Health committee  I have nothing to add to the comments by Dr. Grover.

Health committee  I have read some of the earlier submissions to the committee, so I see that the idea of a fat tax or something like that has been bandied about in this group. I think the price tag of food is only one part of the packaging, and before you go down that path you should explore the

Health committee  Very quickly, in response to your question about Canada's food guide, it is important to recognize that this thing is not a prescription. It's not the same as if you went to a dietician and were given a diet that was a menu plan. All it's doing is mapping a pattern of eating that

Health committee  Well, it used to be a federal responsibility and you gave it away.

Health committee  Okay, but it's gone now. I get that part.

Health committee  One of the difficulties in doing research in this area is that the numbers differ. If you take Ontario, as an example—that's where I live, so I know their welfare program best—there are two kinds of welfare programs. There is something called Ontario Works, and then there's somet

Health committee  But your question is what these thresholds are. They vary across provinces. I love your idea that federal members would sit down with your provincial colleagues to start to talk about how to repair this mess. While the levels vary by province, nutritionists do these calculation

Health committee  I don't know. We've tried to look at the differences in the thresholds and the relationship to food security rates. We can see some patterning, but we haven't got it mapped out yet. Part of the problem is that even when we do those calculations, we're getting different levels of

Health committee  I think there is no way out of it. If you want to make an impact on the extraordinary health disadvantage that is faced by low-income families, you have to tackle the adequacy of their incomes. I think other kinds of programs--tax credits that are targeted or labelled, targeted i

Health committee  Not all of them opted to do it, but everybody had the opportunity, and sadly, many took it, so it didn't have the impact on welfare recipients that we would have liked to have seen. I think that has to be the route, to get more money into the pockets of low-income families. Hone

Health committee  Yes, that's true.

Health committee  Yes. The income variable that has been appearing in recent years in Statistics Canada publications is something called household income adequacy, and there are five levels to that. If you look at some of the other graphs in my presentation, you'll see that we've used that variabl

Health committee  It varies depending on the household size. That's one of the good things about that measure. So we have taken the third level of the five-level variable. The majority of Canadians are sitting with incomes at levels four and five. We went as high as number three so we could includ

Health committee  Yes.

Health committee  You've structured the question to get us to say yes. Of course, if you give poor people more money, they'll have more money than they had before you gave them some. You're talking about $1,200, and that means $100 a month. I'm talking about deficits that amount to several hundred