What we're looking at is the will of Parliament. When we look at the economic growth and prosperity in our country, we're dealing with a whole lot of children who are not prepared because of the economic situation they're facing.
I also want to draw your attention to the cost of not dealing with social and economic deficits that are caused by continuously high rates of child and family poverty. Recent studies estimate the cost of poverty to be between $8.1 billion and $9.2 billion in British Columbia alone, and I'm talking British Columbia because I live here. Nationally, the cost of lost revenue and remedial expenditures is even higher.
Acording to The Cost of Poverty: An Analysis of the Economic Cost of Poverty in Ontario, the annual cost of child or intergenerational poverty is very high, and if poverty were eliminated, the extra income tax revenues nationally would be between $3.1 billion and $3.8 billion. That came from an analysis we got in 2008. So—