Yes, thank you.
In our view, lowering the GST and the child benefit and so on are band-aid approach material. What needs to be done is a much broader approach to the reduction of poverty, because the GST, really, does not affect poor people. They don't buy the big items, so it's just of no benefit. If you were making huge sums of money, it might make a difference.
What we need, Mr. Savage, is a pan-Canadian reduction strategy that allows the federal government to take leadership, with its partners in the provinces and the territories, to take a look at how you can bring those departments together, in fact, instituting a new department with a leader. You need to look at how you can best bring together all of those departments that affect people's lives, and begin to look at targets that you need to set--around housing, around social assistance, around a number of issues that need to be worked on with the provincial and territorial governments--and then evaluate. Have amounts of dollars in your budgets to go after that reduction strategy, and then evaluate what's happening to see if we have arrived where we wanted to be.
It's not a dream at all. I mean, Newfoundland and Labrador are doing it. Quebec is doing it.
In Ireland, for instance, they started a reduction strategy. They were at 15% of their population living below the poverty line, and they brought that down to 5%. Now, there's a real indication that this can be done. And if we can do it in some of our provincial territories like Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, we certainly can do it at the federal level and begin to give that leadership and vision that's required for this country.
We have a morally disgraceful situation with 4.9 million people, 1.2 million children, living in poverty, and for a country as wealthy as Canada that is not satisfactory.