Thank you to the witnesses.
First, before I ask Stats Canada my question, to Sheila, you have identified a lot of the poverty groups and some circumstances; however, I'm wondering if you have looked out there in some of the communities. Some groups are working very well on the ground, and I'll throw one out. Pathways in Toronto is actually working for specific groups. Many of these aren't even government-funded, and I know myself, in my own city, lots of community living hardly gets any government funding; yet it gets out there on the ground and has been trying to help a lot with poverty.
I wonder if you would agree that perhaps what's missing here is sometimes just connecting some of these good groups and this good work that's already being done out there with people like you. You seem to have the statistics, even though you're not really giving us numbers; as you said, you're giving us circumstances and different scenarios. We have a lot of those scenarios coming, and what we're hoping to do is have a solution-based poverty study so that we can bring people who have already got some really good solutions but who want to be heard and are crying to be heard. I think it would be great if you could pull some of this and perhaps see some of the groups or help us coordinate some of the groups that really do want to get the government's ear, that feel they can attack some of the problems you have in your presentation.
But most important, because this is a poverty study, I wanted to start our first.... I tried to get some sort of definition, some way of measuring it. You were very guarded, Sylvie, on making sure we don't use LICOs. I'm wondering about the measurement to do this right. I don't think we can break it down into groups and demographics, and of course in a country as big as Canada, I don't think we're going to be able to do anything but try to find where the persistent poverty is. So what is going to be the ideal way to do it as well as we can?
I'll start with Sylvie, and then we can perhaps go to others.