Thank you very much.
The message I'm getting here this morning, particularly with this panel, is that one of the big challenges in Alberta these days is finding skilled workers. It's a question of looking at where they might be found, what are the pools? Diane, you talked about the disabled and creating workplaces that are adapted, and we heard some talk about women and getting more women in. We also heard that the fastest growing segment of our population in Canada at the moment is aboriginal, and yet each one of these groups is disproportionately represented in the group you defined as living in poverty.
We need to be doing something to try to reduce, if not eradicate, this terrible reality that exists in our country. We had some suggestions earlier and today of things we might do that would be helpful, and I would hope that even after today some of you might get together to talk about some stuff you could do that would be helpful, for example, the literacy people. Literacy is huge. We had a forum last night on poverty and people looking for opportunity, immigrants coming in, which is another pool. But they need literacy training, and to be cutting funding to literacy seems to me to be regressive. Also, they need proper and appropriate housing.
I want to ask Diane this. There was a suggestion--and I agree--that if we had a good national child care program in place, then more people, more families, more women in particular, who are now living in poverty because they can't get good work would be able to get into the workforce. Has the $100 approach to child care of the present government produced any more workers for you? Has it made it better? Has it made a difference?