Status of Women committee  I don't think I need to wrap it up. I said all I needed to say in the presentation. I thank you for your questions and your interest.

Status of Women committee  I can only speak anecdotally in terms of a number of the women we work with who are on social assistance, who are in that situation because they've left abusive relationships. They left because it was safer for their children to get out of that relationship than to continue. Actu

Status of Women committee  That's right.

Status of Women committee  We feel that legislation establishing a national child care system is an important part of what we are proposing. The programs flow from the legislation, and the legislation establishes the principles.

Status of Women committee  I would point to the graph on the first page of our presentation where we actually present the poverty rates using the before-tax low-income poverty number, which is the one we use. What the department people have probably told you is the after-tax poverty number. If you look at

Status of Women committee  It has not been a policy that we've advocated. We're looking more at the big picture in terms of what is happening to the changing workforce and what protections can be put in place for precarious workers, which is a big discussion.

Status of Women committee  I can give my personal opinion, but—

Status of Women committee  I would say yes, but Campaign 2000 has not taken a specific position on that issue. As a representative of Campaign 2000, I can only really speak to issues that we've written on and stated.

Status of Women committee  The findings are that women earn—if you look at comparable jobs in terms of education—74% of what men are earning. So pay equity might be one way to address that.

Status of Women committee  I can't specifically address that, just because our work focuses more on child and family poverty, but you'll see in the report card that we do have some information on inequality in terms of how the poorest 10% of families are doing versus the richest 10%, and that is also captu

Status of Women committee  The countries that have the lowest child poverty rates, below 5%, are Scandinavian countries. I can't describe their programs in detail. I can certainly refer you to a UNICEF report called Child Poverty in Rich Countries 2005. Basically my understanding is that they have a numb

Status of Women committee  I'm sounding repetitive, but I guess I would just refer again to the success that other countries, Ireland and the United Kingdom, are having by setting out a plan, as you say, and not just a one-year proposal, but a long-term plan that is monitored, that is tracked. In the Unit

Status of Women committee  I think there's an opportunity to harmonize. I think the provinces maybe are moving faster than the federal government at this point, but I think there's an opportunity to harmonize. What we've talked about here are steps that we think can be taken at the federal level. We have

Status of Women committee  Well, what we use is the Statistics Canada low-income cut-off. We use the pre-tax low-income cut-off.

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 bef