Thank you, Mr. Chair. It is a pleasure to come to this committee because it is an important part of the work of the House.
Your presentations were extremely eloquent. They were both forceful and clear, but they were also distressing. They reminded me of a poem by Réjean Ducharme, but I will resist the temptation to read it to you and will concentrate on specific questions instead. Please know that I much appreciated the message you brought to us this morning.
I would like to ask three brief questions. I am not convinced that the federal government is in the best position to fight poverty. In the parts of Canada where the battle has been won most clearly, the initiative was provincial: in Quebec, in Newfoundland, and, to an increasing extent, in Ontario. But that does not mean that the federal government has no role to play.
The common thread in all of your testimony is the mental health problems. Researchers tell us that, in the coming years, one person in five will experience a mental health problem to some degree, and will suffer discrimination as a result. The Canadian Human Rights Act provides a number of guarantees designed to end discrimination, particularly in relations between governments. But the federal government has not included social status as one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination, whereas nine provinces have.
Should not the first thing that the government should do, simply out of respect for its area of jurisdiction, be to provide a tool that people with mental health problems could use to challenge any refusal to provide them with banking services or access to housing? Could the government not come together with all the legislatures and begin by amending the Canadian Human Rights Act to include social status? Have your organizations looked at that issue?
Does someone want to start that discussion off? Then I want to get back to housing.