Thank you, Mr. Skinner.
I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about the structure we have in place, our overall approach, and what we're doing in the area of measurement. I understand that this has been a particular interest of yours.
Our poverty reduction strategy is overseen by a committee of nine ministers. That's been really important. In addition to the ministers in social areas, it includes our Minister of Finance and a number of ministers in the more economic areas. That's been an important part of the success and the work to date. There's also a deputy ministers committee and a working group of primarily director-level representation. Having the right players has been important to our strategy.
We've been taking a comprehensive and integrated approach, a government-wide approach. We meet and try to look at things from the perspective of people living in poverty. We look at what they need rather than at traditional departmental mandates. It's a real challenge for government. Previously, representatives would come in and look only at what their department could do. Although that's part of it, it's not where we start. We consider what people living in poverty really need and then what we have to do to meet those needs.
I wanted to touch on measurement. We did a fair bit of work early on in the strategy to look at how we might measure poverty. At the same time, we developed initiatives for looking at the issue of measurement. All the measures have strengths and weaknesses. They all have different flaws. We looked at all the best practice literature and what's done in other countries, and we studied all the available measures to track our progress. We haven't settled on any one measure; instead, we've been looking at all the available measures.
In doing this, we realized that none of the measures allowed us to track what was going on in different areas of our province and at the community level. We developed a measure of our own, taking the methodology that HRSDC developed in conjunction with provinces and territories. We developed in Newfoundland and Labrador a market basket measure. It is a little different from the national one in that we use income tax data rather than survey data. As a small province, we have issues with all the national measures with respect to sampling error and our ability to look at different populations, whether by geography, different family types, or subpopulations. We're just getting ready to release this measure, which uses income tax data. It will be available publicly on our community accounts system, which provides access to data through a website. This information will be available to our community partners as well. That's been an important part of our process, the involvement of our community partners.
We have regular consultations with our community partners. Every second year, we go out more broadly to speak to them and check in on how we're doing and what we might need to do differently. We're getting ready to start that process again now.