Human Resources committee  Another thing we might wish to mention is the children in families who are on income support. Sometimes when they turned 18 but were still in school, their families were no longer eligible for any of the Canada child benefit. That was actually leading to some dropouts, particular

Human Resources committee  One of the major challenges has been trying to work in a coordinated and integrated fashion--and that's coming from a member of the public service. It's difficult sometimes to work that way; we're used to working within our departmental silos. It has been a challenge, and it ha

Human Resources committee  Certainly a gender-inclusive analysis has been an important part of our poverty reduction strategy. Unfortunately I can't say that all issues of wage disparities have been resolved, but it's certainly a priority. One of the things we're seeing as we have more and more jobs based

Human Resources committee  No, I don't think that was the position that was being expressed. I guess we have some concerns with moving to a purely per capita-based allocation for transfers, particularly for a smaller province like ours, where we have a smaller population spread out over a large geographic

Human Resources committee  We'll be looking again both at the low-income cut-off and at HRSDC's market basket measure as the two measures that are there to make comparisons among provinces. We're looking at those measures, and they both show similar trends. Obviously we have some concerns with the methodol

Human Resources committee  I have a quick response in terms of what a national measure might look like, particularly around the market basket measure. There are a number of things you could do to make that measure work better for different provinces and territories, particularly smaller ones like ours, lik

Human Resources committee  The Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure is not the only measure of progress we'll be using. As the minister mentioned, we'll also continue to look at LICO and HRSDC's MBM and track what's going on with them. As I mentioned briefly earlier, the problem is that we can't

Human Resources committee  Thank you. In developing the areas in which we felt working with the federal government would be beneficial, we certainly looked at past agreements and past areas. We didn't consult directly at that time with the federal government to any great extent. We did reach out and had s

Human Resources committee  I think there's still a lot of work left to be done. Minister, I don't know if you would like to comment.

Human Resources committee  When we did our original consultations, we had some municipal representation, both at the political level—we had municipal politicians come to our consultations—and the staff level. It's an area we're really looking at now: how to involve our municipalities more as our strategy m

Human Resources committee  Thank you, Mr. Skinner. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the structure we have in place, our overall approach, and what we're doing in the area of measurement. I understand that this has been a particular interest of yours. Our poverty reduction strategy is overse