I don't think there would be any change in the overall trends if we came up with another measure.
You need different measures for different purposes. Some people like to focus on inequality in our society. If you want to focus on inequality, then what is called the low-income measure, the international measure of percentage of the population at less than one-half median income, is the way to go. If you want to focus on the effect of whether economic growth can actually help reduce poverty, then you would want to have some type of absolute component to it. Then the LICO is the way to go.
We should have all these measures. Right now we're focusing on the after-tax LICO. Let's agree to that and let's focus all our energies on policies to reduce the number of Canadians below that line. That really should be the focus for the measure.
We've been debating measurement for decades, and I don't think there's going to be a lot more progress to be made.
I do agree, though, that there are a lot of problems with the LICO, not at the national level. People are well aware of it. The main problem, for example, is that the cost of living is related to the size of the community, which is fine because smaller communities do tend to have a lower cost of living, but that would mean all cities above one million have the same cost of living. We know housing costs a lot less in Montreal than in Vancouver or Toronto, yet we're using the same level of prices for both those communities. That creates a real bias in the numbers, giving Montreal a poverty rate that's really too high.
Those types of things should be corrected. There is work to do there, but I don't think that should be the focus of the debate about poverty.