Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for being here. I must tell you that we are always glad to meet with people who make a contribution to the poverty debate. I am especially pleased because I have followed your work from a distance, as have my committee colleagues. It is refreshing to see that your analysis and findings are very similar to ours even though you are not of the same political stripe.
You may be surprised, but I am going to approach the poverty issue from a different perspective altogether. As my premise, I want to use a couple of the statements in your report, as they sum up the situation quite well. You said, “The economic and social costs of doing nothing about poverty—more than $20 billion—are more than we can afford.” It seems to me you are saying that we should no longer consider money spent on helping people out of poverty as an expenditure, but rather as an investment.
I will now quote Tom Gribbons: “Fundamentally, people do not want to live better in poverty, they want to get out of poverty.”
That brings me to what I want to say. Just as a number of others have done, you covered in your research almost all the areas where poverty occurs. I learned that Senate subcommittees had studied the issue of urban aboriginal youth specifically. You also studied poverty in rural Canada. And you have just done a study on the ageing population in urban communities.
On November 15, 1999, the House of Commons passed a resolution seeking to eliminate poverty, especially child poverty. Since 2000, things have been pretty well the same. The problem is not that we are uninformed when it comes to poverty but that we do not take the measures necessary to fight it. There is also the fact that some policies make the problem worse. There are aggravating factors with respect to poverty.
During the period when we were supposed to eliminate poverty, we made decisions that made it worse. Housing is an aggravating factor. Funding provided to the provinces for housing was cut for 10 years, during that time. A maximum number of people were excluded from employment insurance, municipal infrastructure funding was cut, a whole slew of resources to support aboriginal communities were taken away, and transfer payments for health and education were cut, while shifting responsibilities to the provinces that they could not assume. And I could go on and on.