Thank you very much.
Thanks for being here this morning.
To Shawn, I think the committee and I would be very interested in getting the most recent, up-to-date statistics on welfare, if you have them. We hear a lot about EI and trying to get people on EI. I worry about those who aren't getting EI, and the ones who are falling off because they've been on EI for 50 weeks, or whatever, and what they're doing. We all know the difficulty, the low threshold of assets where welfare is concerned, and what that does to people. We know the EI stats. They're out there and we're talking about them. But we're not hearing much about the welfare stats, and it would be good to know those as well.
What should we be doing right now to lift people out of poverty? A number of provinces have taken some creative and courageous initiatives. I think we all know who they are: Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, and Ontario. When we were in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick a couple of weeks ago, we heard they are starting a strategy. They're all saying they can only go so far and then they'll need federal government help. They need the resources and the federal government to take the leadership role.
Years ago the federal government took leadership on some fronts that I think we still benefit from today. We passed legislation on health care with the Canada Health Act. We passed legislation on EI that has had an interesting life, and lately is being challenged for not really working as well as it could. We decided years ago it was unacceptable that seniors who built the country should live on welfare, so we brought in the Canada Pension Plan, the OAS, and the GIS. Even though some seniors struggle now, most are not living in the desperate poverty they used to live in. We have done some pretty major stuff.
If as a federal government we decided to move to put in place a framework and some legislation to do the same for people living in poverty so we could deal with 100% of those people now, as opposed to some now and some later, what would be the major pieces of that, as far as you're concerned?
Laura, you listed a few things at the beginning. In the context of legislation and federal legislation, considering the jurisdictional challenges we have in Canada, what do you think are the main pieces we should be zeroing in on and dealing with?