Human Resources committee  I'd like to respond to that. Certainly you don't have to pick one. The issue, though, is that we don't have the choice right now. We don't have the functional market basket measure to draw from, and that would be quite helpful. The LICO does that a little bit in that it allows y

Human Resources committee  I mentioned earlier on that I'd like to come back to the question of the market basket measure. The FCM, early on, had developed something called a community affordability measure, which at some point actually had members of this technical team in different Canadian cities going

Human Resources committee  I'll start with two short cautionary notes on the whole business of measurement. One is that probably the most cost-effective way of dramatically reducing absolute poverty in Canada is to just move your poverty line down. That would change things dramatically, and of course the

Human Resources committee  The social--

Human Resources committee  I'm glad you asked that we don't go into full detail on all the indicators. Again, this is not an attempt specifically to measure poverty. It's not an alternative to the LICO or an alternative to the market basket measure--although I'd like to return to the market basket measure

Human Resources committee  Just to give a thumbnail sketch on these trends, one of the points I mentioned earlier was that these issues, these trends, do vary across the country when we're looking at municipalities. We looked at--I don't know how many--maybe a dozen of those 75 to 80 indicators that dealt

Human Resources committee  Right now there aren't. The only exception is in some larger municipalities, in terms of their geography, that include rural areas. The one we're in right now is an example of that. In principle, the framework we have would be applicable to rural communities, but there are alwa

Human Resources committee  Thanks, Mike. I am going to focus on this question of measurement. We started off in this meeting talking about the complexity of poverty, and certainly that's what we grapple with, but our starting point here is trying to understand the animal we're working with. The quality