Thank you.
First of all, I'm on record as having real difficulties with the LICO measure. I don't regard that as a very useful technical tool for measurement. I think that if we're interested in a genuinely relative measure, we ought to use something like 50% or 60% of median after-tax income or some of the social exclusion measures that have been used in Great Britain. I think those are much preferable to LICO. My understanding is that one reason the market basket measure was developed was in response to provincial dissatisfaction with the LICO.
I'm also on record, for at least 10 years, as advocating that we do use two measures, a relative and an absolute. I happen to feel that absolute captures what most people understand in terms of poverty. If we listen again to Ed Broadbent's comments when he spoke passionately in Parliament about child poverty, he wasn't talking about social exclusion. He wasn't talking about inequality. He was talking about hunger and ill-housed and ill-clothed and so on--terms that you can get at only if you use an absolute measure.
So I think that's widespread. I think people understand an absolute conception of poverty when they think of that term, so I would prefer to use that in linking poverty to the national issue that we're talking about, but continue to measure both absolute and relative, so that we have the information before us.