Thank you, Chair, and thank you all for coming this morning.
My name is Mike Savage and I'm a member of the Liberal Party. I'm the human resources critic. I come from Nova Scotia. We've been working on this poverty study now for some time, going back into the last Parliament, and it's important for us to come to places like Yellowknife and Whitehorse and the other communities we've been visiting this week. Although we know there are some national strategies that can deal with some of the basic things--a lot of the things that you mentioned, Ben, in terms of social justice and the poverty needs of Canada--there are some unique issues that we need to make part of our report as well, and every place we go, we hear about those.
In British Columbia, on Monday, we heard a lot about the loss of the salmon and how that's affecting particularly indigenous people there. Yesterday we heard about communities that don't have clean water and about the cost of construction, and we're hearing some of those stories today.
One of the things I'm struck by is that in the statistics, in looking at the places we're visiting this week, if you compare Winnipeg and Yellowknife, for example, in Winnipeg the average house cost, or the average value of an owned dwelling, in 2006 was $168,000, and in Yellowknife it was $302,000, so almost twice as high. A two-bedroom apartment rents for $769 in Winnipeg and in Yellowknife it rents for $1,450. In Winnipeg the minimum wage is $9, and in Yellowknife it's $8.25, if I understand it. I don't know where you'd live if you made $8.25 an hour in Yellowknife. Where would you live?