Thank you for the question.
The way the territorial funding formula is derived is I think a critical aspect to this. I'm not sure the committee is familiar with the way it's done, and I'm not going to do it justice either, but there is a package or a standard of living equated for the south that is based on a certain package of taxes and social services and other things like that. Then there's a calculation done to determine what kind of money would be required by the territories to provide a similar service here, considering what we can raise with our own source revenues. That money then comes to us in the form of a formula funding grant.
The point I'm making is that if we are going to have an anti-poverty strategy that works in the north, the formula should accommodate this as an extra. It has to be an add-on, I think, in the formula. It can't just be, as Gord was saying, a per capita funding grant that goes to all provinces, or something like that, because the federal government looks at us and says, “If you were living in Toronto, or if you were living in Prince Edward Island, this is how much money you'd need to do so.” That is now the standard we're supposed to be living under.
My point in saying this was that the formula should accommodate an anti-poverty strategy, if that's the direction we're going in.
Is that clear?