Thank you, Chair.
And thank you to all of our panellists for your presentations.
I'd like to talk a bit about poverty.
It's nice to see John Murphy. I know that you're no stranger to Ottawa, and it's good to see you again.
I'd like to just chat a bit, because it seems to me that one of the big issues facing Canada in the next little while is whether we are even going to make an attempt to bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. I would argue that successive governments of different stripes have at least claimed that was their goal, although we've fallen short in a lot of cases. But some of the measures that were introduced in this past budget, such as the GST cut and the proposed continuation of that to go to 5%, have actually been trumpeted as being good for lowest-income Canadians because personal income tax may not affect them but GST does.
I wonder if you have a view on whether reducing the GST is of benefit to the lowest-income Canadians.