Thank you very much, Chair.
I thank all the witnesses today for preparing and presenting to us some constructive and positive suggestions as to the role of the federal government.
I've heard all of you agree that the federal government has a pretty major role to play and that we should get ourselves engaged and involved, and that there should be a strategy of some sort. We've talked to a couple of the provincial ministers who are working at implementing their own strategy. They're saying that it will be very difficult for them without the federal contribution, particularly in these economic times.
I was pleased with the commonalities that I heard, that we need definitions and indicators; we need to be able to do analysis, evaluations, and set targets. We need to put in place an architecture and a structure that will work. I think there was certainly agreement on focusing on the disabled and women, and there's support for child care and early learning across the board, as well as affordable housing and social infrastructure. I was particularly intrigued by that. Also, we need to develop an enabling environment so that people can actually participate.
My question is in terms of trying to do that. As Mr. Battle has told us, we do have some programs that we put in place, the Canada Pension Plan and the unemployment insurance system, as it used to be called, that was more universally available to people. The universality of some of these programs.... I hear provinces now talking about 25% and 5%. I always worry about the 75% that don't get to live out of poverty because we decided we're going to do 25% and 5%.
It seems that when we did the Canada Pension Plan, and I don't have the history of that, we didn't say we'll do 25% in the first five years and then we'll do everybody else later. We decided that we were going to put in place a program that was going to be universally available to everybody. We later added the GIS, I believe, to make sure that those who were falling below the poverty line would not live in desperate poverty. We have seniors in the country now who used to live in some pretty difficult circumstances who are relatively better off.
The question is on the universality of programs. Is that an important consideration as we go forward, or do we hive off pieces as we go along?