I appreciate the opportunity, honourable members.
Mr. Chair, thank you for the opportunity as well.
As I sit here looking at the picture of the Fathers of Confederation, I think it's a rather interesting time to be talking about poverty. Andrew talked about the state of our economy and the impact it will have, invariably, on poverty.
With the permission of the chair, I have some slides that I would love to pass out, although they're not translated. There are some slides in here that are frankly about trends. If you could disregard the text, it's about the pictures. I'd love if people could at least look at them while I'm giving my presentation. I'll look to the chair on that.
While you're thinking about that, I'm going to start. If we choose otherwise, I'll just continue as though we're okay with at least looking at the pictures.
The title of my presentation is “Dissecting the Line on Poverty”. The question posed to the three of us was: What was or what could be the federal contribution to reducing poverty in Canada? I will take a slightly different approach from that of Ken and Sherri. Rather than looking at the incremental side, my focus will be more on the transformational side, respecting, of course, Andrew's thoughts around how one would push through the issues to bring about transformational change.
This is a synthesis of the CPRN research. We've been doing research in the public space for about 15 years. My presentation will focus on our research but also will bring in a couple of slides from Ipsos Reid and Statistics Canada.
I'll begin very briefly by giving a couple of the key facts on poverty, just to reiterate in order to make my points as I go through here.
First of all, there's been a fair bit of interest internationally on the importance of goals on poverty....
Mr. Chair?