I think that's just wrong, and I think it's part of the waffling and the shell game our government has played in international fora for years now. One of the difficulties these international treaty bodies have in dealing with Canada is that whichever level of government you're speaking to, it's always the other level that's at fault. There's a complex “blame the other level of government” game that gets played in the Canadian federal state.
I think it's very obvious that there are many measures the federal government can do, and the member countries of the human rights committee that conducted the Universal Periodic Review of Canada are not idiots. They had a lot of submissions before them from various groups in Canada that are experts in the constitutional structure. Indeed, I was part of a coalition of groups that went forward.
There are some clear, obvious areas of federal jurisdiction, like housing. A housing strategy was one of the recommendations the Government of Canada took up from the UPR, and you have that in process. Employment insurance, old age security, the tax structure; there are lots of really smart suggestions for the tax structure that would result in reducing income inequality and would significantly address poverty in Canada. Transfer payments with conditions attached have long been a tradition, but less so under recent governments of Canadian federalism. The national child tax benefit has done quite a bit, actually, to lower rates of poverty in certain groups, but it could do a lot more.