. The Golden Horseshoe Social Action Committee, social justice groups and the labour movement have urged all levels of government to adopt policies of full employment. We certainly don't want people to be forced to depend on welfare. We prefer, where individuals are capable of employment, that they have access to meaningful, dignified jobs. Is workfare a means to achieve that goal? We do not think so.
A New York study has found that two thirds of those dropped from the welfare rolls failed to find real jobs, and they defined a job so liberally as to include those who only made $100 in the past three months. Even in Yankee dollars, that's not a lot of money. That's less than a kid with $10 a week in allowance.
In Wisconsin, the welfare rolls dropped but the use of food banks skyrocketed and the number of children entering care rose by 60%. This indicates that those leaving the rolls were not finding jobs, despite the state having a low unemployment rate compared to Ontario. The state actually keeps no statistics on how many workfare recipients do find jobs. The Wisconsin governor has been quite open in describing workfare as simply a deterrent to coming on to welfare in the first place.
Instead of helping people to find jobs, workfare replaces real jobs and in some cases may prevent individuals from pursuing volunteer efforts, education and job searches that would be more profitable, given their skills and background.
The previous system of welfare in Ontario wasn't perfect. The Social Assistance Review task force, in its document Transitions, pointed out many shortcomings. We all paid for that thorough study of our system. Some good, effective voluntary programs were generated from the study. Unfortunately, those programs were arbitrarily axed by this government for ideological reasons. The government would do better to implement some of those made-in-Canada solutions rather than to implement expensive, failed American experiments.
Workfare has been shown to reduce real jobs and to replace them with workfare conscripted labour in other jurisdictions where it's been introduced. An estimated 21,000 municipal jobs were lost in the city of New York. This work is now done by workfare conscripted labour, I think 150,000 or something workfare part-time participants. The city of Los Angeles has said its street maintenance program is being maintained by workfare and court-ordered workers. They couldn't afford to maintain the streets without those workers. Those jobs used to be performed by city workers who could afford to support a family in dignity, to say nothing of having disposable income to add to the economy.
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Where workfare doesn't immediately lead to the loss of a job, it will certainly prevent the creation of one, once the work is done by a workfare labourer, as has been demonstrated in the New York and Los Angeles examples cited above. How can we justify receiving goods and services at below the legal minimum wage? This is not good for workers, nor is it good for a government bent on reducing its deficit. Workfare recipients are not contributing vital tax dollars to fund the services that we all depend upon. Workfare puts downward pressure on wages in the workplaces where it's implemented. This not only creates stress for workers but again reduces the tax contribution of workers and their disposable income that might boost our economy.
There is also ample anecdotal evidence of morale reduction and lost productivity when workfare labour is introduced into the workplace. Henry Ford, certainly no socialist, thought that it made economic sense to ensure that his workers could afford to buy a new Ford motorcar. Likewise, the economy of Ontario is not going to continue float on paper investments alone. I think if you read the business pages recently, they say it could be Black Monday all over again any time now. We have to start giving people real jobs. This, I hope you understand, makes sound business sense.
The government cannot have it both ways. Either workfare participants are doing real jobs for less than minimum wage and thus replacing a real job with a workfare job, or they're doing needless make-work which has no purpose other than to punish them for the misfortune of being down on their luck. Continuing to maintain that both conditions can be met does not bear examination and it's not convincing to workers.
One of the basic facts of unemployment in this country that must serve as a backdrop to all considerations is that our federal government uses a formula, the NAIRU, non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, to make unemployment -- we are speaking here of the misery of individuals and their families -- an economic lever to prevent inflation in our country. Recent studies commissioned by the federal government have placed the so-called proper NAIRU level for our country at 7.5% to 9.5 % unemployed.
We have people out of work in this country, not because of lack of training or lack of ambition, but because it is simply government policy to have a certain percentage of us out of work. Job seekers thus are engaged in a game of musical chairs and under this system there will never be enough seats to accommodate all of us.
In a major 1995 study of Ontario social assistance recipients, it was found that nearly half of unattached respondents, 44%, lone parents, 45%, and more than one third of respondents with partners, 38%, had not graduated from high school. A further 20% in each case had only completed high school. One in eight had not attended high school at all. These individuals need long-term upgrading to qualify for many jobs on the labour market today, not a quick fix. Where Human Resources Canada estimates that there are three job seekers for every job opening, these underprepared workers are extremely disadvantaged.
Sole-support mothers, 80% of whom are divorced, separated or widowed, contrary to the myth that most welfare mothers are irresponsible, never-married teens, face special challenges to employment. Without the support of adequate, subsidized child care, the numbers of women and children living in poverty will continue to rise. When these supports exist, there is no need for mandatory programs. The experience of past voluntary programs -- I'm thinking of STEP and WEP -- with adequate child care was that women so much wanted to improve their family's income that they stood in line for scarce spots in these programs.
Even the most well-intentioned of all our efforts at training, job-readiness skills, resumé writing and motivational happy talk has the limited outcome of moving some people closer to the front of the line while we push others back. Trading jobs around in this way may do some good for individuals but it only creates permanent employment for the job trainers. Still, it's a preferable system to one that is forced on people.
If the government is really serious about wanting to see more of its citizens gainfully employed, it would behoove them to put their political will into a policy of full employment. Would this not be more on target than devising new and even more degrading hoops for the misfortunate to jump through? We, as a group, support work but not workfare. They are not the same thing and our members are not fooled.
We abhor the way that this government has insinuated, against all evidence to the contrary, that fraud is out of control in welfare programs. No one condones any level of fraud in our social programs, but we have to point out that the percentage of fraud found among social assistance recipients stands at about 2% to 3% in numerous studies, including your own, whereas corporate income tax fraud has been found in the double digits. Who needs fingerprinting here? By seeking to stigmatize welfare recipients with insinuations of fraud, the introduction of snitch lines, discussions of fingerprinting, you plant the seeds of justification for treating people as second-class citizens.
I have noticed in some of your press releases and material that your government lists requiring welfare recipients to look for work as one of the ways that you have made the system more accountable. This has actually been a totally reasonable requirement of social assistance recipients for decades. Implying that this is something new is another attempt to create the impression in the public mind that those on welfare are lazy and have just been getting a free ride. This is not true, and you know it, through your own studies and your own snitch lines at public expense. You have turned up only a handful of real complaints in a sea of bogus calls.
Those who find themselves on welfare do so through a variety of life circumstances, many of which might happen to any one of us, and because of a government policy that ensures a high level of unemployment. As a society, we have decided to provide those unfortunate individuals with a modest level of income out of a sense of decency, or failing that, out of the self-interested reason that the social and long-range financial costs for failing to provide adequate levels of support is greater in the long run.
No one was living like a king on social assistance and minimum wages were always considerably higher for any individual. A full-time minimum wage earner made in the ballpark of $1,000 a month at a time when maximum individual welfare rates stood at $520. Regulations were adequate and studies showed that welfare recipients were engaged in active job search or approved training programs, except where ill or caring for young children. The call for punitive, tough measures was drummed up by a regime looking for a scapegoat.
There is no provision for two levels of citizens under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It is unlikely that laws based upon two categories of citizens and workers will stand for long. It runs contrary to our whole body of law and the workfare program in Quebec has already failed a court challenge. If it is the right of one citizen to be protected by minimum wage laws and the labour code and have the right to join a democratic organization such as a trade union, it is the right of all citizens.
As you've already heard from the Ontario Federation of Labour, workfare and Bill 22 violate the spirit and letter of the law in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such areas as section 1, guarantee of rights and freedoms, section 2(d), freedom of association, section 7, life, liberty and security of the person, section 15, equality rights.
Workfare and/or Bill 22 also violate the spirit and letter of international agreements signed by Canada including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, sections 6 and 7, and the International Covenant on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Bill 22 violates the spirit and letter of the International Labour Organization human rights core conventions, and you have those printed out in front of you.
Legal challenges to workfare and its various provisions will certainly be forthcoming. They will be funded through the labour movement, social justice organizations, faith communities and the many individuals in this country who see workfare as a cynical attack on the poor and an attempt to create a vulnerable, compliant workforce. Not only will challenges be filed, but with the number of rights and freedoms that your workfare provisions violate, they will ultimately be successful. Just as the challenge to the government's Bill 160 was successful -- the SARB panel found the spouse-in-the-house rule unjust -- other challenges to hasty, ill-advised, legislation on the fly will be successful. We will all pay the legal costs for these challenges.
Introducing legislation for political reasons when the government knows that it cannot stand court challenge will ultimately be seen by the voters as irresponsible. The highest costs of all could very well be borne by your very supporters who are now rubbing their hands with glee at the thought of free or corporate welfare, subsidized labour in the private sector. If these private sector employers are court-ordered to pay minimum back wages, vacation pay and all attendant payments to their workers, they could soon be singing a different song. Those costs are avoidable if you'll just look to the experience of other jurisdictions to see that workfare has been a failure wherever implemented. The court challenges are just beginning to what is, after all, slavery by a different name.
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In its very introduction to Bill 22, the government has recognized that workfare is real work and workfare labourers may well seek membership in labour unions in order to gain access to fair wages and working conditions, as they have successfully done in New York state recently.
If the government really wants workfare jobs to turn into real positions, we wonder why they would not welcome organized labour's assistance in bringing this to pass. This is, after all, the legitimate province of labour unions in our society.
The government's whole tendency to demonize the labour movement is a mystery not only to members of unions but to members of working-class communities and families, such as my own, who have grown up and seen the positive effect of unions on their communities. Many of us grew up attending the union picnic, attending the union Christmas party. Their parents were helped by the union credit union to buy the family home. They saw hospitals and universities reap the benefits of union financial support. Perhaps they even visited their grandparents in a union-built retirement home. This is a continuing role in this community where labour is an important partner here in St Catharines in United Way drives and is a sponsor of many fine community events.
Unions are democratic institutions fulfilling a role in human rights and justice issues that have been respected in our law and international agreements for decades. Far from being a barrier to economic success, low union participation is more typical of the Third World than successful industrialized countries.
The government has said that workers' rights and personal safety will be respected in workfare placements. If this were so, why would a government intent on saving money prefer to hire public employees to supervise workfare placements rather than co-operate with the labour movement in ensuring that workers were treated fairly? Let the union movement do its job. Scrap Bill 22.
As the mother of three young people who have worked in the tourist industry in Niagara Falls as high school and university students -- yes, my daughter joined a union as a 15-year-old high school student --
Mr Kormos: She helped organize it.
Mrs Rogers: That's right, an organizer at 15. I can tell you that not all employers are wonderful people with the best interests of their workers in their hearts. Some are exploitive, mean and engage in discriminatory and harassing manners. My kids could quit and mom and dad would still feed them. Workfare labourers will be more vulnerable to exploitation.
If you don't care for individuals, just think how quickly public opinion will change against your government when the first inevitable abuses hit the headlines. Look what happened to the army with its abuses. You are just setting up the same conditions for vulnerable workers with this situation. Allow the union movement to do its job and protect those workers. Scrap Bill 22.
Elsewhere, in changing policy in the office of the worker adviser, the government has asked workers' representatives to stop representing organized workers with workers' compensation appeals. They don't want public employees to duplicate the work of the labour movement. Why, then, are they so eager to duplicate the work of the labour movement in looking out for the interests of the most vulnerable group of workers in our society? Let the unions fulfil their role. Scrap Bill 22.
Why does the government seek to prevent workfare labourers from gaining the very representation that would see that rights were not violated and that would work to turn jobs into real work? The answer seems to be that when the government says it will not allow the labour movement to sabotage the somewhat inaptly named Ontario Works program, what it really means is that it wishes to stop the labour movement from trying to create a level playing field for workers.
The only conclusion reasonable people can draw is that it really wishes to create a two-tiered labour force not protected by labour standards and with no power to insist on fair treatment and future real work. This is simply an unjust law that violates so many enshrined principles of justice that it will never stand. The Quebec workfare plan has been successfully challenged in court and Bill 22, if it is enacted, will also be struck down by the courts.
Don't waste our money on legislation that will only be reversed. Turn back from your plan to create a two-tiered workforce that will only undermine the economy, as it has in the US. Don't put vulnerable workers at risk in unregulated employment situations. Scrap Bill 22 now and rethink the whole workfare scheme.
The Chair: Thank you very much for your presentation. That allows us approximately two minutes per caucus and we begin with the official opposition.
Mr Agostino: Mrs Rogers, thank you for the excellent and obviously well-researched and well-thought-out presentation that you've made today.
I want to ask you a little bit about the drop in numbers. That's one of the things that they've talked about continuously. I know from your experience and people who are part of your group that the government would lead you to believe that workfare is responsible for this massive drop in welfare numbers and not necessarily regulation changes, or in some cases people get back to work as there's improvement in the economy. But particularly around regulation changes, I want to get your sense of the impact.
As you know, for example, the people who are on welfare and in university programs are no longer eligible and had to be forced on to OSAP. That knocked 2,000 people off welfare. They changed the requirements for people as a top-up and the base limit for people who are working part-time. That took people off welfare. If you were living with parents, even if they could not financially afford to take care of you, you were no longer eligible. Those are the combinations of changes that I think have contributed.
From your experience and the people you have seen, do you believe that the life and prospects of people on welfare who have been cut off as a result of these changes have improved in the last three years, or has it simply forced people from welfare into either a shelter or the streets or food banks?
Mrs Rogers: I think they're going to food banks. There were definitely increases locally in food bank use. I don't think it's a mystery why we're seeing squeegee kids coming up to our windshields, why we're seeing more panhandlers on the street. It's not just a sign of our times generally. My husband and I went to another province recently and were in a major city the size of Toronto. We saw as many panhandlers in a whole week of being there as we see on one street corner in Toronto. This is definitely what people have done. The regulation changes have driven people out on to the streets.
Mr Kormos: Chair, I'd ask you to note that this presentation is not only well-written and effectively analytical, but it has footnotes, and that does not happen very often.
I know your daughter Amanda, who at 15 and a high school student, along with Larry Savage, a university student, both part-time workers in a Niagara Falls hospitality location, led a major union organizing drive, to their great credit and great courage. I don't want that to permit people to draw inferences about you. I don't even know if you're a member of a trade union. Are you a member of a trade union?
Mrs Rogers: No. As I've said, I've not had the privilege. I'm one of the great people of the 1990s who work three contract jobs and am pretty much self-employed. I have no protections of a trade union and only a very minimal number of years was I a member of a trade union. I did grow up in a union family and Amanda did definitely see the need of a union in her workplace when a 50-year-old woman was laid off because she had got too slow.
Mr Kormos: Thank you kindly.
The Chair: There's still a little bit of time left.
Mr Kormos: I'll let the Tories have it. I insist that the Tories have it.
The Chair: We now move to the government members.
Mr Skarica: I'd like to compliment you as well on the research that you did, but I do take issue with a couple of points and one is where you indicate that workfare will undermine the economy, as it has in the United States. The United States presently has the last booming economy in the world, with an unemployment rate of 4.5% and a stock market capitalizaton equal to all the rest of the planet. I just don't think the US economy has been undermined.
Mrs Rogers: A stock market economy is a paper economy. I think you'll find that when you compare the way in which the USA analyzes their unemployment statistics with the way that we analyze our unemployment statistics, there's not much difference.
Mr Skarica: Then let's talk about that. There is some contention with Ms McQuaig's definition of NAIRU. As I understand it, NAIRU refers to the fact that there's a certain unemployment rate that once you reach it, no matter what a government does -- they can print money as we are doing right now -- you can't break through that, and in fact by printing money it's inflationary. The problem with Canada is that the NAIRU rate has been increasing over time. It used to be 6% in the 1970s and it's been rising. Now we appear to be printing money, and actually the money supply has gone up 12% in the last year as our dollar's gone down by the equivalent amount, but we're not breaking under 8%. So the NAIRU in Canada has been rising and the government can't break through it. It's much higher than in other places. In the United States it's at 4%, 4.5%. I take some issue with Ms McQuaig's definition of what NAIRU is and what the government tries to accomplish, as indicated in your paragraph.
Mrs Rogers: I'm not an economist, actually. Most of my work right now is done for a symphony orchestra, and I'm a drama graduate, so I can't really comment. But my reading indicates that we're one of the only countries in the G7 nations that still uses the economist Benjamin Friedman, who came up with the concept of NAIRU. Other nations give it no credence now.
The Chair: Thank you very much for coming forward today. We very much appreciate your presentation.
That concludes today's hearings. This committee sits recessed until 1:00 of the clock tomorrow.
The committee recessed at 1502.