The research that the National Council of Welfare has put together on welfare rates and their inadequacy across the country is pretty clear. Frankly, no matter what poverty measures we want to use, as Mr. Stapleton pointed out, welfare rates don't add up under any of them.
I want to come back to underscore the fact that if we want to have accountability, if we want to be able to track progress, we have to take a strategic approach.
I'll give you a couple of quick examples of how that is so helpful and crucial.
The United Kingdom has a strategy to reduce poverty. In 1999 they increased the minimum wage and they set up a low-wage commission to actually study and track what impact the introduction of the minimum wage and raising it would have, both on poverty reduction and employment for low-income workers, as well as the impact on small business and stuff like that. So it's a very concerted effort to address poverty within the context of the whole economy.
One other example: Newfoundland and Labrador has a poverty reduction strategy, integrated across ministries, that involves addressing what each ministry can do to help contribute to reducing poverty in Newfoundland and Labrador. In their last budget, they raised social assistance rates and indexed them to the cost of living.
Another interesting thing they did, because they had this poverty reduction lens and strategy, was to realize that school fees were excluding many students from being able to participate fully in school. So they put in a special measure to reduce school fees, a special measure in the education budget which would not necessarily have made it into the budget if the education ministry had asked, what are the educational priorities we have to do? But because they took that inter-ministerial and integrated and strategic approach, they were able to identify that as one element in what they needed to do to achieve their goal of making poverty in Newfoundland and Labrador the lowest in Canada.
It addresses this issue of accountability too. If we have a strategy, choose what our measures are going to be, and then track what the outcomes of policy are, that will help us to address questions about the impact of discrete budget measures and things like that. We judge them through the lens of the effect they're going to have on reducing poverty and inequality in Canada.