Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to each of you for your interventions this morning.
Ms. Smith-MacDonald, some of your constituents and the people you serve are similar to the people I grew up with. One of the things I observed in the little elementary school I went to, where there were 23 kids in grade six and only eight graduated from high school, was that those who did drop out--in many cases women dropped out and became part of the group that's currently without a diploma, certificate, or degree--had arrived in grade one without any educational background because their parents didn't have the capacity. That was not because they were bad parents; they just did not have the literacy skills to read to those kids.
To what extent could early learning and child care, and a robust program of early learning and child care, help break the multi-generational poverty that exists in rural Canada?