Thank you, Mr. Chair.
There are a disturbing number of cuts that this government is making to scientific and research organizations. The National Council of Welfare is of course just one. In this budget there are cuts to Library and Archives Canada funding, which is very, very significant: about 20% of the workforce will be eliminated, very seriously damaging our ability to keep libraries and archival material. We talk about the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. We see big cuts to Statistics Canada. We talked about EI a few minutes ago. In fact we're not even going to be able to get access to some of the data from EI. We're seeing the elimination of the Experimental Lakes Area in Ontario.
It's part of a disturbing trend. In some cases, I think maybe it is that bodies are producing information and reports that the government doesn't want to hear. In other cases, I'm wondering if they just don't appreciate the value of some of these institutions.
The National Council of Welfare was created in 1962 to provide research and information on poverty in Canada. It is the only source of pan-Canadian information on welfare incomes, providing a valuable tool to understanding and comparing welfare across provinces and jurisdictions. It also provides unique research into aspects of poverty, including first nations, Inuit, and Métis poverty, the cornerstones of successful anti-poverty strategies, and most recently the cost of solving poverty compared to the cost of failing to take action. We hear a lot nowadays about the social determinants of health and the impact that inequality has on health outcomes, not just for those at the bottom of the income scale but for all, and the reduced social outcomes that inequality creates. The National Council of Welfare was the only body in Canada that had the mandate to advise the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development on poverty.
One of the major concerns Canadians have nowadays is the growing inequality in Canada, or the growing rates of poverty. We have seen with the Occupy movement young people concerned about growing inequality but also concerned about their diminished possibilities, with the difficulty getting a toehold in the workforce, with double the rate of unemployment for youth, and with the skyrocketing cost of post-secondary education. We spoke earlier about the erosion of OAS and the intergenerational divide that exacerbates.
The National Council of Welfare is more necessary now than ever. It is an important body—the only body that advises the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development on poverty. Something Canada doesn't have that some provinces have and some countries have is a poverty reduction or poverty elimination strategy. For people who grew up in Canada, they are seeing the cohesiveness of a society that is more or less equal—