Okay. That was immense.
To start at the beginning of your comments with respect to looking at poverty, we don't define poverty; that's true. I think what we have tried to do is use a series of measures that help us understand the dynamics of poverty and low income.
I think it's important that people understand that the reason governments, not just Canada but governments around the world, have developed a series of measures as opposed to defining and focusing on one single measure is that these different measures tell us different things about what Canadians are experiencing who live on low incomes. So there are a number of measures that focus on income, and there are other measures that include other things in addition to income. That's where we decided to develop the market basket measure, because it will tell us more about the kinds of dynamics that people are confronting in terms of the costs.
You raised the issue of shelter costs. The development of the MBM gives us a greater facility to look at the impact of shelter costs in regions where they vary. Shelter costs include not just rent but also mortgages.
The value of looking at the MBM, for instance, is that we see a very different situation in Newfoundland compared to British Columbia with respect to people who hold mortgages. In Newfoundland, they have very low rates of individuals who hold mortgages. There's a higher rate of straight-out ownership. We can look at some of those dynamics and that diversity. So that's the value of having a series of measures.
The measures that we have in Canada, I think, fall between a more severe understanding or definition of what low income is and a more social inclusion approach to low income, which would include measures that would suggest families should be able to take a holiday once a year, that families should be able to entertain once a month. So there's a very wide perspective in terms of the kinds of things people want to look at. Our three measures together fall in between that very inclusive approach to measurement and the more subsistence approach to measurement.
In terms of looking at the dynamics of some of the individual populations, that is something we were asked to start doing over the past year. I think in the past we have kind of blended the population together. We talk about poverty and we have national statistics and overall numbers, but that doesn't necessarily tell us the difference between what poverty means to an aboriginal person versus an individual who is 45 to 64 years old. We're just beginning to understand those dynamics better. That work will evolve over time, and I think it will give us a better understanding as we look at trends over the last 20 years. As we follow the three measures that we have now, as we see those gaps between the measures starting to close, we'll have a better understanding of why that is and what the dynamics are that people are living in.