Thank you very much.
I want to thank the committee for having this brief review today, and I want to thank the members for coming.
We've heard quite a bit of very valuable information this morning. I've been dealing with and looking at this question of poverty for quite some time--as a member of the Ontario parliament and now at the federal level--and it's difficult to find one particular answer. I get frustrated when we get into a panel like this one, where some say poverty exists and is growing, and others, it seems, have spent a lot of time trying to define poverty. At one point I thought they were actually going to define it right out of existence, but that hasn't quite happened yet. Other people are trying to come up with labour market strategies to deal with poverty. It seems to me there's an underbelly to this that is challenging and problematic.
To Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Calderhead, and Mr. deGroot-Maggetti, obviously you've all done studies indicating that poverty exists in Canada and is growing. That's what the National Council of Welfare said, that it was deeper and more pervasive than ever before. We have Mr. Sarlo saying that we can't measure poverty, that we don't have the vehicle to measure poverty; it's a data question. What we have, I guess, is a problem with data, not poverty.
Maybe you could comment on that.