Bringing social and fiscal policy together: Towards a rights-based approach

Written submission for the pre-budget consultations in advance of the 2025 federal budget

Poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity are rising across Canada. Governments must respond with policy solutions that reflect the magnitude of the challenge so that everyone can live with dignity.

But social policy cannot happen in isolation from fiscal policy, and the federal government simply does not have access to sufficient resources at present.

To balance these considerations, Maytree recommends that the government use the human rights-based principles of the maximum available resources and progressive realization to guide its decisions in the 2025 budget.

In a country as wealthy as Canada, using the maximum available resources means allocating more funding and capacity to address the broken systems that prevent the realization of economic and social rights. There are many tools available to address these challenges, and even when fiscal capacity is limited, this capacity can often be used more efficiently and effectively to help people in greatest need.

The related principle of progressive realization recognizes that we will not fulfill all economic and social rights overnight. Instead, it is the responsibility of our governments to lay out realistic plans, based on the maximum available resources, that move us closer to a more just and equitable society.

It is in this spirit that Maytree calls on the federal government to use a human rights-based lens in the 2025 budget – one that brings social and fiscal policy together to advance the right to an adequate standard of living. This can be achieved by strengthening income supports, making housing more affordable to the people who need it most, and fulfilling its human rights commitments.

Strengthening income supports

Recommendation 1: Improve the Canada Disability Benefit (CDB) by raising the benefit amount, simplifying access, and expanding eligibility.

Recommendation 2: Better support low-income working-age adults by adding a floor amount to the Canada Workers Benefit (CWB) and increasing its maximum benefit.

Recommendation 3: Better support all low-income people by enhancing the GST/HST credit, by, for example, replacing it with the proposed Groceries and Essentials Benefit.

Making housing more affordable to people who need it most

Recommendation 4: Enhance and expand the Canada Housing Benefit so that more renters can afford a place to live.

Recommendation 5: Fully and immediately implement Budget 2024’s housing commitments that support those in deepest need.

Recommendation 6: Prioritize creating affordable units in all supply initiatives.

Being accountable for economic and social rights

Recommendation 7:Further the domestic implementation of Canada’s international commitments to economic and social rights, working with other levels of government.

Recommendation 8: Ground social programs in a rights-based framework, starting by embedding a human rights-based approach in all housing programs.

Recommendation 9: Create new measurement tools that will better gauge progress toward the right to an adequate standard of living.