Thank you, Mr. Chair.
My colleague will no doubt talk about solar energy and the environment, but you must know that in order to increase research and development budgets for solar energy, the environment or the atmosphere, it takes a long-term vision. And as you know, we do not form the government but are part of the House of Commons. We are members of a committee that makes recommendations to the government.
I hope that you will continue to turn up the heat on the government, raise the temperature, so to speak, so it becomes more sensitive to these kinds of issues. But we have a government whose vision extends only as far as the very short term. It is unfortunate, but that is the way it is.
Ms. Donnelly, I want to turn to the study on child poverty. I get the sense that the further away we get from the government source, the harder it is to understand. Of course, the House of Commons unanimously adopted a motion on November 24, 2009, pointing out that 20 years before, it had adopted, no doubt unanimously, a motion to eliminate poverty. Despite the fact that so much time has gone by between the two motions, family and child poverty still exists.
I remember November 24, 2009 quite clearly. I did not take part in the debate because I had arrived in the afternoon. My colleague across the table, Mr. Généreux, arrived the following day because Rivière-du-Loup is even farther away than Hochelaga.
Do you not get the feeling that the fight against poverty is a sort of catch-all, a sort of generic measure to make ourselves feel good?
As you say, it involves many elements: family incomes, housing—by the way, the Bloc Québécois introduced a bill today on the CMHC surplus—minimum wage, employment insurance, education, child care and so forth.
You are talking to the federal government here, but I feel that this level of government may be too far removed. At the end of the day, should the federal government not send all that money to those levels of government that are more directly involved with poverty issues, the people affected, and that can take direct action, whether it is municipalities, groups or provincial ridings? Do you feel as though you are yelling at the federal Parliament, when the federal government is quite far removed from the actual issue, as compared with the provincial government?