Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I bring this motion forward because I feel that there is a need to reaffirm the passage of the motion from the 16th Assembly. I feel that this Assembly needs to indicate their support for their belief in the development of an Anti-Poverty Strategy so I am bringing this motion forward basically in that regard.

I want to provide some comments. First of all the National Council of Welfare first examined the cost of poverty almost a decade ago. What they found was that poverty does have high costs for all Canadians. That certainly is true for us here in the NWT. That high cost is not attached to those just living in poverty but it is attached to everybody.

Alternatives North in 2009 produced a report. I would like to quote from that report. “There has never been a more important time for the government to develop a poverty reduction strategy to improve the living conditions and well-being of low income Northerners. These efforts need to be located within a larger vision and framework for social development, one that is tied to an equitable and sustainable vision of economic progress. Economic growth alone cannot accomplish this task, as evidence from the last decade amply demonstrates. Rather, a comprehensive approach to poverty reduction is needed, one that brings together community governments, employers and

citizens to ensure that all share in the potential and the promise of the NWT.” That is from Jeffery Wilson from an Alternatives North report on Poverty Reduction Policies and Programs in the NWT.

The impact of poverty and low income is seen across Canada, but there are a number of variables that are unique to the North. I don’t think that is any secret for anybody in this room. They affect the depth and the experience of poverty in our NWT communities. I would like to mention a couple of them. High cost of food, shelter and fuel in the North and the decreasing reliance on traditional ways of life and the mixed economy, especially in regard to food supply, influences poverty. The development of non-renewable resources has fostered inequality in the distribution of wealth and economic opportunities between genders, as men typically have benefitted disproportionately from the vast majority of jobs in mining and the industrial sectors. There has been an increase in housing prices and rent which contributes to housing insecurity among those who don’t benefit from the boom times, and decades of policies of colonization and assimilation have created dependencies, poverty, apathy and lack of encouragement to work on homelessness and loss of self-esteem. Again, this is not news to anybody in this room.

These factors create large disparities from community to community and also among people within communities, and I mean all NWT communities. Poverty has an economic cost to our government, and some of those are expenditures on health care to remedy poorer health associated with poverty. A family that can’t afford prescription medicine for a sick child will likely end up in a hospital at an emergency room. That’s far more costly than keeping the child at home and/or keeping them healthy.

Poor nutrition and high stress can lead to diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses. Twenty percent of health care spending in Canada can be attributed to socioeconomic factors such as income-related disparities. So it costs us when we don’t have healthy people, and we certainly have a high number of unhealthy people within the NWT and an Anti-Poverty Strategy will address that.

Another cost to government is the additional cost of crime and we’ve talked about that through Bill C-10. Across the NWT in 2010 there were over 22,000 incidences reported, criminal incidences. Another cost to the government is foregone tax revenues. Millions of dollars in personal income and tax revenue would be added to our economy if adults facing a high risk of poverty had the same likelihood of employment and the same average income as other Canadians.

Lastly, there’s the tragedy of losing out on potential and talent. The health problems of an impoverished child, for instance, can hinder their learning and,

therefore, their employment later in life. We lose a lot of potential if we don’t have healthy children and children who are able to go to school and become educated.

So what does poverty cost? Well, in BC poverty represents a direct cost to the government of $2.2 billion to $2.3 billion annually. That’s about 6 percent of their provincial budget. In PEI the total cost of poverty is $315 million on an annual basis. In the NWT we don’t have a clear definition of poverty and it’s a very difficult one to produce, so it’s very hard for us to work out the total costs. But I can tell you that about $15 million of our budget goes only towards income support, and if you add in the staff costs for income support it bumps it up to about $26 million. But we have to consider all of the subsidies that we give to people in the NWT. That $15 million or $26 million does not include housing, it does not include all the subsidies that we have, for instance, for fuel subsidies for our seniors. So there are absolutely any number of subsidies across any number of departments in the GNWT that we have not yet accounted for. BC and PEI have done that and they can give a total amount of money. I can’t do that because we haven’t done that work.

Initially, to put an Anti-Poverty Strategy or to develop an Anti-Poverty Act and put it into place will cost a small amount of money. But I’ve said this several times before and I will say it again: there will be an initial upfront minimal cost, but the amount of money that we have in providing programs and services that try to deal with poverty and try to support our people that we have an adequate amount of money. We spend huge dollars on our people relative to income support, relative to poverty, relative to education, et cetera. We just need to take that money and use it more efficiently. We need to coordinate it across departments. We need to make sure that we have policies that don’t contravene each other. Looking at an Anti-Poverty Strategy, if it’s comprehensive, if it involves all departments, if it involves the general public, if it involves NGOs who do the work as well, and if it involves people who actually are impoverished, we will get a strategy that will give us a more efficient and, I would say, a more caring government. We can invest in childhood development, literacy, numeracy and higher education.

Last, but not least, I want to say that research has shown that if we invest in poverty, it generates positive results for us. I’d like to quote another quote from Alternatives North from Ms. Aggie Brockman, who I believe is still up there listening: “Our society and economy cannot prosper unless the negative costs of dealing with poverty are exchanged for the positive costs of human development. Other jurisdictions are defeating poverty using Anti-Poverty Strategies. We can do it too.” It can’t be said better.

Poverty reduction plans do work and not doing anything about poverty will cost and is costing us all. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.