I would like to talk a little bit about poverty among seniors. One of the acclaimed successes of Canada in the last number of years has been that we have reduced poverty among the elderly from 29% about 30 years to 5.4% in 2006. It's an area in which Canada has had success. However, as you pointed out, we still have some real problems, and I'm referencing a report from the Caledon Institute, who do some great work on this stuff. In particular, 16.1% of single elderly women live below the poverty line, and many more live just barely above the poverty line.
Again, in terms of reducing poverty in Canada, I think someone referenced child poverty as being 9.5%. I think that was the number from Statistics Canada of the percentage of children living in poverty as of 2007, which had also come down, but I suspect both of those numbers have gone up in the last year because of the difficulty the economy has been in. One of the measures often cited for the success in reducing poverty among seniors has been strengthening pensions but also particularly the guaranteed income supplement, which goes to the lowest-income seniors.
I wonder, Ms. Dean, is that a mechanism that we should be making more robust as a priority, as a way to immediately inject money into the system for low-income seniors?