Could I follow up on that briefly?
I think what's interesting in Europe is that a number of countries have actually adopted a suite of indicators to track poverty and material deprivation. In fact, I think one of the troubles or stumbling blocks that we voice in Canada...because we've obviously been in this place of limbo for many years around whether the LICO, for instance, the poverty line, is not a poverty line. I actually have to take Richard's point of view, that these sorts of things are a bit of a diversion. Any measure is going to be as good as it is designed. Measures are targeted to reveal particular things, and there will never, ever be one perfect poverty measure. I think what we need to understand is that we may well need different types of measures to track different types of important things.
The LICO, which is much maligned, actually is a very important historical measure. It has been a very credible and rigorous tracking of low income and income inequality in Canada for these many years. We do not have measures, for instance, for material deprivation, and that's what Glenn was talking about.
In Europe they've actually supplemented their relative income poverty lines with a series of deprivation indices, and they report on both. Ireland has taken this step and created a combined measure. If you look at England, when they announced their target to reduce child poverty significantly by 2020, they introduced three different income measures to track their progress, some of which were better targeted to actually tracking program outcomes, and others were tracking income and inequality outcomes, both of which were important.
The idea that we need one measure, I think, is wrong-headed, and maybe the committee could think positively and constructively of a suite of measures to move our agenda forward on this very important topic.