Thank you.
Thank you to the witnesses.
I want to reiterate how disappointing it is that this meeting isn't being publicly broadcast. We have some of the leaders in the anti-poverty movement in Canada appearing today, coming forward with very passionate presentations. This is really what this study is all about, and it's disappointing that it's not more widely seen.
Having said that, I want to thank you for coming. Groups like the CCPA have been a big part of our social policy landscape in Canada for a long time, and Make Poverty History, of course, both domestically and a quick tip of the hat to the work internationally. We'll keep the pressure on John McKay's bill on corporate social responsibility. You'll help us with that one, I hope. And of course there's Canada Without Poverty.
I want to go to the issue of taxes. You mentioned, Mr. Howlett, in your presentation about the 2006 tax cuts in the first budget of the Conservative government, how they don't necessarily assist those most in need. We had a budget in 2009 that was billed as a budget to provide stimulus and to particularly assist those who need help the most. According to the Caledon Institute, if somebody has $150,000 in income, which is most of the people around this table, a two-earner couple with two kids gets $483 in savings and a single parent with one child gets nothing out of this budget. So we still don't seem to quite be there. We're not getting it.
Sometimes you hear about people saying you reduced taxes. I used to hear, not so much recently, fortunately, from the Conservative side that reducing the GST was this great thing for poor people because they don't pay other taxes. But we have mechanisms. We have the GST rebate, which I think the CCPA had suggested doubling, as opposed to tax cuts that are widely spread out and assist people who make more money or certainly assist them equally. So you have that measure. You have the child tax benefit, to which you've referred. You've talked about the importance of that versus the child tax credit.
I want to get a comment from each of you about the idea that combatting poverty is complicated. It seems to me that a lot of mechanisms exist right now that just need to be fixed. They don't need to be reinvented. EI is one of them, the child tax benefit, the GIS. Do you agree with me that we have the mechanisms in Canada, and if we really wanted to combat poverty right now, a large part of that infrastructure exists, it just needs to be enabled?