I'm used to massive topics. If I could make a comment about current social assistance programs, there's no question that they're inadequate financially. Before I went to the School of Social Work, I worked at the Dalhousie Legal Aid Service for twenty years. I used to teach a seminar on our current social assistance and previous social assistance systems. One time, one of the law students said to me, “This is more complicated than tax law”. One of the problems is that we spend money on bureaucracies and infrastructure that we don't need.
We can streamline the system. There are different ways of getting people out of poverty. Maybe for young healthy people there is a different way than for persons with disabilities.
Single mothers in Nova Scotia--I wanted to get this in earlier, because, and I'll say it on the record, it's a stupid social policy. One of the ways the Nova Scotia government is saving money on its social assistance program is by cutting off people on assistance if they go to university. They lose their funding. Student loans have a cap, and people with families, primarily single parents, can't live on their student loan.