The Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure is not the only measure of progress we'll be using. As the minister mentioned, we'll also continue to look at LICO and HRSDC's MBM and track what's going on with them. As I mentioned briefly earlier, the problem is that we can't really look at what's going on in different areas of the province. That's becoming more and more important as we've had a lot of economic development, but a lot of it has been focused on the Avalon Peninsula, as well as a few other areas of the province. We need to make sure we're tracking what's going on in different areas of the province and that we're able to respond.
In addition to looking at our market basket measure, we're doing things like looking at who's on income support and looking at changes in our income support program. One of the focuses we've had is removing financial disincentives for income support clients to go to work. We're seeing real success in that area. For example, we introduced a range of different measures, taking some of our programs outside income support--the low-income prescription drug program is the biggest one--because we knew the biggest disincentive or barrier for people to be able to leave income support was losing access to prescription drug coverage, so we removed that by having the low-income prescription drug program outside income support, based on income level rather than source of income.
We've increased our earnings exemptions, and as a result of that, when we looked at a one-year period on a monthly basis, we had 40% more people starting a new job every month. Obviously that's also partly due to changes in our economy, but we know from talking to our clients and also just from the way our program worked that if we hadn't made these changes they would not have been able to avail themselves of those opportunities.
So we increased the earnings exemptions. We have a new job start benefit. As I mentioned, the low-income prescription drug program has been taken outside that program. We can measure that. We have administrative data for our income support program and we will be reporting on that, but we're mindful of the fact that this is only one group living in poverty--our income support clients.
What the Newfoundland and Labrador market basket measure does is allow us to track who's falling below those cut-offs at the community level. So we can look at almost 400 different communities in our province and we can look at who's falling below the particular cut-offs of the market basket measure. The basket itself has been costed for all these different communities, so it's a very regionally sensitive measure, unlike the HRSDC one. Also, as I mentioned, because we're using income tax data, we don't have issues of sampling error, so we can look at any geographic area of the province, and in that community overall we can look not only at who's falling below the cut-offs but at family composition--the age, and those sorts of things--so we can target our initiatives where they're needed. We're looking at everything from high school completion rates...and again, they're generally very good in Newfoundland and Labrador compared to the rest of the country, but we know we do not have good high school completion rates in certain areas. We're trying to look at what's going on so we can address existing needs.
Our measure allows us to look at different neighbourhoods and cities. We can look at any neighbourhood of about 1,000 people and see what's going on in terms of who's falling into poverty and what supports they might need.
I don't know if this fully answers your question. Is there anything else you want me to add?