Thank you for your question.
I will answer in English because I can give you more information in English in answer to your question.
To answer your first question about child poverty, we haven't finalized the structure of the tax credit, but that will be made known in the next two months by the Department of Finance and the Canada Revenue Agency. We don't know exactly how it's going to be structured, but what I can tell you is that we are very aware of the challenges facing parents who are in disadvantaged groups, and of the high cost of participating in some of these sport activities, such as hockey. Hockey is a very expensive sport. It's expensive for municipalities to maintain arenas; it's also expensive to buy equipment, especially for somebody who has a young child who is outgrowing his pantalons every two months. I could tell you that hockey equipment is very expensive to buy every couple of years, with rapidly growing children.
That's why I've said before that we believe in partnering with Canadian Tire. We've provided them with core operational funding of $250,000 a year, and they've used that money to then raise, through a variety of partnerships, $5 million a year. This year alone, they will spend over $5 million purchasing equipment for kids across the country. To date, about 35,000 children have been recipients of this equipment.
It's done by the local dealer network. There are plenty of Canadian Tire dealers in the province of Quebec. It's got the widest reach, and as a matter of fact, it's probably got a wider reach than any government or any private sector company. There are close to 500 Canadian Tire stores throughout Canada; this company has an unbelievable reach, and they've used their dealer network to get into the communities to deliver help for children who are in disadvantaged groups.
With respect to ParticipACTION, you cited some statistics regarding the increase of obesity while the program was in effect. As the member for St. Paul's mentioned earlier, it's difficult to assess what the result would have been--what the increase in obesity would have been--had the program not been in effect. In other words, we did not have a control group that was outside the population, a group for whom the program wasn't in effect.
These kinds of public policy initiatives are often hard to quantify and to analyze, but what I can point to, by all accounts--from the information I've received and the information I've read--is the public policy with respect to anti-smoking campaigns. It's been very effective; it's been looked to as a model to decrease smoking rates among different groups in the population, and that's the model I've looked to in terms of tackling some of the challenges we face with physical activity.