Thank you very much.
It's hard to know where to start.
We appreciate very much your impassioned testimony today, and I assure you that it will receive significant attention when we write our report.
It occurs to me that one of the really interesting things about poverty in our country is that Canada is a wealthy country. It's this dichotomy, this juxtaposition, the contrast between the haves and the have-nots. In Canada the average income of the wealthiest 10% of the population has increased twice as much as the income of the poorest 10%. Canada's child poverty rate ranks 13th among 17 peer nations. We rank last among 25 OECD nations on benchmarks for early learning and child care. We don't have a very good reputation with the United Nations because of the way we deal with the most vulnerable in our society. So we're a rich country with a lot of people who aren't doing so well.
We have poverty everywhere in Canada, but then you look at places like Vancouver, where there is great wealth, or Calgary. Tony and Dean and I have been to the drop-in centre in Calgary, one of Canada's richest cities, where there are over 1,000 people every night. We drove last night through the downtown east side, and then you come across a neighbourhood that's extraordinarily better. And it's perhaps all perfectly encapsulated by this contrast between the money that'll be spent on the Olympics versus the needs of people who live here on a full-time basis.
I love Canada. I think it's a great country. We do a lot of things right. But we're a little too proud of ourselves and the way that we look at the people who actually need help, I think. I can't help but think in terms of housing--a number of you have mentioned housing and mental health--when we asked Mike Kirby, who appeared before our committee, what the number one things are that people need from the federal government, the first thing he said was a national housing strategy with specific measures for those who have mental health issues to deal with. The second thing he said was that our social infrastructure is not designed for people with mental health issues--for example, episodic illness and the EI system, things like that.
I wonder if any of you want to comment--not in a piling-on way, but....
Canada is not doing as well as many Canadians think we are, are we?