Of course. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I would like to inform you in advance that there are a series of amendments to come regarding the proposed legislation, the Poverty Reduction Act, in its current version, before the amendments.
In my opinion, this title betrays the Government of Canada's lack of ambition with respect to the problem of poverty, since it aims to reduce it rather than eliminate it. Several witnesses also said that the government's targets were not ambitious enough and that we should pursue the primary objective that has been adopted internationally, which is to eliminate poverty and not just reduce it.
If the government had enough ambition, it would change the title and the provisions that flow from it, of course, and change the word “reduction” to “elimination”.
Amendment NDP-13 is intended to correct this. The amendments that follow are aimed at the same thing. We had some difficulty identifying all the occurrences of the word “reduction” in the bill, but the same objective remains: to give the government more ambition. Obviously, some of this was missing when the bill was drafted.
You will notice that many of the upcoming motions are designed to ensure that the word “elimination” is found everywhere.