EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Thursday, May 16, 1996

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[English]

The Chairman: We'll call the meeting to order.

We welcome Dr. Paul Steinhauer from the Sparrow Lake Alliance and Voices for Children. We're glad to have you, sir. I understand you have some other commitments, so we won't keep you for an unduly long period of time. We're looking forward to hearing your statement, which we know will be brief, because we want to have some time to ask you some questions. Welcome, and go ahead.

Dr. Paul Steinhauer (Sparrow Lake Alliance and Voices for Children): Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I'm sorry for asking you to come so early, but I am due at another committee at 9:30 a.m.

I want to thank you also because the Department of Health is one of the sponsors of Voices for Children, which as you will see in some material that is currently being translated is a group of 18 Ontario organizations with two national partners, the Canadian Institution of Child Health and the Child Welfare League of Canada, whose goal is to educate the public about the needs of children.

I've been a practising child psychiatrist for 34 years, and for much of that time I've felt like the person standing by a mighty river with drowning bodies by the thousands going by and wondering what he can do. Is he going to pick out a few and provide mouth-to-mouth resuscitation while most of them go by, or is he going to go upstream and really try to stem the source of the developmental carnage at its source? It's just in the last seven years that I've had the opportunity to devote most of my time to going upstream and trying to do what could be done to get children off to the kind of start that will allow them to be healthy, competent, and productive individuals.

I should begin by stating that I'm hoping this committee will see health as more than just the absence of disease and that we'll see healthy development as anything that keeps children from developing their full potential, their full competence, and their full productivity.

Children are clearly a national issue. In two of the papers you were given, you saw figures about the extent to which children's mental health is an issue with one in six Ontario children in one study, and there was a roughly comparable figure in the Quebec child health study having a mental disorder with a corrected national drop-out rate from school of 18% nationally. Any of you who read The Globe and Mail this morning are familiar with the statistics on youth crime, particularly crime at the younger end of the spectrum - between 12 and 17 years.

Children are also a national issue in that poor outcomes for children inevitably lead to poor outcomes for society. If we have children who don't form adequate attachment relationships in their families, we're going to have adults with chronic relationship problems in their families, in their workplaces, within society, and in their parenting. If we have children who drop out of school and remain illiterate, we're going to have adults who continue to have poor job prospects and are more likely to remain chronically dependent, which will mean higher welfare costs for the rest of us. If we have adolescents who are alienated and antisocial and have chronic emotional disorders, we as a society will be faced by increased rates of vandalism, violence, teenage pregnancy, and the need for costly services. If we have children who don't learn to be productive, we will have adults who are chronically unemployed. Our industry will lack the skilled workforce that it needs to maintain its economic base, and we will have fewer resources to meet increased costs of welfare and services.

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Ladies and gentlemen, children are a national issue, and Canada has recognized this by making international commitments recognizing children as a national issue and affirming this country's support of children and child development. I'm talking here about Canada being a signatory to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The quality of caring that a child receives in his first three years of life is the most important single factor in that child's development, apart from genetics. We know now that there are certain windows of opportunity: a window for intellectual development, a window for emotional control, and a window for the potential for attachment.

Attachment is the source of the capacity for trusting and forming satisfying ongoing relationships. It is the basis for all socialization. It is the basis for having the capacity to be sensitive to the feelings of others, and it is the basis for willingness to change one's behaviour to please others.

We know that those windows of opportunity close by the third year of life. That doesn't mean that nothing can change, but it means that to create change after that time you're bucking a very powerful current. So it's crucial that we get children off to a good start. It makes far more sense to do that than to let them get entrenched into a variety of deep and overlapping and mutually reinforcing disorders and then try to patch them.

The primary responsibility for raising children is and always will be that of their families. However, a growing number of parents are having increasing difficulty meeting their children's basic developmental needs on their own. That this is so is the result of major changes in socio-economic and family structures.

First of all, the technological revolution, which has led to globalization of the economy, means that we have lost many secure, well-paying, permanent jobs with benefits. To the extent they're replaced, they've been replaced by short-term, poor-paying jobs in the service industry with very poor benefits.

As a result, whereas in 1976 one person could support a family of three on minimum wage by working 41 hours a week, in the 1990s it requires between 73 and 75 hours of work at that same wage in order to keep a family of three out of poverty.

A second factor that has changed is the divorce rate, which according to the study is now somewhere between 10 and 14 times what it was in the period just after World War II. That doesn't include the breakdown rate of common-law marriages, which is over and above that.

The third factor is greater mobility, which means that extended families are often less able to provide help in child care.

If you put together those three factors - the fact that one has to work so much longer to stay above the poverty line if you're working for minimum wage and that in over 70% of families you need two incomes to stay above the poverty line; the increased divorce rate; and the decreased availability of the extended family - you have what has been called the family time famine.

Never in the 60 years that statistics have been kept has there been so little actual time that children spend with their parents over the course of a week. I heard of a recent study, although I haven't been able to track it down yet, that suggested that the average Canadian child spends 10 to12 hours less. I've seen American statistics that have also used the 10 hours a week figure.

What this means is that the parents, who should be there to help the child develop adequately, are often not going to be there. You don't have sufficient quality time, ladies and gentlemen, without sufficient quantity of time. Quality time doesn't come when you plan it. It often comes, as any of you have children know, when you least expect it.

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There is good agreement about what it's going to take to get children off to a good start, and it takes more than just government-funded services. As you can see from several of the articles that were distributed, our feeling is that it will require specific changes in our families, and particularly we're going to have to get more fathers involved.

Secondly, it's going to require changes in our workplaces. Two of the pamphlets from Voices for Children that the Department of Health helped sponsor will comment on, first of all, why business should care about kids, and secondly, how business can make a difference for children.

Thirdly, it's going to take changes in our communities, where we have the kinds of communities in which a whole village is available to raise a child, meaning basically that a child in his neighbourhood, in his playground, in his day care, in his school, is surrounded by adults who are caring and who are able to be there for the child, even at the times when the parents aren't available, rather than the kind of society in which, as the waterhole gets smaller, the animals get meaner, as the Ekos report showed was the mood in this country.

It means changes in our mainstream services, in our educational and our child care services. It means changes in our specialized services. Child welfare and children's mental health personnel are going to have to use themselves much more effectively and find new ways of stretching their services to cover more children, and finally, it's going to require changes in all levels of government.

However, the protection of children's developmental potential must become an integral part of the economic strategy at all levels of government, especially when social policy is being made by Ministers of Finance. If we don't want 25% of our children to grow up far short of their potential and being a drain on rather than a productive source of wealth and productivity in this country, then we can't afford to continue wasting one in four of our children's productive future.

I need to talk a little bit about the importance of high-quality child care, and I'm using this in the generic sense, and it overlaps with, but is by no means synonymous with, day care. This is a child development issue, it is not an employment issue.

We have tax structures here that penalize parents who want to stay home. A majority of Canadian parents have said that the best way to raise children is with a full-time parent in the home, and yet only 13% of families these days are able to afford to have a single parent in the home, when over 70% of the families require two incomes in order to stay above the poverty line.

So what we need are changes in tax structures that will not penalize the family that want to have a full-time parent remain at home, and at the same time we need a whole range of supplementary care. I don't care whether it is relative care, or whether it is nanny care, or whether it is high-quality home care, or whether it is high-quality child care in a day care centre. But what we do know is that the high-quality child care for children in their early years tends to increase the possibilities for success at school and tends to increase the capacity to control aggression, because most of our school drop-outs and most of our delinquents are on the trajectory to social and educational failure by the first day of grade one.

I want to just comment that as the federal government has changed to the Canada health and social transfer, as it has cut cash transfers in the absence of national standards for social services, those social services that are most supportive of the normal development for children at risk are going to be the first ones that are cut. The reduced transfers are going to go largely to the institutional services, to the universities and colleges, and to medicare, and it's going to be the social services and the social supports that are cut first.

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When funding is cut, provincial governments that used to get those transfers can go in one of two directions. They can either restructure or downsize, which is what they usually do, or they can re-engineer. Usually when there is downsizing the loss of funding tends to accentuate fragmentation.

It tends to accentuate the rigidity of the system and it tends to lead to a protection of programs that are already there, so that programs and policies rather than children become the focus of that particular ministry with its own particular silo. The kind of creativity and the kind of imagination and the information sharing laterally and the kind of partnerships and the kind of risk-taking that are essential for re-engineering are typically lost when there is downsizing.

So recognize that as a predictable effect of the decrease in transfer payments. Recognize also that some of the most innovative and model programs in this country have been some of the CAPC-grant-funded programs that this ministry has been responsible for, and they have been really a light in the future, suggesting some of the kinds of things that we should be doing as we re-engineer systems rather than just restructure them.

Also, it is a shame to see the federal government giving up the kind of economic leverage that allows some provinces to lead the way in the dash to the bottom when it comes to social supports, because this is going to hurt traditionally as the federal government abandons its traditional role of the protector of equity in this country. What is going to happen is that the weak and vulnerable are going to be hurt most, and developing children are among the weakest and the most vulnerable.

Finally, I am not unaware of the deficit and that we cannot go on paying over 40¢ of every tax dollar just servicing the debt. However, we have two deficits in this country. We have an economic deficit and we have a social deficit, and these are inseparable. If you try to correct one by aggravating the other, you're going to end up in the long run making both of them worse.

I can't think of a better example than what has happened in New Zealand, because in the ten years that New Zealand has plunged into neo-conservatism, its youth suicide rate has doubled and is now the highest in the world. Its crime rate is the highest of 20 industrialized countries. Its poverty rate grows 40% from cuts to welfare and also from the rising unemployment, so that now 25% of New Zealand's children are growing up in poverty.

We know that growing up in poverty - and it isn't just the economic deprivation, it's the psychosocial deprivations that are highly clustered in a poor population - doubles the rate of just about every poor outcome for children except conduct disorder, which is the forerunner of delinquency, and it more than triples the rate of that.

We also know that New Zealand's unemployment tripled, if you use the 1984 definition of ``unemployment'', in four years, to 12.7%. It was a negligible 4% and had been that for years before that. We know that as the middle classes decreased, the gap between rich and poor in both income and education has increased, and for the first time New Zealand can claim a large impoverished under-class.

That's what happens if you make up the economic deficit on the backs of the people who represent the victims of the social deficit. There is room for cutting in social services. In a paper that we wrote called The Canada Health and Social Transfer: a Threat to the Health, Development and Future Productivity of Canada's Children and Youth, we have suggested guidelines for responsible cutting, and what we would suggest to you just in very general terms is that there are smart cuts and there are stupid cuts.

Stupid cuts are cuts where you save some money now, but you're going to pay for it in the long run. In one of the documents being translated that you will get from me there is a chart that looks at one particular study in the United States of very high-quality early childhood care and education - day care if you want, but in a school setting with a high cognitive component in an extremely high-risk population, multiple risk factors - and they followed those kids through to age 27.

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They compared them to kids from that same community who had not received this, and by age 27 the rate of arrests and convictions was 50% less. The rate of graduations from high school was 33% higher. The rate of teenage pregnancies was 42% less, although that statistic is not exactly comparable because of differences in the two societies. Also, the rate of kids that had been on welfare at any point over the previous 10 years was down by 50%. The rate of those people who had been earning $2,000 a month or more was four times as great.

They estimated that for that extremely expensive early childhood care and education program, every dollar spent when you tight-rated it against the decreased medical, crime control, specialized education, welfare costs, and when you factored in the number of those people who had been through the program who had taxes - every dollar spent saved $7.14 by the time those people were educated.

If we strip away the supports that allow families that are vulnerable to raise their children and get them on a trajectory to successful, productive development, as a society we will be paying for the damage we have done for the rest of those children's lifetime.

I thank you for your consideration and would welcome any questions or comments.

The Chairman: Sharon and then Andy, please.

Mrs. Hayes (Port Moody - Coquitlam): I've enjoyed your presentation this morning. Thank you for coming. I enjoyed reading the material you gave us prior to your presentation.

Hopefully I'll have more time to ask questions later on, but I did want to clarify a few things. You mentioned that there are various ways of providing high-quality child care to this very important age group of zero to three, and you've certainly made the point this is extremely crucial to the development of healthy adults. During your conversation you mentioned that the majority of Canadians believe parental care is the best kind of care. However, you did not mention whether there were any studies to show that, or what you feel is the best kind of child care. Are there any scientific studies? If there are, what do they indicate?

Dr. Steinhauer: There is a survey, and I believe it is quoted in the paper The Primary Needs of Children, that indicates the majority of parents say the best way to raise a child is for one parent to stay home, but at the same time only 13% feel one parent can stay home. An additional 40% wish they didn't have to work and could stay home but can't afford to.

Generally speaking, I think most important is the quality of care that children get. Generally speaking, if a parent is able to stay home and if it doesn't plunge the family into financial poverty, I think that is fine for children. I think that probably would be...

I was lucky. When my children were young, I could afford to have my wife stay home and raise our children, and I was also lucky because she wanted to stay home and raise our children.

One thing we do know is there will always be some parents who are incapable of parenting effectively. If they were to stay home to raise children, it would not be in the best interest of those children. There will be other parents who resent having to say home because they have other aspirations. Their children will not be better off if they are forced to stay home and they are unwilling parents.

The other thing is that research has shown very clearly that high-quality extra-parental child care, combined with caring parenting, is good for all children and can be lifesaving for those children who are not well parented at home.

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Mrs. Hayes: To go back to my original question, an issue so crucial to the development of good adults, of a population that is healthy for a country... Millions of dollars have been spent on promoting national day care, millions of dollars have been looked at as to which social services should be provided, and of course millions have been spent in providing those services. Has there not been a study somewhere that has actually looked at what the best outcomes are given certain child care at that crucial age?

Dr. Steinhauer: There have been multiple studies. Most of the studies have looked at the question of whether children who have not been raised by a full-time parent in the home develop as well, not as well or better. Those studies have repeatedly shown that given caring and involved parents when the child is at home, and given high-quality child care, which has been well-defined, those children do as well or better than children raised in their own home.

The children who are poorly parented at home will do considerably better. The playing field will be levelled if they get high-quality child care when they are not with their parents, and if there is a combination of poor-quality child care and poor parenting, the result is disastrous. The other thing we know is that poor-quality child care - and I'm using that in a generic sense to include poor home care or poor relative care - can be sufficiently damaging that it isn't compensated for even by good parenting.

Mrs. Hayes: Okay.

Recently there was a study, and it was reviewed in the press, that indicated the best child care is by one parent in the home. That has been brought into question by the press or by certain commentators. I have not heard of any study that denies that, and in fact you have said that good parenting is probably the best place for that to be. I would agree with you that there should be choice.

Dr. Steinhauer: Are you talking about the Genuis study?

Mrs. Hayes: Yes. What is your opinion of the Genuis study?

Dr. Steinhauer: Scientifically, it is totally invalid.

Mrs. Hayes: But is there a valid study that would -

Dr. Steinhauer: There are multiple valid studies.

Mrs. Hayes: Where are they? That's what I'm asking. Is there something that has looked at the same thing? You're saying poor parent care... Of course we'd all agree that poor parenting is not going to produce a healthy child, but good parenting - is it better to have the child at home or in a day care with good parents? You haven't mentioned any study that answers that.

Dr. Steinhauer: I don't think there are many areas in the developmental literature where the evidence is as clear that, given good parenting and good child care, kids will do very well either being brought up by the parent or being brought up in high-quality child care outside the home. That Genuis study is not genuine. It's full of errors, full of dishonesty.

Mrs. Hayes: But you have no study that would show otherwise?

Dr. Steinhauer: I'm sorry, but you keep changing my words around. I have said there are multiple studies that have all drawn the same conclusion - that children who are raised in high-quality child care and who are well parented at home do just as well, and may do somewhat better in the socialization area.

Mrs. Hayes: Could we get the references for those studies that show good parenting is equivalent in day care to what it is in the home?

Dr. Steinhauer: I would be glad to send those to the clerk of the committee, and a number of them are referenced in the material that I've already given to you.

Mrs. Hayes: Thank you.

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The Chairman: Mr. Scott.

Mr. Scott (Fredericton - York - Sunbury): Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Dr. Steinhauer. I must say, your presentation was very thoughtful and logical and interesting.

I'd like to explore two things. One, we have a tendency to concentrate very much on whether or not a parent should be home or perhaps someplace else...or high-quality child care and so on. We also talk about the fact that we're not spending enough time with our children.

Now, perhaps this is a male perspective - I am not certain - but I'd like to explore the possibility of all of us working a little less and spending a little more time at home, not necessarily an either/or proposition in terms of whether I work or my wife works and one of us stays home. Rather, we don't seem to talk enough about the fact that we're working too much, and why we're working too much.

I think you've referred to that. We seem to always respond to that dilemma with this debate about whether the kids should be home, and maybe we should adjust the work week or something.

The second part has to do with the extended family. You mentioned three things: one, how much time we spend with our children; two, the divorce rate; and three, the fact that we don't have the same level of support for extended families.

I was involved in a debate yesterday which spoke to the question that what we had to do in this country, if we didn't have enough jobs in Atlantic Canada, was move. I would very much like to have you respond to the need for people to have the kind of support you have when you... In my case, we've been in our community for seven generations. I have lots of relatives, and a great support system. I think there's enormous value in that for my children.

I'm working - at least for another year or so - so consequently, I am secure. My neighbours, who are contemplating all of this, are trying to factor that in. I'd like to go home and tell them what you had to say about that.

Dr. Steinhauer: First of all, on the question of parents not spending enough time with children, that's absolutely true. And you know, it isn't just poor children who are in trouble these days. One of the things that has happened is that the high earners in our society, the professional people, the high executives, the highly skilled technicians, who are very much in demand, seem to be working longer and longer, and they, too, are spending less time with their children.

One of the things we raised was I think probably discussed best in The Primary Needs of Children and The Whys and Hows of Health Promotion, two of the papers I circulated to you. They really talk about the fact that, first of all, study after study has shown that in most families, even if both parents work full time, the bulk of the housework and the bulk of the hard work of parenting goes to the wife. So if we're going to have more family time, it's going to have to be because more fathers are going to be available.

Now, in order for that to come about, it's going to need two things. It's going to need a recognition and a resolve on the men in this country, and in some groups in society it's probably going to mean a recognition that it isn't unmanly to put families before a promotion. But as things stand now, in much of the corporate world - there are exceptions, and I think the exceptions are increasing - to be promoted you can't be too cognizant of the needs of your family.

I know a young executive with a food company who was having his first child. This young man was slated for promotion to the vice-president's level. He had made it clear years before that when he had a child, he wanted to take some paternal leave, to be there, when his child was born. He was told just before the birth that he couldn't be stopped from taking that leave, but if he did take that leave, he could kiss away his chances of being a vice-president.

We're under enormous pressure for people to work more. Partly it's the materialism of our society, partly it's the pressure on those of us who are high earners to work longer hours, and partly it's the wish to get ahead. If two salaries are the difference between being in poverty or not being in poverty, there's no choice, but those of us who can afford to should really look at the question of what you lose in terms of the family unit as well as what you get.

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As far as the extended family is concerned, if there's a good relationship with an extended family it can be an enormous support in all sorts of ways, including the fact that at times of tension between children and parents, having a grandparent or aunt or uncle to go to can take enormous pressure off the family system.

I guess one of the things that concerns me the most is not just that people are moving away from extended family but also that barriers are coming up between people in communities. I think of when I was a child growing up in Toronto, when I was seven or eight. We would have died with mortification if a parent had come with us when we went shelling out on Hallowe'en. What parent in their right mind in a large city in Canada these days would let kids of that age go shelling out without adult supervision?

Here's a very classic story. One of the members of Voices for Children was driving through an affluent neighbourhood in Ontario when she saw a three-year-old driving a tricycle on the road. She stopped her car, got out, took this child and the tricycle onto the sidewalk, and was telling this kid how dangerous that behaviour was when the mother came out of her door, screaming that if this woman didn't leave her child alone she was going to call the police. That is the level of mistrust. The Ekos report showed the same type of thing.

There's a meanness of spirit in this country. It shouldn't be just extended family. One of the unfortunate things that happened when women went to work was that neighbourhoods were no longer communities. The communities had consisted of the women who were in that neighbourhood during the day, forming social ties. Most of us men left it to our wives to basically keep most of the social connections going. As women went to work, their community often became the people with whom they worked rather than the people in the neighbourhood.

The other thing is that it's a shame to have to move to find some kind of support, because moving in itself is traumatic. One gives up a great deal to move, even though one loses something, certainly, if one is bringing up children in isolation.

I would hope we could somehow rekindle social values and social capital in this country so that we could begin once again to share common values, common beliefs, common trust, and we would begin to have communication and support between different groups in society so that we could work together again rather than view everyone we don't know with suspicion and fear.

Mr. Scott: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Let the record show that the witness has a great tie.

Some hon. members: Oh, oh!

The Chairman: Jealousy will get you nowhere.

Paul Szabo.

Mr. Szabo (Mississauga South): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Doctor, I enjoyed your presentation very much. I have one very quick question. Do you have any information on the current levels of drop-out rates of children from high school?

Dr. Steinhauer: The last figures I have are from the early 1990s. They suggest a drop-out rate of 30%, and 12% of those drop back in. Now, how many of those who drop back in will stay and graduate, I don't know. Those are the latest figures I have seen. They are Statistics Canada figures.

Mr. Szabo: I have heard those figures as well, and they're tragic. I think all of us know that if a child drops out of high school, their expectations for the balance of their lives are much diminished.

I hope we'll get a chance, Mr. Chairman, to incorporate something in this aspect.

Recently a major study - I think a report on it was in The Globe and Mail - was announced in New Jersey. It talked about the number of days of institutionalized care per week. This was referred to as the most comprehensive study that has even been done with regard to parental care. I'm not sure if you are familiar with it.

Of course, everybody knows we're not talking about black and white when we talk about child outcomes. We're talking about the probabilities, or the likelihood, of positive or negative outcomes, affected by a number of factors, many of which occur during the formative years, according toDr. Fraser Mustard.

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That study said that if a child - and we're talking about secure, consistent care by an adult - has more than ten hours per week of not secure, consistent care, and they referred to it as institutionalized care, there was a risk factor associated with the likelihood of positive outcomes of children.

I found this absolutely fascinating because you know what? The Genuis study concluded that it was twenty hours. After twenty hours of institutionalized care or non-parental or non-consistent adult care, there could be a negative impact on the positive outcomes of children. This amazing study, the best study that's ever been out in the entire world, that's got lauds and praise from the industry, says it's ten hours. Yet you've testified that the Genuis study is bogus. Let's have your comments.

Dr. Steinhauer: I don't know the particular study you're referring to. The one thing I do know that is somewhat similar, although more limited, is an American study that has looked at the amount of time children in their senior public school years spend unsupervised before and after school.

Mr. Szabo: We're talking about pre-school years.

Dr. Steinhauer: Look, basically I agree with you about the quality of care there. But even as late as the senior public school years, the more children are left alone and unsupervised, the less likely they are to do well in school and the more likely they are to get caught up with drugs in adolescence.

Mr. Szabo: Mr. Chairman, I want to leave the question, but I would ask if the doctor would mind if I sent him something on this and he could provide a response once he has seen the study. I think the doctor has a wealth of knowledge of this area that he could comment on. Maybe I could ask for that undertaking. If I write to you, will you send something back?

Dr. Steinhauer: I would be pleased to, sir.

The Chairman: This is a very quick question, because we're out of time. Dr. Steinhauer, in your opening remarks you made reference to the fact that the tax system is working against parents who want to stay at home. Could you elaborate and tell us how that can be fixed?

Dr. Steinhauer: Unfortunately I can't tell you how it can be fixed, but it should be a matter of concern for those people who want to make it possible for more families who would like to have a parent stay at home to do so. It should be a matter of concern to make sure that the tax system isn't set up in a way that puts them at a disadvantage.

The Chairman: Could you tell us how it's set up that way right now? I don't quite follow what you mean. I don't challenge what you're saying; I'd just like to have some information.

Dr. Steinhauer: I'm sorry, I don't have a depth of knowledge about this. This is something I have heard from other people who have more depth of knowledge in that area, other people I work with. A great deal of the work I do is with other people who are working, and I've heard everybody from the right-wing people in The Sun to some of the people who are in the day care movement suggesting that it is important that there be changes in the tax system if we actually want to have as many parents as would like to stay home be able to do so, without putting their families at a financial disadvantage. I don't know the details, sir.

The Chairman: I would be interested in having that information, so maybe you would be good enough to write me or have someone else write me on this issue. Or you could give us the names of some people we could talk to about it. It's an angle that is very germane to what we're doing here and we'd like to be able to pursue it. If there's a tax angle we should be addressing, we would like to do that.

Dr. Steinhauer: I will research that, sir, and I will get back to you within the next two weeks.

The Chairman: That's excellent. Thank you.

I want to thank our witness for coming and for quite an informative exchange this morning.

I'm going to take a minute for the transition to invite our other witnesses to the table.

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The Chairman: We'll reconvene this session. We welcome now the witnesses from the Canadian Council on Social Development: David Ross, the director; and Katherine Scott, the project director.

In a moment I'm going to invite Mr. Ross to make a brief opening statement and then we'll have an opportunity for some questions. We have a total of 45 minutes for this segment.

Before inviting Mr. Ross to do so,

[Translation]

I'd like to ask my colleague, Deputy Chair Mrs Picard, to chair the meeting for a few minutes.

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Hello. Go ahead.

Mr. David Ross (Director, Centre for International Statistics, Canadian Council on Social Development): So we can start?

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Yes.

[English]

Dr. Ross: Thank you very much for inviting us to the session this morning. We were invited on the basis of a fact book, called Child Poverty: What are the Consequences?, which we prepared this year. This fact book was a simplified chart book, with an easy to read and easy to understand presentation. It was circulated to the committee in advance, at your request.

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I want to spend just a few minutes going over the rationale behind this fact book and briefly some of the conclusions, but I also want to raise in the formal discussion with the secretary of the committee here some other work we are working on, called The Progress of Canada's Children, which I think is of interest to the committee as well. We brought some copies of this little brochure. It's a major project that Katherine is heading up for the council that involves 20 experts from across the country.

Just to let you know, my specialty is and has been for a long time economics. I have a doctorate in economics, so that's my specialty. I'm not a child psychiatrist. My main interest is in social economics, that is, looking at the impact of economics on families and on communities, so I call myself a social economist. I'm also a sociable economist too, if you were to meet me after hours.

Social economics is my thing, but also my wife and I have raised five children. They're at least 22 years of age or older now, and they're all pretty well successfully dug into the adult world. So I feel I know probably a lot more about child development through that than I do about reading the subject matters, frankly. Anyway, we'll see.

Katherine, on the other hand, has a somewhat more indirect experience with child development. She spent a number of years before she came to the council working with the children's services branch in COMSOC in Ontario, so she has a bit more hands-on knowledge and can deal with those kinds of questions.

I'm not sure to what extent the committee has got into this in its hearings or whether you've just been talking with child psychiatrists mostly. I don't mean to denigrate that, but it is a particular perspective. I think what's very important and what concerns me is that we get the macro picture right.

I think talking about whether parental day care or this kind of day care, non-profit or profit, or whether you have this kind of pre-school program or that kind of pre-school program, if the rest of society is sort of crumbling around you it doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference, basically. What you have to do is get the societal picture correct. I think Dr. Steinhauer was alluding to that in one of his lengthy rejoinders.

In Child Poverty: What are the Consequences?, one of the things we're looking at and trying to illustrate with the existing survey data that we use in this volume is our concern that if we move more towards what I call the privatization or the individualization of our society - that is, putting more and more emphasis on families and communities, however we define community, and that's a good point - to look after the social and the economic problems in this country and move away from more public or collective involvement in our economic and social security system, it's putting new stresses and strains on families and on communities.

Basically what this privatization, the shifting of responsibility for economic and social security, means is that families have to be more self-reliant, and they can only become more self-reliant by relying more on the marketplace. So we have a lot of emphasis and focus today in the economic field of creating a much healthier free enterprise engine and having less government involvement both in managing the economy and in providing social support.

We've had quite a dramatic reduction in a variety of social supports, family supports, in the last ten years. This concerns us in terms of looking at the macro picture. We're not against having a healthy, vibrant market economy. As an economist, I know very well that a market economy is not a bad way to organize a society, but it does need - and I think we had developed after the war - a reasonable balance between collective responsibility and the private self-reliance. We seem to be moving away from that now.

What most of the studies will show - and in the United States it's even becoming more apparent - is that too much reliance on the free marketplace leads to a considerable inequality of incomes unless the government is to come in afterwards and try to clean it up. But governments are showing more and more reluctance to come in to try to adjust and knock some of the rough edges off the marketplace, so to speak. So you get more inequality of incomes, and we have a chart in here that shows that.

.0930

We've been having somewhat of a running battle in The Globe and Mail with theC.D. Howe Institute about who's right, but we're right on this one. Partly it's a matter of using different bases. We're looking at families, while the C.D. Howe is looking at all Canadians, and we're looking at families with children, so it's partly a difference there.

Also, they're looking at all income and we're looking at market income because we think that's what's important. I call ``market income'' the income people get from earnings and investments, because if that's the way the society wants to go and that shows an increase in inequality, then I think it's going to create some problems.

The increased income inequality basically leads to reduced opportunities for children, and that's why I say to get the macro picture straight. As I said, before making these other adjustments to programs and how you care for children...a good number of families are starting off with less income relative to other families, and in fact less income, because even on an absolute basis it's declined at least since 1981.

It's not just an inequality in income. What we're trying to show in this fact book is that the increased inequality in income leads to certain outcomes, you might say, for children. We looked at some of these outcomes and you can see there is a connection. We're not saying the income itself causes the outcomes, it's just that incomes are highly associated.

On page after page you can look at the relationship between different levels of income, and it's not just poor versus non-poor, it's through the whole range. If we break it up into what we call quintiles, or three or four different income segments, you can see that the likelihood of good outcomes for children increases as the family income increases. I think this is incontrovertible. What is probably not at this stage incontrovertible is what exactly the mechanisms are behind that.

Dr. Ross suggested that if we just give people money you can reverse that. No, not at all; I don't think so. That's obvious in some cases, and in the case of nutrition for children that would probably go a long way, but there are other things associated with the incomes. Obviously these aren't identical families who just happen to have different incomes.

There's quite a difference in the levels of education, in where these people live, in the family structure, in their occupations, and what not, so there are a lot of other things associated with the incomes that we obviously want to look at more deeply.

But I think it's incontrovertible that income is highly associated. For example, infant mortality, low birth weight, disability rates, children who drop out of school, hyperactive children, children with disorderly conduct, children who don't use condoms regularly, teenage pregnancies - there's a whole range of things that seem to be highly associated with our levels of income.

That's basically what this chart sets out to do. It concludes by showing that in some European countries where there is more of a concern with child and family poverty and child and family outcomes, they are able to produce a much better profile in terms of income distribution and child outcomes. That's what is in that book.

Very briefly, The Progress of Canada's Children is a study with funding from a private foundation. We'll be doing every year what we consider to be a progress report. It's modelled after a report that the United Nations does looking at the progress of children across a bunch of different countries. We're focusing on Canada. There will be some international comparisons, but our focus is on Canada.

Our model is that children are always affected by the environment in which they're being raised. I know there's a large focus in this room on children from zero to three, or children from zero to six. There's no question those are crucial years, but it's also true that if a young child were raised in ideal surroundings from the age of zero to six and then at the age of eight ended up in a different family where the father was an alcoholic and started beating on the kid, there's no question that child would have a different outlook and a different outcome in life.

So I wouldn't say 18 or 19, but I think in our study we're looking at children up to the age of 18 because we think all those years are crucial. We could argue about whether one year is more crucial than another year, but I think it's important.

I think it's also important that when we're dealing with the question of child development, we shouldn't suspend common sense. We were all children ourselves. We all have children in our communities. We all know people who have children if we don't have them ourselves. I think you should just use common sense sometimes as to what it is that makes a child turn out well, makes them turn out secure, makes them turn out with curiosity, and as well makes them turn out healthy children.

.0935

I think in interpreting all these studies we should keep that in mind. If you think of it that way, then you realize that focusing just on a particular age, although it might be interesting, can lead you to some wrong policy conclusions. If you think we should put all our money in the zero to six age group because after that you can't do anything about it, well, you're really creating some bad policy or some bad initiatives, in my mind.

What this study is going to do, then, is every year we hope it'll be a sort of statement of record. It's looking at what we call the environment in which families are raising children.

We have five environmental sectors and we're using statistical data. There are a number of surveys out now in the country. There's the one very long survey, the National Longitudinal Survey of Children, that asks a lot of questions about children from the age of zero to 12. We'll be using data from that very heavily and we'll be bringing this out to the public.

What we want this report to do is not just direct it towards academics and policy-makers, but direct it towards communities and families. We want to be able to show what the healthy environments are, and the things that are required.

[Translation]

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): You've gone over the time limit.

I don't know if you are aware of this, but all the MPs who are members of the committee have received your paper. We've had time to read and we're ready, if you want to finish in a few seconds, to ask you some questions.

[English]

Dr. Ross: I've wrapped up. It's okay. We will get to talk here, so let's say I'm terminating.

[Translation]

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Dr. Hill.

[English]

Mr. Hill (Macleod): I always like to know a group's funding. Where do you get your funds from? I noticed the Laidlaw Foundation as one source of money. Could you just overlay where your money comes from?

Dr. Ross: I can't easily. I could send you a financial statement, if you like. I'm quite proud of the fact that it used to and I'm proud of the way it is now, but the CCSD used to basically be funded by a grant from the federal government for years. I'm going back. The CCSD has been around since 1920.

Three or four years ago the government, as it did with a lot of organizations, said no more sustaining funding. So we had to reinvent ourselves. We did it through what we call the Centre for International Statistics, which was funded with an initial start-up by the Laidlaw Foundation.

Basically what we do now is this. There are 15 people in the centre, all post-graduates and all social scientists with statistical backgrounds, and we do contract research now. So everything is on an invoice basis. We do a lot of research for other national organizations.

One of the ideas was that research today is getting very complicated, but there's a lot of very good databases out there, most of them collected by Statistics Canada, but there are others. We have international databases, but most organizations can't afford to access that. So we do that.

We try to centralize and keep the costs down so that a wide variety of primarily social organizations can contribute. We raise about $1 million a year from contract research from provincial governments, municipal governments, from United Way, from federal governments, whoever wants to contract with us.

The rest of the money comes from membership. We are a membership organization. We have over 1,000 members from coast to coast. Most of those are organizations such as child care centres, agencies, United Way, organizations like that, and a lot of individuals. So we get money from memberships.

We get money from publications. We sell our publications.

Then we get donations. We have a number of corporate donors. We have a number of private donors, life and legacy funds.

Mr. Hill: You get approximately $1 million from government. How much would you get from the others?

Dr. Ross: It's not $1 million from government; it's $1 million from contract research. We do contract research, for example, for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, for One Voice, and for the United Way of Metro Toronto. We do contract research for the B.C. government, for a lot of different organizations, steel workers, you name it.

Mr. Hill: Yes, that's great. You mentioned that some European countries do much better than Canada in income distribution and that the outcomes for children in those countries are much better than Canada. I'd love to not only know which countries you think are the best in this area, but also actually have some documentation that the outcomes are in fact significantly better. Could you just go over the countries that we should look at?

.0940

Dr. Ross: I'm going to turn you over to Katherine. She's just returned from Europe.

Ms Katherine Scott (Project Director, Canadian Council on Social Development): Two years ago, anyway. I spent a year in Sweden, which of course is the pinnacle of all great social development in that sense, certainly by way of child and family services.

A number of European countries certainly have much better profiles. The data we cover here are for the countries that, through significant public and collective intervention, have basically radically reduced rates of child poverty. That was the specific focus in the comparative data that's presented here, which is derived from the Luxembourg Income Study, which is a major cross-national study conducted by a number of economists based in Luxembourg.

Canada is a participant in this study. So the data that we present here are from that study and show that the continental European countries - France, Germany, the Netherlands, in particular, and northern European countries, including the Scandinavian countries - have much more equitable income distribution and much lower rates of child poverty, and the attendant consequences that are linked with child poverty that we amply demonstrate in this volume are less there.

They also have a much different approach to family and children by way of the types of supports that are available in the communities, and that is certainly true. My experience was in Scandinavia, and I was stunned time and again about the types of community or social supports that are available to families.

It crosses a wide range of things. That would include things like parental and maternity leaves, so that the time available for parents to spend with their new children is much longer in those countries. Particularly in Sweden if your child is sick, there are leave provisions so that you can care for that child, whereas the situation here in Canada is that the mother or the father has to take their own sick days and there is very little response time.

They actually have provisions in many Scandinavian countries for what they call ``long part-time'', which is the ability to work a six-hour day. So women in those countries have tremendously high participation rates in the labour force, but a great many of them are actually working this long part-time and actually get off around 3 p.m. and are at home when their young children come home from school.

Finland has an interesting program whereby they actually have guaranteed that child care will be available for children from zero to three, but at the same time they have put in place a benefit for those parents who stay home with young children, so that there is an equitable playing field for parents who go out and continue to engage in the labour market, and those who choose to stay at home.

All of these are supports and result in things such as higher rates of participation in university training, all sorts of outcomes that are considered more positive.

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Monsieur Scott.

Mr. Scott (Fredericton - York - Sunbury): Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you very much for the presentation.

First of all, I want to thank you for reminding us, notwithstanding the nature of our particular study, of the need for us to be conscious of the benefits of remediation. My own background in this is in the area of literacy, and when you said that, it occurred to me that it's probably one area you can't really go from zero to six and talk about, because it's assumed to some extent that kids that age aren't reading, at least regularly.

To some extent the debate has become polarized. I welcome the way that you've engaged us in the beginning in terms of this broader issue of collectivism and individualism and so on, and so I'll put on the record that I consider myself an interventionist, so if I walk down a road that sounds a little bizarre I want to protect myself.

The previous witness spoke to the fact that one of the outcomes, for instance, of the fact that women entered the workforce in the last whatever number of years is that it's had an effect on our sense of community and neighbourhood. I hadn't thought of that before. I don't know what that means about me, but it was an interesting observation.

.0945

One of the other outcomes, though, is the sense of community. I am not one who believes in the charity model. I believe in entitlement and I believe in the state's obligations and so on, so don't misunderstand what I'm about to say.

I do think one of the things that's happened is that this sense of community that went along with the volunteerism on the contribution end of that equation has also escaped. Therefore, people who would willingly help in some fashion seem very resistant.

In my own neighbourhood, if my house burned down, the people who would come to help me build my house are demanding that they not pay taxes. I am not sure what that says. I don't know what's happened to cause that to happen. I suspect you've been thinking about this more than we have. How do you respond to that? Do you have any advice for us? I think it is a broader issue. It is not enough for us to decide that this is what we must do. I think we need to generate a collective will to do it.

Dr. Ross: One of the environmental indicators we're using in The Progress of Canada's Children is something we call ``civic vitality''. It's one whole area. We think it is important - the vitality of the community in which the children are being raised, what we call the social infrastructure, the social capital, the things that go on in the community that you can't quantify so easily.

For example, how engaged are the people in municipal politics or in local politics? How engaged are they in volunteering? How many clubs are there - Lion's clubs, Kiwanis clubs, or whatever? How often do people engage among each other as opposed to just going home at night and locking their door, turning the TV on and feeling that they are not part of the world?

We think it's very important. I don't have any easy answers to that.

I grew up in Alberta and went from rural Alberta to Edmonton, and I think what was going on at that time, and I guess we've all experienced it, is that there has been a breakdown in the community. I think cities are more anonymous - maybe not at the workplace; your community is more at the workplace than it is where you live. Unfortunately, your children don't live at the workplace. They live back there, and mostly people return there at night and they close the door and they turn on the television.

Our communities seem to have broken down. This idea of the family building bees...if a barn burned down, everybody just got together and they rebuilt the person's barn. Communities felt that obligation because they knew each other. They all went to the post office every day to pick up their mail. They met at the seed company every day, at the mill. They met, they were engaged, and they had to help each other.

Nowadays we seem to be more anonymous. We go into a highrise apartment. I think the urbanization has done a lot of it, and we have to reinvent how people get together again, frankly, in very stratified, urbane and cold communities. There's no magic bullet.

You're right, though. We've lost a lot.

Mr. Scott: The work time and sometimes our public policy have a tendency to track certain words that are used by public policy people. People have now become very familiar with participation rate, for instance, relative to the workplace. I would encourage your organization to begin to float participation rate at home. It's a gender-neutral concept that I'm suggesting. It may be that we can deal with the lack of economic opportunity and the community and quality-of-life questions at one and the same time by an interventionist exercise in work distribution. It's been talked about, and I would welcome your reaction and comment.

Ms Scott: I have two comments. One is that I think this whole task of re-engaging or reconstructing the community is very important, but it is not a question of going back to a glorious past. I think it's important to point out that oftentimes people have a very nostalgic view of what those communities were and how helpful they were and all the rest of it. As we well know, that always wasn't the case, whether it was questions of domestic violence, which were hidden in the house and not brought forward...

.0950

We live in a much different concept so we need to generate the concepts or ideas of the civic that reflect life in late twentieth century Canada and move into to the twenty-first century. I think a nostalgia about sending women back to the homes and all that sort of thing is misplaced - I'm not imputing that to you - and misguided, and that what lies before us is a much more creative and demanding exercise.

In terms of the role the government has now, that it's redefining itself within the context of scarce resources, how best to actually generate the civic is interesting. Holding up the voluntary sector as the saviour of social services - we know from the American experience that's absurd. With the withdrawal of government funds, you can't expect a voluntary sector to come up and take over and so forth.

It behooves us to think of creative ways to sustain and support organizations in a variety of different ways. It behooves the government, as it redefines its role, to understand how it's pulling critical supports out from under and leaving a gaping void. As people scramble to meet it, I think there's some... There's scope for a creative response to that, but in this area in particular, I think it's critically important that they understand that the voluntary sector can in no way begin to make up for that sort of thing.

The government has tools at its disposal, including tax tools, which Dr. Steinhauer... There are a variety of ways in which they can reconsider their role - not just head start programs or nutrition programs in every school and that sort of thing.

Mr. Scott: Thank you.

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Madame Hayes.

Mrs. Hayes: This is a fascinating discussion on some of the root problems, and there are no easy solutions to what we're looking at. I'll go back to the comment about community. So much of what I'm reading today seems to indicate that the solution is the village, the community, that the family is breaking down so we have to move on to something else. Yet at the same time, because there's participation from women or homemakers or whatever - men or women - the community itself is becoming fractured. So we're depending on something that is increasingly at risk to be the saviour of the thing that we're trying to help. So we're looking at a very interesting problem.

From what I've seen of the gender/feminist movement and going back to a comment by my colleague, participation in the workforce and equal participation seems to be their goal, so that we don't recognize the value or perhaps even the option of complementary roles. Within government departments we are driving toward equal participation as the solution, but here we've just heard that maybe it isn't ideal. Maybe there should be choice. Is equal participation in the workplace as well as in the home the solution, or do we lose our community in that process, as would seem to be indicated by a previous witness?

Dr. Ross: I don't think solution is the right word to use, because I don't think there are any solutions. I think we're misleading ourselves if we think that is ``a solution''. Let's reduce the work week, create stronger anti-discrimination laws - I don't think these things -

Mrs. Hayes: No, but my point is -

Dr. Ross: If this is the way society is moving, if women are taking jobs in the labour force and that's the way they've decided they want to go, I don't call that a solution. That's just society evolving and I see no reason why men - as Mr. Scott is suggesting and as I would suggest - can't pull a bit more of the load. If women are helping to bring home more of the family bacon, why can't the male come home early and pick up the child from child care?

Mrs. Hayes: Actually, I'm not finished my question yet, but I would agree that there should be the choice. But there is also a mindset that equal participation is the answer, and I would question whether that is the answer.

Dr. Ross: It's not our mindset.

.0955

Mrs. Hayes: Okay. That's interesting, because I think it is the mindset of a good number of people, and I would question that mindset.

This is not so philosophical. This is a very direct question, actually. You mentioned there was dialogue between you and the C.D. Howe Institute. You mentioned that you look at a market income index, income investment, as being the indicator of what you've given in your book. Could you expand on your dialogue with that organization and where your indicators would be different?

Dr. Ross: It's quite simple. They did a study, reported in the newspapers. We sent our study to The Globe and Mail. Bruce Little tried to resolve it in one of his columns. The Toronto Star has tried to resolve it. Basically, their field of study was all households, that is, individuals. They lumped all households together - individuals, the elderly, families with children, families with no children, the whole works - and said, what's the income distribution, and how has that changed over time? They looked at what we call ``total income'', that is, all sources of income.

That's fine, and their conclusions are probably... I haven't gone through the study, but they're careful authors. I'm sure what they found is probably correct. What we find, though, is if we're dealing with children...and that's our concern, children, and the environment they're being raised in. We took only those families - you can do that with computers and a database - with children under the age of 18. That's the result reported in this book here. Only families with children under the age of 18 make up our universe; that's what concerns us. If society wants to reproduce itself healthfully, you have to look at the families. So that was one source of difference.

The other source of difference was that we wanted to focus, at least partially, on what we call ``market income'', or total income excluding government transfers. Most of our income comes from the marketplace - or 80% of it does. We wanted to look at what is really going on underneath the income distribution in Canada, so we looked at market income.

You'll find, as we report here, that of these Canadian families, the bottom 60% are worse off if you look at 1981 and 1993. In fact, we've done different years, and it doesn't matter what years you look at; they're worse off. The shares of those 60% have gone down. The working poor, the poorest and the middle class - their shares have gone down. The top two shares, the top 40%, have increased.

If you look at families, it doesn't matter whether you look just at market income or total income: even after the government has come in with taxes and with transfers, those three bottom groups are still worse off.

Mrs. Hayes: But not as badly off?

[Translation]

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Unfortunately, Mrs Hayes, your time is up. I must move on to someone else. Mrs Gaffney.

[English]

Mrs. Gaffney (Nepean): Thank you very much, Madam Chair.

First of all, in response to the question Dr. Hill asked initially about where the funding comes from, I'd like to tell Dr. Hill that we all receive notices from the CCSD. I am a member. I receive notices of their new booklets, of their research papers that have come out. If I wish to purchase them, I can purchase them. This goes to all members of Parliament. I would encourage anyone to become a member and join the club. They do some tremendous research.

I think I sat on your board at one time. Do you still have a board?

Dr. Ross: Oh, yes.

Mrs. Gaffney: You do. Way back in the early 1980s, I think, I was on your board.

Further, I want to comment on something Mrs. Hayes said in regard to families, and working families, and what you have done on the type of upbringing these children are having as opposed to two parents working as opposed to only one parent working.

I think it's unfair to judge all families the same. I know of working parents where the children are being brought up better than in a case where mom could be at home. There are different reasons why moms work outside the home. I have always been a working mother, and have raised five children. My five children today are all contributing citizens, young professionals, in this country. I'm very proud of them. I think I probably gave more attention to those children from the time I came home from work until they went to bed than some parents gave them when they were home all day.

So it's not black and white. It's a little bit different.

Having said all that, we have been dealing with Bill C-222. A subcommittee of this committee has been dealing with fetal alcohol syndrome. You appear to be talking about living children. Have you ever done a report on children in the womb with regard to how they are being abused...or what is a proper thing for them to do, and look at the alcohol side of that and do a report on that, and really make this question charged? I just wonder if you've done something on that.

.1000

Dr. Ross: That's your area, Katherine.

Ms Scott: We haven't done anything specific as a study of child health. You're talking about prenatal health, really.

Mrs. Gaffney: That's right.

Ms Scott: No, we haven't done a specific study. I would refer you to the Canadian Institute of Child Health. Denise Avard would be tremendously helpful in referring you to studies of the impact.

Certainly our work as it relates to income - and there is clearly an impact that poor pregnant women are at great risk for delivering low-birthweight babies or -

Mrs. Gaffney: Not just poor women.

Ms Scott: Oh, no, we agree that it's not just poor women. I'm just saying our area of study has been looking at income as it effects, as a risk factor, bad natal outcome, such as low birthweight and the like. Oftentimes that would be compounded by other health risks, whether that be smoking or alcohol consumption.

I would point you, actually, to the National Longitudinal Survey of Children. I'm not sure whether you've had anyone here from Statistics or Health Canada to discuss this new survey with you. It's quite tremendous. There are questions about the prenatal health of mothers, and child outcomes, on that survey. We'll be able to follow little children year to year. So there might be findings germane to your question in that particular study. It's just coming together right now.

Mrs. Gaffney: Madam Chair, I'd like to share my time with Mr. Volpe, if possible. He's been bugging me here.

The Vice-Chair (Mrs. Picard): Je suis d'accord.

Mr. Volpe (Eglinton - Lawrence): This is Madame Gaffney's motherly instinct. She's taken me under her wing.

Mrs. Gaffney: Heaven forbid.

Mr. Volpe: I'm too old to be one of her kids.

Thank you, madame.

I just wanted to ask a question or two about the methodology of your studies. I've run through some of the charts you have listed in that booklet. I notice you chose, as sample countries for comparison, Scandinavian countries, Luxembourg, Belgium and then the United States. I think you threw in Australia a couple of times.

I wondered why you would have chosen the Scandinavian countries. Aside from climatic similarities, the population group would be considerably smaller and the GDP would be considerably smaller. I guess lifestyle or at least the GDP per capita might be similar. Cultural elements would be considerably different.

You chose Australia, a population size not too different from our own. It's about two-thirds the size of our own. Lifestyle is substantially different. Particular values might have some similarities, but in terms of an economic environment and the economic dynamics of the day, both the Scandinavians and the Australians, I think it could be argued, would be substantially different from the Canadians. The Australians might have some similarities on a demographic side. Yet you eschewed the opportunity to draw parallels with Britain, with France, with Germany or with Italy, G-7 countries who have some similarities both on traditional - I think you used the word ``values'', so I'll throw that back in - values that would have some resonance in this country, in particular with France, where we have roughly 7 million people whose cultural and social values might have some connection. Why wouldn't you have drawn on this?

Dr. Ross: There are two things here. One, in terms of graphics, you just can't present22 countries. It's messy.

Mr. Volpe: I want to know why you chose those as opposed to those others.

Dr. Ross: I'm coming to that. I said there were two reasons. The second reason is that we're trying to use a comparable source of data. I don't know whether or not you've done research in this area, but it's not easy to get comparable data across countries.

.1005

This is the flaw of most studies, in fact. Using different data sources, when you say this is ``family income'', quite often you don't even know what the hell it is. So we've used this Luxembourg Income Study, a repository for national data. Statistics Canada deposits their national data there, as do a number of other countries.

We tried to get this as current as we could. This is around 1991. The last year for the French data was 1986. The last year for the Italian data was around 1986. They haven't yet caught up into this next wave of the Luxembourg Income Study.

So we have the question, well, do you want to compare 1986 Italy with 1992 Canada? I don't think so. I think you want to use roughly the same years for comparison.

If you want to go into this in more detail, we could certainly send you more information. We can go back in time. In fact, I think in an earlier version we did have Italy. When we were looking at earlier data in the 1980s, we had France in it. It doesn't make any difference. You're going to find the same results. The reason Japan's not in is because they're not part of the Luxembourg Income Study. There's a limit to the kinds of countries we can use in here. But there's no pernicious reason as to the choice of these countries.

Mr. Volpe: I don't think the word ``pernicious'' was on my mind. I was just wondering about the merits of a study that includes some countries and excludes others. There's a selection process, obviously, and a series of reasons that goes beyond that selection. If there is any impact on the study, I'd like to be aware of it. If there is any priority set of decisions that have to be tested out, I would like to know those as well.

Ms Scott: Mr. Volpe, I would just like to add that in the international comparative literature of welfare states, there are basically three groupings of countries that time and again, study after study, emerge as demonstrating common characteristics - quite simply, English-speaking countries that have similar political systems and similar types of economic structures. Australia is one of them, as is the United States, Britain and Canada, despite its substantial Quebec population. Just the organization and political structures of the countries tend to have demonstrably similar types of welfare states. They tend to have similar levels of poverty and the like.

The next grouping of countries are continental European countries, which include France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, as reflected in our chart. The Scandinavian countries take a very distinctive approach and have different social and economic systems which, again, are roughly similar.

Typically, in all of the international research these types of countries, this typology, has emerged, and our study reflects, again, exactly the pattern. Even though we've taken countries from each of those groupings, it demonstrates this type of pattern. The countries, as Dr. Ross pointed out, were selected on the basis of comparability of data. The Luxembourg Income Study is the most definitive study of its kind available - period. It doesn't get any better.

The Chairman: All right. We're out of time. I want to thank our witnesses for taking the time for the exchange this morning. I'm sure we'll have need to pick your brains some more, not necessarily in full committee, but I'm sure the research staff might want to be in touch with you over the course of our study. Thanks for contributing to it.

We'll take a moment for the transition to our next witness.

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.1012

[Translation]

The Chairman: We'd like to welcome Mr. Pierre-Marie Cotte of 1, 2, 3, GO! For a good start in life.

Mr. Pierre-Marie Cotte (Director, 1, 2, 3, GO! For a Good Start in Life ): Thank you,Mr. Chairman.

1, 2, 3, GO! is a completely bilingual title. In French, it's ``Un, deux, trois, GO!'' and in English, it could be ``One, two, three, PARTEZ!''.

1, 2, 3, GO! is an evocative name. It tells us that the project has to do with children from zero to three years of age and the ``Go'' isn't there for nothing. When you say ``Go'', while playing, it's the time to go, the time to get involved. The point of the project is to ensure that children zero to three years of age and their parents have enough support so that they are ready to go and make their way in this life.

If you like, I'll tell you a bit about the background of this project to give you an idea where it came from. The project has three fathers and mothers. I'd like to start by telling you that I've worked at Centraide's greater Montreal office since 1988. I had worked on the Centraide campaign for many years. At Centraide, we asked ourselves a lot of questions concerning our way of helping communities.

Traditionally, Centraide and United Way gather funds and distribute them to community organizations so that they can work in the community with certain groups. We've realized that this form of action within the community is still very useful. I don't think that this has been called into question as such. What we wonder about is the fact that needs are growing.

For instance, in Montreal, we still have requests for $10 million, which we won't be able to meet this year. Of course, community problem solving approaches are of interest to us.

In 1993, the Greater Montreal Centraide tried to experiment in new ways of supporting communities rather than organizations. So the first sponsor of the organization is Centraide.

The second sponsor is Mr. Camille Bouchard, a Quebec psychologist who chaired a task force on the status of children. In 1991, he published, with his group, a report entitled Un Québec fou de ses enfants.

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In this report, Camille Bouchard and his group explained why it was necessary and urgent to work with very young children. After tabling his report, he didn't just go back to university and work as a professor. He tried, with a group of people, to implement initiatives for young children. He called on Centraide in 1993 and asked us if we were ready to get involved and look for a way to help very young children of zero to three years of age.

The third sponsor is Mr. Purdy Crawford, who is now Chairman of the Board at Imasco and who, at the time, was co-chair, at the Conference Board, of a subcommittee on education. This subcommittee on education was greatly influenced by the work of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, by Mr. Fraser Mustard and Mr. David Offord. They are the people who made Mr. Crawford aware of the fact that there was in our community an extremely significant human capital which might be lost if we didn't take great care of it. That resource, of course, was very young children of 0 to 5, 6, 7 and 8 years of age.

So those three people, Michèle DeGuire, the chairwoman of Centraide, Camille Bouchard, author of the report Un Québec fou de ses enfants, and Purdy Crawford met, their paths crossed and they pooled their resources.

Centraide asked Camille Bouchard to set up a focus group on working with young children in communities using a community problem solving approach. Camille worked from 1993 to almost 1995 with a group of about 10 people who came from regional boards, local community service centres, daycare centres, and so on, and who had thought about the means of intervention.

For his part, Purdy Crawford told us he would look into the problem of funding such a project. I'll tell you about that later.

Camille Bouchard's committee came to some conclusions. First of all, intervention that works, or leads to betterment, has certain characteristics. This intervention tends to prevent rather than to cure. It succeeds when a holistic approach is used rather than a more intellectual or theoretical approach is used. This holistic approach gets people involved.

Good intervention occurs very early in the life of children, therefore between 0 and 3 years of age. These are also of the kind that get parents and communities involved. From there the model started to take shape.

We also knew about some of the effects of this type of intervention, which displays these characteristics. It significantly cuts social and economic costs tied to problems in school, delinquency, crime, welfare, unproductive activities and exclusion from the market economy. We know that this type of intervention improves the chances that children, once they become adults, will find a job, be satisfied with it, and own, amongst other things, their own home, for instance. It markedly improves the situation of the parents, as far as their work is concerned and as far as the interest they take in their children's success in school and the support they give them are concerned.

You've certainly heard of the classic example of the Perry Preschool Project in the United States, where it was shown that very early intervention leads to savings of $7 for every dollar invested from the start in the community.

Everything was ready to set up the model 1, 2, 3, GO!, whose objective was to mobilize as many resources as possible and necessary, be they material, intellectual, financial, political, social, and so on, to help communities, small communities, that we term neighbourhoods, to nurture and support the betterment of their very young children, from 0 to 3 years of age in particular.

.1020

The task force set for itself six main principles which are the backbone of the type of intervention that 1, 2, 3, GO! carries out in communities.

The first is to mobilize all the people in a given community: inform them, raise their awareness, mobilize them, so that what changes in the community is not just the intervention and services for small children, but also the culture of this community concerning small children and its interest in early childhood.

The second principle is to get the existing resources to cooperate more. We're talking about concerted action, linking different programs and services, and, eventually, integrating certain services.

The third principle involves directly helping children of all the families. That mostly means outreaching, but I must say that the English term is much more specific. It's reaching out: going towards parents, not waiting for them to read a folder or meet someone so that they suddenly decide to take that extra step, to step out of their isolation. Reaching out is establishing ties with the parents, setting up a trusting relationship which leads them to gradually trust the resources that the community provides for them. One of the people involved told me that it can take up to six months of monthly or weekly contacts before a parent decides to use a community service.

1, 2, 3, GO! also works directly with children. All this mobilization only makes sense in so far as, at some point during the process, children 0 to 3 years of age are directly affected by the impact of this action.

The fifth principle is that parents are perceived as having the primary responsibility for their children's education.

Finally, the sixth principle, which is moreover very important, is to give daily support to the professionals and volunteers, those who every day - in the daycare centres, in the local community service centre, in community groups, in drop-in daycare centres - work with parents and their children, giving them the knowledge and the tools necessary to work even better.

The entire project is based on these six guiding principles. The six neighbourhoods accepted for the 1, 2, 3, GO! project are Pont-Viau, in the south of Laval; Montreal North and Côte-des-Neiges, which are multi-ethnic communities, and Saint-Michel, on the island of Montreal; Longueuil West and Saint-Rémi, which are semi-rural communities, on the south shore.

These six neighbourhoods were chosen based on certain criteria. First of all, they are neighbourhoods which have a high level of poverty. They are also neighbourhoods which have a lot of children. We're sometimes asked why we didn't choose Saint-Henri, for example. Quite simply because Saint-Henri nowadays has much fewer children than Côte-des-Neiges.

We chose neighbourhoods where there was already an active community life, able to support a mobilization process, neighbourhoods which reflected the new multicultural aspect of Montreal and greater Montreal and, as I was saying, at least one rural or semi-rural community.

I'll give you a few example. We've been working in these neighbourhoods since April or May of 1995. After a year, what has been accomplished? We've set up six task forces in these neighbourhoods. There are about 130 to 150 people who, in the last year, on a volunteer basis, have worked towards setting priorities for action in these neighbourhoods. We've consulted with more than 300 parents, which is perhaps a conservative estimate. I think that closer to 500 parents were seen at least once and were asked the following question: ``What do you want for your children here, in this neighbourhood''?

One of the six neighbourhoods has already presented its action project, Saint-Michel. We expect the Laval project at the end of the month. In each of these neighbourhoods, we have set up a network of partners who are committed to supporting the overall intervention.

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In Saint-Michel, where a first initiative has already been started up, the priorities laid out were to adequately feed the children, to ensure their physical and psychological safety and to provide them with stimulating activities, which would promote their development.

I can tell you that it wasn't just the professionals and volunteers saying this, but also the parents. Perhaps I'll come back to this a little later in our discussion.

We've noticed, and this is encouraging, signs of collaboration that didn't exist before. For instance, in Saint-Michel, the Regional Health and Social Services Board for Montreal Centre set up the ``Naître égaux et grandir en santé'' (Born equal and growing up to be healthy) program. This program, in a way, is tied to the 1, 2, 3, GO! project in Saint-Michel, which leads to more energy and synergy for the young children of this community.

You may have heard of many experiences, including 1, 2, 3, GO!, which count on the community's support to help very small children. In that sense, it's not the project of the century, nor the most innovative project, but it is made up of certain elements which are characteristic.

The first element is the profound, even relentless, conviction that communities can and should take care of themselves in order to promote the development of their very young children. It is both a positive and a community approach, which doesn't stop at the failings or risks in the community, but which is based on the potential and the resources that can be mobilized to bring something new to the children and their parents.

The second characteristic is that this project will be entirely funded by the private sector, which is quite rare among community projects. This, however, doesn't diminish the involvement of government agencies which are with us in the field, such as local community service centres, regional boards, cities, and so on.

l,2, 3, GO! is a project that counts on participation at all levels, decision makers, professionals and volunteers. The 1, 2, 3, GO! has been recognized as an innovative approach by the McConnell Foundation, which has undertaken to carry out a scientific evaluation of it with a research group tied to the Laboratory for research in human and social ecology of the Université du Québec in Montréal.

Yesterday evening, this group introduced a model it will work with to carry out the evaluation of l, 2, 3, GO! over the next few years. I know that I'm not supposed to speak for more than ten minutes, and that there will be a question period following my intervention. So I'll stop here.

The Chairman: Mrs. Picard.

Mrs. Picard (Drummond): Early on, you said you chose the neighbourhood of Laval. Who identifies the sector to be considered in your study of the impact on children? Afterwards, you spoke of an initiative which had singled out as its greatest priority the need to properly feed the children of the neighbourhood. What happens after you isolate a problem? What does 1, 2, 3, GO! set up to truly meet this need? Are parents and volunteers made aware of the situation and then left to solve the disastrous problems identified amongst children 0 to 3 years of age? Are only children 0 to 3 years of age targeted in this study?

Mr. Cotte: Let's start with the three aspects. Who chose the neighbourhoods? Over a period of two years, Camille Bouchard's group looked into the type of intervention required. They pondered the statistics of the School Board of the Island of Montreal which, given its multifactor approach, is probably the best equipped to identify communities where poverty rates are the worst.

.1030

Given these data and statistics, Centraide and its partners chose the neighbourhoods. We didn't hold a competition or call for bids, granting funds to the loveliest projects. We identified the neighbourhoods where the needs were greatest and which met the following criteria: a high rate of poverty, a greater number of children age 0 to 6 than in other neighbourhoods, and enough social infrastructure for the community to be mobilized.

1, 2, 3, GO! is an experimental project over a period of five years. The study will be carried out on the six neighbourhoods chosen that we term first generation neighbourhoods. This does not stop other communities from being inspired by its principles or from mobilizing to do things.

As soon as we had chosen these neighbourhoods and that we were ready to provide them with the initiative, we drew up the most thorough list possible of all the people in the neighbourhood who might be interested in some way or in another in the welfare of small children. We then proceeded by invitation, and presented the initiative in each neighbourhood. We called on people to set up a task force to take on the initiative in their own neighbourhood; these groups have mobilized between 130 and 150 people in the last year.

Does that answer your question?

Mrs. Picard: Yes, thank you.

Mr. Cotte: As to your second question, the parents of Saint-Michel whether we met them in day care centres, local community service centres or during the general annual meeting which brought together more than 65 parents - validated the feeding of their children as one of the priorities.

Bear in mind that in Saint-Michel, there aren't any supermarkets, such as Métro or Provigo, because they're all on the outskirts.

The neighbourhood does have nine convenience stores where, as everyone knows, food is much more expensive. So there is first of all an access problem, then a cost problem.

Moreover, a few years ago, although the problem is no longer as acute, there was exploitation. Some of the corner stores had sales, which were more or less real, at the beginning of the month, which did not necessarily include nutritional items. In the neighbourhood, there is even a truck that goes by at the end of the month, when people have no money left, and sells food that isn't necessarily any good, on credit. I would say that there is an endemic problem concerning food; people don't have access to food, it's expensive and isn't very nutritional.

A resource which is the result of citizens' action has just been set up in this neighbourhood; it's a community restaurant where you can eat very inexpensively and which is called Mon Resto. Moreover, efforts are presently been made to give neighbourhood people access to healthy and inexpensive food.

We are also making a particular effort to teach cheap and long term recipes. We also want to bring together the elderly and young mothers. We've noticed that often, young mothers don't know how to make meals. Elders could help them to cook better or teach them to cook.

1, 2, 3, GO! doesn't want to give answers, but rather to help in the energy of the community that is looking for answers to this problem. We think that that's how the initiative will become credible to people in the neighbourhood, because we won't miss the basic need that people have identified.

Even though the 1, 2, 3, GO! initiative is focused on children age 0 to 3, mothers also often have children 5 or 12 years of age. So it would have an impact on the whole family.

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We want to emphasize our intervention with 0 to 3 year olds, without limiting its scope and hoping that there will be positive results for all the other age groups in the community.

Mrs. Picard: Thank you very much.

Mr. Cotte: Thank you.

[English]

The Chairman: Sharon.

Mrs. Hayes: I have just a couple of questions. You mentioned there was a social infrastructure... First of all, I'll back up a bit. This seems to be to communities that are generally, as you say, disadvantaged communities. The poverty levels are probably higher than normal and so on. Perhaps you could give us some indication of what the family structures are like in those communities. Certainly what you've described is something that's extremely important to families that are disadvantaged, and I can see that having that helping hand would be very helpful.

Specifically, is there a large proportion of single parents in what you're dealing with? How does that affect what you're doing? You mentioned that you try to mobilize the community. Is there parental involvement in what you're doing? Do you find that what you're doing helps these single parents go back to work? How does that work, say, with the volunteerism aspect of what you're saying? Is there another...? Have you looked at the effect on the parents of what you're doing?

You're there to help the children. Has it indeed given an extra leg up to the parents that are in that community as well, whether it be to go back to work or whether it be to become involved in your program? Is there a spin-off there, and have you noticed that at all? I know you've been there only for a little while, but perhaps... I'd be interested in the whole community effect.

Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. Cotte: Thank you, Mrs Hayes.

In most of the disadvantaged communities where we work, the average family income, and not the income per worker, is less than $20,000 a year. I don't remember the exact rate, but I know that in some of these neighbourhoods, single families make up to 45% of families.

There are differences, however. In Côte-des-Neiges, a neighbourhood where there is a great number of ethnic groups, the single parent family rate goes down slightly, probably because of the culture of the newcomers, whose family values are still very strong and who separate less often. The single parent family rate, however, is generally around 40%.

As I was saying, we chose the neighbourhoods based on the multifactor scale set by the School Board of the Island of Montreal, which used factors such as income, single parenthood, and services provided. It is the most valid scale presently available in the greater Montreal region concerning under privileged communities.

In each of these neighbourhoods, the School Board of the Island of Montreal set statistical units covering two or three grade schools and affecting groups of 15,000 to 20,000 people. Altogether, there are 6,600 children living in these six neighbourhoods.

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We're talking about mobilizing parents, getting them to participate. For all sorts of reasons, this group is probably the most difficult to mobilize. We've made a huge effort to reach out to them. You're right to say that the initiative is still young and that we're only at the beginning of the process. During the first year, we have mostly tried to identify action priorities with the people of the community. A significant effort was made to reach out to parents where they live. We went door to door in many neighbourhoods, went into the day care centres, the waiting rooms of the local community service centres and of family doctors, we went to households, and so on. We met with between 300 and 500 parents that we consulted, to know what was important to them.

Each of the neighbourhood task forces is made up of a few parents. I think that parents will participate more and more once the initiatives has been implemented; many of them told us they would be there when tangible things started to happen.

The first step of the initiative consisted in research, which was perhaps a bit dry for the parents. As soon as we move on to concrete action and start reaching out, parents' participation will become essential and, I think, easier because we'll ask parents to speak to other parents. People like to be called on by people who are like them; if we want parents and children in these neighbourhoods to be affected by the initiative, it will have to be carried by the parents themselves.

Even though parents told us that it was hard to get involved in the process of identifying priorities, many told us they were interested and ready to participate in that phase of the project. This is already being done in Saint-Michel.

What impact can this type of intervention have on the parents? It's still difficult to assess today because the model is too new. We do know, however, and much research show this, that a parent who takes part in stimulating activities with his or her child and who sees the child successfully learn certain things, such as drawing, immediately benefits from direct results. The parent learns to trust himself or herself and sees his or her children's success as his or her own. If the process is easy, the parent is confident in being able to do the same thing with his or her child. You start to see a relationship based on success between the parent and the child, rather one based on helplessness or ignorance.

We want to stake a lot on this initiative. As to whether in the long term the parents will get back into the workforce, I can't give you an answer at this point. We hope that, over the years, parents involved in setting up the initiative will rediscover a feeling of productivity, that they will have the satisfaction of doing something useful for themselves, for their children and for the community, even if isn't necessarily in the context of paid work. That's the first step towards a greater commitment in the community and, eventually, in the workforce.

Does that answer your question?

[English]

Mrs. Hayes: That's probably all the time I have. Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. Cotte: Thank you, Madam.

[English]

The Chairman: All right. I want to thank you, Pierre-Marie, for coming.

I have no other names. You all looked shocked, but we have a lot of business to do otherwise. So unless there's a question, we're going to conclude with this part of the meeting.

Thank you once again for your help. We'll probably be in touch with you later. Some members of the research staff will get further information from you.

[Translation]

Mr. Cotte: Certainly.

The Chairman: Thank you very much.

Mr. Cotte: Thank you.

.1045

[English]

The Chairman: To the members of the committee, in case you've only looked at one side of your paper, there's a second side. That second side is in two parts. We're going to have a public part first and then we'll go in camera a little later on. To have the full agenda in front of you, you need two pieces of paper. You need the item called ``Standing Committee on Health'', with the agenda on it, but you also need the reverse side of the agenda with the first item at 10:45 a.m. My darling clerk tells me we're just getting it right now, so that's why you all -

The Clerk of the Committee: Your clerk.

The Chairman: My darling clerk, as I said. My clerk, as I said, is distributing that, which explains all your blank looks if you didn't know what I was talking about.

An hon. member: Good for you, Nancy.

The Chairman: We do this all the time. She's trying to make me a non-Newf and I'm trying to make her a Newf, and neither is working very well. She is a darling clerk. That's a perfectly legitimate adjective in Newfoundland to describe somebody who's doing a job well. Am I right?

An hon. member: We're not in Newfoundland.

The Chairman: You have two items. On the reverse side of this sheet we're dealing with the 10:45 a.m. item, the report from the subcommittee, after which we will go to the agenda.

Mr. Hill: I'm confused. You said we would be going in camera at 11 a.m., yet this agenda shows that we're in camera now.

The Chairman: This was printed before we knew about the need for the report from the subcommittee. We're going to do the subcommittee in public.

Mr. Hill: You'll note the agenda, business arising from the meeting...oh, I'm sorry. Shut your mouth, Grant.

The Chairman: We had an agenda for this morning's meeting, which is here. Subsequent to having that agenda prepared, we became aware of the need to deal with an item that arose in Tuesday's meeting of the Sub-Committee on Bill C-222. We're going to deal with that item first but in public, since it's a matter that needs to be dealt with in public. Then we can go to our agenda as printed.

We're going to hear from the chair of Sub-Committee on Bill C-222.

Mrs. Gaffney: I believe you all have this in front of you as handed out by the clerk. The Sub-Committee on Bill C-222, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act, warning on alcoholic beverage containers, has the honour to present its first report. In accordance with its order of reference dated Tuesday, March 5, 1996, your subcommittee requests that Bill C-222 be withdrawn from consideration of the subcommittee and recommends that the committee consider the bill in the context of its study of Canada's drug policies, with particular attention to effective means of increasing awareness of FAS. A copy of the relevant Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence relating to this bill, issue 1, is tabled. This has been respectfully submitted.

Mr. Chair, this passed the subcommittee by a vote of three to two, three for and two against. The committee had heard from many witnesses, both for and against the issue. I won't explain the motion. I'm going to leave that to the mover.

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The presentations of the people who appeared before the committee who were for implementation of labelling because of FAS were very compelling, very moving and very emotional. I think they were very legitimate. We were all impressed with them. On the other hand, the industry side was equally compelling in support of non-labelling, in support of what it was doing right now with education. On the other hand, there were some elements of doubt that we needed probably more examination. We didn't have before us the evidence that the educational program was working to the extent that it should be.

We heard of neurological damage and we heard of preventive programs. There was a very compelling presentation by the national public health officer, who spoke strongly in support of this. I looked back in the record and I could see that in 1992 it was studied, and in 1994 there was a report saying that labelling should be permitted. But there was obviously still an element of doubt in the minds of the committee. They didn't have all the evidence, in my opinion, that they felt they needed to have.

I personally feel that I have let you and other members down as chair of the standing committee because I have not been able to bring the subcommittee through to a conclusion with a final report that we should be presenting to the House of Commons. It saddens me that I don't have something definitive.

Having said that, you have the recommendation before you. I would like to hear from the mover of the motion, and I'm sure other committee members would too, as to why he felt the motion had to be moved.

The Chairman: In a moment I'll hear from Andy. First of all, let me say to you that you shouldn't feel you've let anybody down. You followed the instruction of this committee in convening the subcommittee. You also followed the instruction of your subcommittee in bringing the motion back here. You've done what anybody else in your position would have done or should have done in the circumstances.

I thank you for chairing the committee. You're not off the hook yet, because it depends on how we deal with this particular motion, whether we send it back to you, receive it, concur in it or whatever.

Andy.

Mr. Scott: I'm not certain it's an indication of any kind of failure, and I say this for Beryl and for the committee, to conclude simply that a significant problem exists. It has been identified. Certainly my awareness of the problem has increased dramatically. I speak only for myself on this. For me to conclude that there's a problem and not even discount the possibility that my colleague's suggestion is a way to deal with it, but just to simply say that I have not been convinced of that...

I want to say again that I believe in labelling as an approach to these things because of my experience in the exercise on plain packaging of tobacco and all the experts who appeared. I don't want you to get the wrong impression; it's just that I'm not sure in this case that labelling is the best way to get to the people who are unaware. It's really not much more complicated than that.

It occurred to me, and I guess to the majority of the committee, that given that we were doing the drug strategy analysis in any case, it seemed an appropriate place to have this considered further. That's the way I would like the record to show the suggestion. It's intended only to say that at the point we reached on Tuesday, I wasn't convinced that this was the way to deal with what I instinctively thought probably the people who were unaware of where they were...

.1055

I'm not sure, and I don't think that's an admission of anything. It's just an admission that I didn't feel confident enough in this approach to take that route. But I'm not discounting it, and I would refer it back to the committee, and that's why I made the motion I made and it was supported.

The Chairman: Pauline.

[Translation]

Mrs. Picard: Mr. Chairman, having considered this issue, I submitted it to the Bloc québécois. I think that everyone agrees on the principle of warnings, but we're not sure that the measure concerning the labelling of alcoholic beverages is efficient, because we think that it is too costly, given existing measures for the education and raising of the awareness of the public. Moreover, the industry also warned us of the fact of a dollar more invested in this changing of high tech equipment meant a dollar less on education and awareness.

On the other hand, I was quite impressed by the concerns of health organizations and associations concerning foetal alcohol syndrome, and that's why I approved Mr. Scott's motion as to the consideration of foetal alcohol syndrome and the steps to be taken to make women who are already pregnant - or those who will be later - more aware of this.

[English]

The Chairman: Grant.

Mr. Hill: Mr. Chairman, my personal preference is to have as little legislation as possible, as little government as possible, and the only time I think you should intervene with legislation is when there is an innocent bystander. That is why I have favoured from the first to legislate a graphic warning for the fetus, the fetus that is so innocent in this instance.

As I expressed before, that would be a recommendation to my caucus, and my caucus would have voted freely on this issue.

However - and I must for the record say this - I did notice a change in the attitude of the Department of Health, and I believe that came from the new Minister of Health. The Department of Health changed a very subtle statement to say that they supported the principle of this bill, having previously said they supported the bill, and I want the record to show that I believe that reflects a change of the minister's attitude, no more.

The Chairman: I'm sure Paul will want to say something, too, but I would like to have a word first. This is speaking not as chairperson at all, but as a member of the committee.

I felt from the beginning that Paul had a good bill. It's a bill I could have supported not only in principle but also in detail. It's a measure that in my view is long overdue. You can quibble with the detail of how you get the message through, but certainly the principle of there being such a warning is consistent with what we've already done as legislators with respect to tobacco use.

So I don't think you can even quibble with the principle, and then if I needed any reassurance that I was on the right track, I only had to sit back and watch how the industry lobby went to work on this one.

One of the many hats I've worn over the years is that of a printer, and I can tell you what extra cost it would be to put that warning on the label. You're already printing a whisky bottle in seven colours or whatever. To put a warning on it in black and white or whatever would be using one of the same inks again with a little more print. I suppose you'd pay a fellow an extra $20 to sit and design the words that would go on the label. When I say $20, maybe you'd pay him $200 or $2,000 - let's get real ritzy here. But it's a one-time cost. All this patent nonsense about how the industry is going to be driven out of business is absolute hogwash, absolute hogwash - absolute. I can't say it enough times.

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When I saw the industry move into high gear on this one, I said I think they're afraid it's going to be effective. That was maybe the best proof I needed that Szabo was on the right track here.

I'm also in agreement with Grant. Somebody changed their tune. Somebody started writing the message more carefully. They support with more qualifications.

We're all politicians and we deal in the realm of the possible. First when the clerk called me and told me what happened in committee on Tuesday, I was quite livid. Then I told her to put it on paper to me, and in the meantime I began to cogitate and I realized what had really happened. It's not to say that Andy made this happen, but Andy's motion certainly puts the thing in a very stark perspective.

The choice is clearly to lose the bill in committee right now and forfeit the opportunity to... When I say lose the bill, I sense that the collective wish is not to pass the clause-by-clause at this time. So the choice is between losing the bill and forfeiting the opportunity of resurrecting this issue for a long time, or buying some time to fight another day. Now, that's only my version. Nobody has to agree with that. But it might not be far from the truth.

If the committee agrees to concur in the motion from the subcommittee, I give the undertaking that not only will we deal with this as part of our review of the drug policy, but it won't get lost. We have a technical obligation anyway to report this back to the House at some point, correct? But more than that, we'll see to it that we address the substance of this bill and report it at the appropriate time.

For those concerned about the substance of the bill on either side, for or against it, if we concur, it will be dealt with but not this month. It will basically be a year down the road.

Mr. Scott: I think it reflects the wishes of the committee - and that's the point I was trying to make - that this not be seen as sidetracking. It would be fair to say in reading the comments of the committee prior to the motion that it probably would have been defeated. But rather than seeing it as wanting to sidetrack, it's quite the contrary.

It's my personal view that this is a very serious problem, deserving of very serious consideration. I wouldn't want the fact that this particular approach didn't convince me to be perceived as this not being a serious problem. This approach may in fact convince me, but I'm not convinced yet. So I think that's consistent with the motion that was put and with what I heard from the committee when we went around the table.

The Chairman: I was rather impressed by the volume of mail that I received on this issue as chair of the committee. I heard from the industry, and its view was not surprising. I heard from ministers of health across the country and from various groups and individuals, all very supportive of the spirit of what Paul's bill would have achieved.

Pauline.

[Translation]

Mrs. Picard: I don't know if I've understood correctly, Mr. Chairman. Are you telling us that we will soon be considering all of Bill C-222?

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[English]

The Chairman: It depends on what we do with it here. We have three or four options. What we have now is a report from the subcommittee. We can, of course, reject the report, which basically says go back and do what we asked you to do the first time; go back and deal with this in clause by clause.

We can just receive the report, which is a nice word for doing nothing about it other than saying, thanks for your report, goodbye.

We can concur with the report. We can agree with it. That would mean we would do as the report says. We would not report the bill back to the House now. Instead, we would consider it along with our earlier decision to review Canada's drug policy. At the point at which we completed that review and made our report to the House on that issue, we would also report this bill.

So there are really two options here. We can accept the report, we can concur on the report, or if, of course, you vote down the concurrence, you de facto send it back to the committee. All right?

[Translation]

Mrs. Picard: I don't understand, Mr. Chairman. We met as a subcommittee, we heard a number of witnesses and committee members were anxious to provide you with a serious report. Now you tell us that we have two or three choices. On our side, we have reported this motion and we expect it to be adopted, otherwise what is the point of all the work that we've done? Will it have to be done all over? I am not at all willing to start this work over again and as far as I'm concerned, I accepted Mr. Scott's proposal. I'd like you to explain to me why we would wish to disregard the subcommittee's recommendations.

[English]

The Chairman: Pauline, I may have muddied the waters. I was talking procedurally about what the options are. I'm not making a recommendation as to what you do. You may not want to go over it again, Pauline, and I may not want to go over it again, but we're in the hands of the committee. It's the committee that will decide what we're going to do on this one.

We have two or three options - or we really have two options and the flip side of each of those. We can accept the report. We can say thank you to the committee for the report, which means we do nothing about it. We can just say we accept the report, but the bill is still before the committee, and we still have to do something to respond to the House.

In terms of this report, we can just accept it or we can concur in it. A motion to concur would mean we would make it part of our drug study. Those are our choices.

The flip side of those is that you can vote either one of those down. We can not accept, which means it goes back, or we can not concur.

I'm sorry; I keep saying ``accept'' when I mean ``receive''. We have two options. We can receive the report or we can concur in the report, one or the other. I didn't mean accept at all.

Mr. Murphy (Annapolis Valley - Hants): We made a motion here, the subcommittee, to study this bill in the context of Canada's drug policies. That's the recommendation.

The Chairman: If we concur in that report, that's what we will do.

Mr. Murphy: Precisely. That's what we said we were going to do. Am I wrong? That's what we said we were going to do.

[Translation]

The Chairman: Do you still have problems with that?

Mrs. Picard: I don't understand why we have several choices. I thought that we would be coming here with a recommendation and it would simply be a matter of accepting it or not. What do you mean by two or three choices? We have a proposal before us and we either accept it or we don't. As far as I can see that's the only choice we have.

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The Chairman: The subcommittee is a creature of this committee. It is perfectly entitled to suggest a particular direction for the committee but the main committee will decide whether or not it chooses to follow the recommended route.

Mrs. Picard: I see.

The Chairman: Yes.

[English]

It's the choice of this committee to decide whether what you've decided in the subcommittee is what we're going to do.

Mrs. Gaffney: I'm speaking now as a member of this committee. If we decide to accept the motion as put forward by the subcommittee, there is nothing to stop this committee from amending the motion we've put forward, in my opinion. We can put forward that maybe it can be a time line, that we want to make a decision by such and such a time, or we can say that maybe this comes under the preventive strategy for happy children rather than under the drug and alcohol thing. There's any number of amendments we could possibly put forward, but certainly one on a time line is one that probably should be considered.

The Chairman: The problem with the time line is that if it's not the same time line as for the drug study, then you really clutter things up. If you're going to put it in as part of the drug study, I would hope you would honour the time line we're going to give ourselves for the drug study.

Mrs. Gaffney: Do we have a time line for the drug study?

The Chairman: We will. That's one of our agenda items this morning.

Mrs. Gaffney: All right.

The Chairman: Joe.

Mr. Volpe: Help me out, Mr. Chairman. I have a committee report that has two components to it. It says ``requests'' that the bill be withdrawn and ``recommends'' study. Is this the motion before the committee, or are you suggesting there is another motion, which includes words like ``receive'' or ``concur''?

The Chairman: At the moment, the chair is technically in error. We're discussing nothing, because there's no motion before the committee. The chair was trying to do a little coaching in terms of what motion you'd put down. Somebody has to move pretty soon that we receive the report or that we concur with the report.

We have no motion at the moment.

Mrs. Gaffney: I guess I was moving at the time. As chair, would I not be moving that one?

The Chairman: Why don't you do that.

Mrs. Gaffney: I move the motion of the first report of the subcommittee.

The Chairman: You're moving concurrence.

Now, everybody's clear that if we concur with the report, that means we do what the report says. We put it in as part of our drug review.

Mrs. Hayes: And if we don't?

The Chairman: If you don't, another motion.

The Clerk: If you don't concur with the report, the implication is that it stays with the subcommittee, and the standing committee is basically giving direction to the subcommittee to carry on with its study.

The Chairman: Which means you'll have to go back and hear some more witnesses, maybe, and do a clause-by-clause.

The Clerk: If you don't concur, you're rejecting the report of the subcommittee and the request.

Mr. Volpe: Unless there's another motion that we receive the report.

The Clerk: Yes.

The Chairman: I have a motion that we concur with the first report of the subcommittee.

Paul.

Mr. Szabo: I think I'm going to make this easy for all of you. When I became a member of Parliament and was honoured to be appointed a member of the health committee, one of the things I did was to go back over the last five to ten years of work the committee had done, to get an idea of what was there.

I can tell you, the issue that most struck my fancy and caught my heart was the report of the Standing Committee on Health and Welfare, Social Affairs, Seniors and the Status of Women, June 1992, in which they recommended health warning labels on containers of beer, wine and spirits to alert all consumers that consumption of alcohol during pregnancy places the fetus at risk for fetal alcohol syndrome or fetal alcohol effects.

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I then looked at the response of the government to that report, which is what they do when a subcommittee issues a report. In response to that recommendation, the government's position was this:

The federal government has the authority to regulate the labelling of alcohol products for health reasons under the Food and Drugs Act. The Minister of National Health and Welfare has invited the provinces and territories to collaborate with the federal government in developing ways of testing the impact of a warning label, with the goal to arriving at a ``made-in-Canada'' approach.

I have no pride of authorship for my private member's bill, Bill C-222. It first arose in the House of Commons by the Hon. Marc Lalonde, Minister of Health in 1976.

I have taken the opportunity as a member of Parliament to raise a private member's bill on a matter I feel very passionately about. I have done my very best, and I haven't failed.

I have met with the minister on two occasions. I have spoken to my colleagues. I have listened to what they have to say. My bill will not at this time be sustained in a clause-by-clause review.

The minister has helped me focus my thoughts on where we go from here. I accept his counsel, because I respect the minister. I want the subject matter to stay alive. Although my personal wish would have been to have the bill pass and be referred back to the committee now, I understand that I can't have it my way all the time and that I have to accept the wisdom of my colleagues, in their judgment.

So it is my understanding that our subcommittee continues to exist. It is my understanding that if this motion passes, the bill continues to exist. It is my understanding that the intent and the proposal of the bill will be subject to additional study or consultation or review as part of the review of Canada's drug strategy, and that pursuant to the rules of the House, the bill will have to come back for that clause-by-clause, and if deemed appropriate, reported back to the House.

I also take note of your comments, Mr. Chairman, that this is the best approach if the intent and the principle are to survive past this day. Therefore I am prepared to support the motion.

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The Chairman: All right. Thank you very much, Paul. The motion is that we concur in the report of the subcommittee. Are we ready for the question?

Motion agreed to

[Translation]

Mrs. Picard: I'd like an explanation. The purpose of the motion is to study the most effective ways of making the population aware of FAS as part of the Canadian drug policy. Is that the part that we are concerned with? I suppose that we won't be studying all of Bill C-222 and then go through it clause by clause. Personally, I'd be in favour of the committee studying foetal alcohol syndrome as part of our examination of the Canadian drug policy, after which we might make some proposals aimed at increasing public awareness of the problem. I don't want to vote to bring back Bill C-222. I prefer to vote against it right away.

The Chairman: You are right, but not completely.

[English]

You are right, but you haven't covered the whole truth on this.

There are two obligations here. First, with the concurrence motion we've undertaken to do what the subcommittee has said: to study this in the context of the drug review. That's one thing we've undertaken. We have a second undertaking, which is ongoing. The House sent us Bill C-222, and at some point we have to report it back. Before we can do that, we have to do the clause-by-clause on it and then report it back.

So we really have two undertakings here, one that arises from the report of the subcommittee, and the other that arises from the fact that this was referred from the House in the first place. At some point we have to report that bill back. In order to do that we have to complete the clause-by-clause.

Do we have to go over the old ground you went over before? No. That's part of the record of the committee now. To cover that contingency, we have to ensure that all the subcommittee evidence that was received is now part of this committee's record so that we don't have to repeat it. In that context I need a motion that the evidence taken by the subcommittee as part of its deliberations on Bill C-222 be deemed received by this committee.

Mr. Murphy: So moved.

Motion agreed to

The Chairman: While we're still in public, I want to go back to what looked like a frivolous little incident at the beginning of the meeting, a little exchange between me and, as I called her, ``my darling clerk''.

I take great pride in the fact that I'm very egalitarian about these matters, but I also threw in something else too, and I will illustrate in about two sentences what I mean. I also threw in that as a Newfoundlander, I have a particular turn of phrase. I delivered some lobster to a good friend of mine, a man about 65 years of age, on Sunday past, and he says, ``Simmons, you're an absolute darling''. I'm sure he had no amorous designs on me at the time.

It's used in the same context that Torontonians use the term ``pretty''. Pretty, of course, means very beautiful, right? But what do you mean when you say ``pretty ugly''? You mean very. You put a completely different connotation on the word ``pretty'', and so do we with a number of words. So when I throw around things like ``darling clerk '' I'm commenting on her competence as a clerk, not on anything else.

I just want to make it clear that I would never, ever take advantage of a situation to be less than politically correct on those matters. Don't ask me either to be less than a Newf on those matters.

Beryl.

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Mrs. Gaffney: I just think, Mr. Chair, that out of appropriateness and respect for our clerk and our research clerk, there is appropriate language we must try to use as members of Parliament. I don't think it is appropriate language to... It's not respectful, I don't believe, of our clerk, who is a professional woman, as is our research clerk.

There are different things in my language that came from my background, words I used that I no longer use because they are not appropriate.

The Chairman: Point well taken. But before you get judgmental about what is appropriate, find out the other person's background. In my background that is very appropriate language. If it's not appropriate in yours, since I'm in or close to Nepean, I'll try to use Nepean-type language.

Mrs. Gaffney: I don't agree with you. I'm sorry.

The Chairman: But I don't want you to agree with me. I just want you to understand that we do come from different backgrounds, and sometimes different solitudes. It is as futile for me to try to change you as it is for you to try to change me on that particular point, and your definition of what is appropriate.

I just illustrated to you that it was completely appropriate for Frank to tell me on Sunday I was an absolute darling. I didn't think he was coming on to me at all. I thought he was complimenting me for giving him some lobster.

I want to clarify that I have great respect for my clerk. I would use a Newfoundland term to describe her, but I'm too far from Newfoundland to say it, apparently. So I shall try to adapt to a mainland, albeit more limited, style of description to say some of the things I have in my mind from time to time.

Mr. Volpe: Speak as if you were ``away''.

The Chairman: Oh, oh! Yes.

Is there anything on that agenda that can be done in public, or can it all be done in public?

The Clerk: Sure.

The Chairman: I don't think there's any particular need to go in camera for the rest of it.

Let me just say a couple of other things while I'm talking about my clerk. I'll talk about her without adjectives. When you hear what I have to say, you'll probably want to submit some adjectives.

I said to her earlier, ``Let's have some understanding: no meetings before 9 a.m.'' - so we got one before 9 a.m. - ``No long meetings'' - so we got a long one - and ``If we're going to have it before 9 a.m., let's have something to eat'' - so we had nothing to eat this morning.

So I wasn't in a good mood when we started this one. This is much too long a meeting. I can't promise you there will be no more long meetings, but I promise you I will not chair any more long meetings like this one. I promise you that. Three hours is much too long.

We have to deal with number one. Thanks to Beryl and others, we now have a chair. I'm going to name John O'Reilly, who is neither a member of the committee nor an alternate member - he will be an alternate before tomorrow is out - as chair of the committee on HIV/AIDS. I've asked John, given the delays we've had here, if he would expedite matters and convene a meeting of the committee as soon as the House returns the week after next.

We have all the other membership. That committee is finally complete, thanks to John.

John's name wasn't included in the earlier motion, so we need a motion to make John O'Reilly chair.

Mr. Scott: So moved.

The Chairman: Andy moves that John O'Reilly be named chair of the Sub-Committee on HIV/AIDS. Are you ready for the question?

Motion agreed to

The Chairman: Since we're running out of time, I'm just going to capsule for you what the issue is here, and then you can decide whether you want to deal with it now or at the next meeting, depending on how long you want to talk about it.

We have an extensive study on the healthy children issue. As of our last meeting, we've agreed to do a study on Canada's drug policy. There are really two options. We can do them in parallel. We can do, say, our children's study on Tuesday mornings and our drug study on Thursdays, and run them parallel.

The other option is to complete the children's study and then start the other. If we go that route, we might want to look at how long we're going to take on the children's study. Since we've made the undertaking to do the drug study, I don't think we can put it off indefinitely.

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You might want to take some time to chew that over, or it might be as obvious to you as it is to me. I myself would like to clue up the children's study first, but without compromising the integrity of it, because it's a study that should be done well or not done at all. So we still need a good block of time to do that study, and balance that against the need to get on with the drug study before too much time elapses.

I had the staff look at scenarios. Nancy Miller Chenier tells me that if we were to do justice to the children's study, we would, at the very least, need to stay with it until the end of September or the first week in October. If that's the case, if you accept that projection as being reasonable, our choices are to do the two studies in parallel from now, or to do the first study by the end of September or early October, and then in early October pick up the drug study.

Do you want to think about that or do you want to make a decision right now?

Mrs. Gaffney: I think we can do them parallel, Mr. Chair. I think they're both very important studies that shouldn't be delayed any longer. The longer we delay them, obviously, the length of time...and coming in with the drug and alcohol study. I think we have made a commitment - at least I have made that commitment within my soul - to the people who appeared before us as witnesses that we are serious as a committee about many things in regard to alcohol, particularly AFS.

I move that they be parallel.

The Chairman: Okay. We have a motion that we do the studies at the same time.

Mr. Volpe: Are you looking for a debate or a vote?

The Chairman: I want to hear the views of the committee on this, unless you're ready to decide.

Mr. Volpe: Two weeks ago we discussed this and the agenda of the committee. I think there was a very strong case for following a particular agenda that was made at that committee. All of the variables were brought to bear, including, for example, the logistics of holding other committee and subcommittee meetings, and we had been given an indication that the agenda would be coming to the committee.

So for the committee to do its work and do justice to the study it had undertaken, I think the decision already taken was that we would complete the study on children and health and then take up the other commitment, which we undertook, you'll recall, in a vote in the committee as a result of communication we had from the Senate, where all of these issues were laid before us.

I'm not sure I understand the reasons why we would want to revisit a decision we already took last week.

Mr. Scott: Mr. Chair, I'm having difficulty with being stressed for time here and also trying hard to get my head around not losing something here in terms of the context of the momentum the subcommittee created. Could I ask that we defer this decision until the next meeting, please?

The Chairman: All right. We'll defer the decision.

John.

Mr. Murphy: I wasn't here for the meeting Joe is talking about. Was there a decision already made? He says there was a decision made. Was there?

The Clerk: There was a decision made on the drug policy study that the chair and the staff would go back and try to present the committee at this meeting with an idea of how we could do the two. I guess the staff recommendation is that we try to finish as many witnesses as possible on child health before the end of June in order to allow the research staff to work on a summary of evidence over the summer, come back and finish off in September, and then start on the drug policy. The decision that was made last week was to do the drug policy study, but there wasn't a decision made on the timing. However, there was a prior decision made two weeks ago, I think, that the child health study would carry on until November. But that was before we talked about taking on the drug study.

I don't know if I made it muddier.

Mr. Volpe: You're right in that, except that you also presented us with a work plan, and the arguments, if you look at the minutes, for accepting that work plan already included all of the rationale that would exclude the decision or the motion currently before us.

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The Chairman: Which is why I gave you the two options to do them together or one right after the other. Let's go with Andy's request that we defer it to the next meeting.

Motion allowed to stand

The Chairman: We'll also have to make some decisions about witnesses.

We can do that, Nancy.

The other thing, before we conclude, is just a flag for all of you in terms of the agenda item here, main estimates. We have to report these by June 21. If anybody has any motions on that issue, they should come prepared to put them down at the next meeting.

We are adjourned.

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