Thank you to the witnesses for appearing today.
Just so the committee understands my relationship with the witnesses, I've done quite a bit of anti-poverty work with all three of them. Andrew and I worked together on a charter challenge based on poverty, and Rene, Claudia, and I have worked on the Community Coalition to End Poverty and other initiatives as well.
My first question is for Andrew. I'm thinking about the international covenant on social and economic rights and the fact that it says we have a right to an adequate standard of living. I'm thinking as well about the fact that in Canada we don't have a poverty line, that it's a bit of a myth. Folks think the low-income cut-off is the poverty line, but it hasn't been accepted by the Canadian government as a poverty line. We also have the market basket measure, but again, this is not accepted, so there is no official poverty line.
I'm wondering how that plays into the fact that we have to define “adequate”. How would we define “adequate”?