Thank you very much.
Thanks for being here today and participating in this really important discussion we're having at the federal government level with regard to how we can eradicate poverty.
Greg, you've raised the issue of legislation, and you have also said that it needs to be connected in some way to human rights and covenants that we've signed internationally and have not been very good at living up to. When you begin to look at poverty, it is, of course, multi-faceted. It's very complicated, and it can be quite overwhelming, actually, when you think about the size of Canada and you look at the statistics and see the number of people who are living in poverty and try to figure out the dynamics, what's causing it and so on.
As a country, we have from time to time risen to the occasion in terms of doing something substantial that benefited everybody. But I have to say, Greg, that when I look at some of the direction of the provinces, although I understand why they're going where they're going, they simply don't have the resources to bite off the bigger piece. For example, doing 25% in five years makes me ask, what about the other 75%, and what do we do after five years? It's those kinds of things.
As Canadians, over the years we've determined that too many seniors live in poverty, so we brought in the Canada Pension Plan. We then brought in the OAS and the GIS. Then there was some reference to, and we've all been involved in this, some seniors falling through the cracks in terms of the GIS. It's really not that complicated for government, as they do in Quebec, to make sure that everybody automatically gets the GIS if they're qualified. That's not hard. We could do that if we wanted to fix that, but we don't.
We decided that everybody in Canada should have health care, so we brought in an act that made it possible for everybody to have health care. We decided that people who are working, when they lost their job, should have employment insurance. We brought in legislation that has been watered down over the years, in some respects, because we decided that we couldn't afford some of it, while at the same time we were giving tax relief to people in substantial amounts.
Because you've brought it up, and it has been raised on a number of occasions, we're looking at the question of justice versus charity and catching everybody. We're looking at the possibility of an act. We used to have the Canada Assistance Plan. We got rid of that in 1996, I think. It was an offering to the provincial governments, who were getting less money to spend on social programs, to be more flexible. So they got rid of the Canada Assistance Plan.
I would like some comment from all or any of you. If we moved in that direction, what would be the fundamental tenets, what would be the framework that we would need to consider if we were to move to put in place a piece of legislation that would guarantee that everybody who lived in Canada didn't have to live in poverty?