Thank you.
There is a lot of valuable information here. We're coming to the end of our work on this subject, and we need to prepare a report that we will table with government. Hopefully they will act on it and do some good things for people and communities across the country.
I'm trying to get my head around what some of the principles in that report should or could be, and three of the things I've begun to think about and work with are income security, housing, and social inclusion. What we've done, however imperfectly for seniors, in terms of the Canada Pension Plan and the GIS and OAS, to try to put in place a large government program that everybody should be able to tap into and that will be helpful, needs to be improved. We're committed to doubling the CPP and increasing significantly the GIS. I think we could afford that and we could go there. That would lift a whole lot of very at-risk and vulnerable people, particularly given what has happened through this recession to pension plans and RRSPs, etc.
John and Margot, you both mentioned accountability and targets and timelines. I argue with others that we have spent the last 15 years arguing about a definition of poverty and we don't get to solving it because we can't decide what it looks like. Then we talk about “25 in 5”, and that we should have 50%. The question that always pops into my head is what about the other 75%, or the other 50%? What if the government doesn't reach the target, and instead of 25% we're only at 18%? Then we have a whole lot more people we need to...and the inequality that ensues.
Shouldn't we be looking at something we could put in place as a federal government, given the responsibility we have, that will actually lift everybody now--not in ten years, but now?