If I could just add to that a little bit, yes, as these people have said, the other countries went out and, to my knowledge, a number of the.... The United Kingdom, for example, did a major consultation and asked people about measures. They were looking for one, and they realized very quickly that it wasn't going to happen either.
Most of the countries have decided on a core, and it's usually quite small; it's usually about three. It's something that gets at the kind of thing the LICO does, where you're really close to the line and you might be doing okay, but it won't take much to really put you into hardship; and then something that reflects a real depth, a real persistence of poverty, the more chronic kinds of things; and then others have been combinations of things to get at different aspects of poverty.
So they've adopted those as official measures. But they're not an abstract; they are a goal. Our goal, despite whatever measure you pick, is that each of those three things has to start coming down or we're not doing our job properly. So it's linking the objectives to the measures, and then, as Frank said, there is a whole other array of indicators and statistics that can be used by different people for different things.
Market basket measure is being used and adapted beautifully by Newfoundland and Labrador to very specific geographical locations and in a very transparent way, so people know what their communities look like and the sort of income distribution and poverty issues they're dealing with.
One of the things that has been a preoccupation with the National Council of Welfare for a long time is the fact that social assistance rates are set according to nothing that anybody can determine. To us, there would be a tremendous advantage to having something like a market basket measure, so that it's a commitment to the population that says, “We think this is what a reasonable standard of living is”, and welfare rates should have something to do with that. They shouldn't just be a number pulled out of a hat.
That's the other value of measures and indicators, so that people can understand why things are the way they are, why your cheque is this much money and not something else. So there are governance and transparency issues involved in all of these.