Mr. Speaker, I feel a little guilty dominating the debate in comments and questions, but I always look around to give other people a chance. They do not rise to the occasion, so here I am.
I enjoyed the speech of the hon. member opposite because I agree with him that children generally are not living in poverty unless their families are. There might be some exceptions, but for most cases that is true. Even those in the richest families will not give thousands of dollars to a five-year-old, so in fact as children independent from their parents they are really very poor.
I have two comments with respect to this speech. First I would like the hon. member opposite to comment on the definitions that are used for poverty. By the definitions that I have heard from time to time, my wife and I and our kids lived in poverty for a number of years. I remember that one of the criteria for poverty was not taking a vacation that took a person at least 100 miles from home in the last year. That was one of the characteristics of someone living in poverty.
For many years my wife and I had limited vacations because of the commitments we made. As I have said before in the House, we lived on 30% of my salary because about 50% of it went to taxes at all different levels, hopefully 10% went for preparation for our future retirement and another 10% went to charity, which is sort of a rule of thumb, although sometimes it was more. We ended up living on 30% of what I earned as a single wage-earner so that my wife could be a full-time mom. That government policy was very detrimental to us. I would like the hon. member to qualify the definition of poverty, because we never felt poor, but we were.
The second thing I would like to--