Thank you very much.
I would like to thank all three witnesses for being here today. I was smiling when you were talking about Centraide. I come from Quebec and, as you might know, I worked for Centraide. I like to say that I worked, amongst other things, on the initiatives which were launched under the 1, 2, 3 GO! program, which were funded by Centraide. The initiatives, which took place at the neighbourhood level, were for newborns and children up to the age of five years old.
Let me give you an example. Say we decide to put a playground for very young children, ranging from newborns to children of five in a neighbourhood, but that the speed limit for cars around this playground is 70 kilometres an hour, we would have to work with the municipality to bring down the speed limit. We would also have to inform people living in the area about the fact that the playground will be mostly for very young children. We would have to work at three levels if we decided to go ahead with this type of project. We would have to inform the community as a whole, we would have to make the people living in the neighbourhood aware of this new playground, and we would have to work with people as far as the physical environment of the playground is concerned.
I also appreciate the 211 service. You are right: it is great that the information is immediately available to people, rather than people being told that they have to find the information as best they can. Other services provide information pertaining to the municipality. Community and neighbourhood organizations can quickly provide people with this type of information.
We also talked about best practices and interesting local initiatives. In order to determine which measures worked best, I put a question to people who appeared before you. In Halifax, there is a particular phenomenon. Indeed, according to statistics, the poverty rate seems to have gone down for men and young people, but it has not fallen much for women. Why do you think this is? Do you have an answer to that?