Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning, everyone. Welcome.
It's good to start with you this morning. The first thing I'm going to say is that the list of various indicators, or at least “must do's”, that were listed by Ms. Rothman and Ms. Smiley and so on—with the exception of one or two variations, which of course can be added—are very much the same thing we've heard throughout our hearings so far.
The very first was testimony from the Caledon Institute, who gave us pretty much the same thing, with the exception of WITB, which I think was not mentioned this morning. That's the working income tax benefit. I always get that wrong, but you know which one I mean. Of course, there are a number of other things having to do with the caregiver program, because it affects a lot of people, and so on. Apart from that, the core issues, I think, are pretty much the same and have come up consistently in the majority of testimony. The depth of poverty and the length of poverty in a lot of families tends sometimes to be generational and to continue for some time, and all of these would be things that in my view would break that pattern to some degree.
I want to ask a couple of questions that have to do more with where we go. First of all, my assumption is that we would need to have a national poverty strategy, and I want some of you to let me know as we go—I'm going to ask you a couple of questions—whether that is still something you agree with.
If any of you have looked at what indicators we would put into that national poverty strategy, what would they be? Of those indicators, do some deal with the economic model? Sometimes it's easier—it's an awful thing to say—to sell the need to establish a strategy from the economic perspective as well as the social one.
Some people tend to have this dual brain, thinking that the two things are exclusive, and they're not. We all know that economic and social issues are not exclusive of one another. One feeds into the other. Unfortunately, we still seem to silo the two in policy thinking. Whenever we think we have to address economic crises, we cut services, which of course is not the right thing to do. I'll leave it at that for now.
I have a few more questions, but go ahead. Maybe we can have Ms. Rothman and then Ms. Smiley.