Status of Women committee  It varies by the size of the family and the size of the community. I'll give you an example. I'll use 2004, because the data I used were from 2004, so it's two years behind. Say you are looking at one mother with one child in a large city with a population of 500,000. If her before-tax earnings were $25,319, she would be considered living below the low-income cut-off, which is the de facto poverty line that's been in use for about fifty years.

Status of Women committee  There are different measures of poverty. There's the low-income cut-off, which StatsCan defines pre-tax and post-tax. There's also what Europe uses and how the OECD does their reports that track different countries in terms of how they're doing. They use the low-income measure, which is 50% of median income.

Status of Women committee  There's LICO in Canada or there's what's called the “market basket measure”, which HRSDC, I think, started developing a few years ago. We're a few years behind. It hasn't been developed consistently. So certainly for our purposes, if we're looking historically, we always use the LICO because we can get that data every single year.

Status of Women committee  I would say so, but I can't speak on behalf of all organizations. I would just say that if you're tracking the number over time, LICO is always available every year from Statistics Canada, so that's the one we use.

Status of Women committee  I can't comment in detail on this proposal, but I think any modifications or updating of employment insurance to increase the eligibility and to ensure that women who are not eligible for reasons of having been out of the workforce temporarily for child-bearing or child-rearing obviously would benefit women and would benefit their families in the longer term, in terms of their ability to build up pensionable earnings, as well.

Status of Women committee  I don't think it's in one package. The National Council of Welfare did a report on the cost of poverty a few years ago. There are bits and pieces. There's a piece that the London Children's Aid Society did on costs associated with increased children in child welfare. So there are bits and pieces.

Status of Women committee  Sure. It would be a 25% reduction in the child poverty rate in five years, 50% in ten years.

Status of Women committee  We're a non-partisan organization, so we meet with politicians of all parties and senior bureaucrats, and we have done so a number of times over the years. Our material is publicly available, and we encourage political parties to use it in their platforms and to adopt our policy recommendations.

Status of Women committee  Definitely, and I'd refer again to the concept of a poverty reduction strategy that has targets, timetables, and investments. Ireland has done it, the United Kingdom has done it; both of those cases are well documented. Here in Canada, Quebec has a bill that is law now, a poverty reduction law, since 2004.

Status of Women committee  Canada is at its economic peak right now. There's an amazing report called Growing Concerns: Canadian Attitudes Toward Income Inequality, published by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. We have the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. We have the highest corporate profits in 30 years.

Status of Women committee  It's a substantial public investment for a substantial public benefit.

Status of Women committee  No doubt there's a cost to this. There's a cost to any government program, obviously, whether we're talking about meeting Kyoto targets or whatever. Canada has been in a very strong fiscal situation. We've run a surplus for a number of years now. There are various proposals for how that surplus should be used.

Status of Women committee  I just want to clarify. The $5,100 is the Canada child tax benefit. About 90% of Canadians who have children currently receive the Canada child tax benefit. It's going to reach $3,200 this summer. We're saying increase it to $5,100, which would be the approximate additional cost to help raise a child.

Status of Women committee  I think the legislation on labour has not kept up with the changes in the labour market. It's way behind at the provincial level and at the national level. So when the federal commissioner, Harry Arthurs, released his report last October, many of us were very disappointed that it received no press coverage and was not really taken up.

Status of Women committee  Sure, I have two comments. Number one, I think when the promise was made in 1989--and maybe there's someone here who was there then, I don't know--it was said, and there was no plan put in place. So it was a political statement. There were no targets set. There were no timetables.