I'd like to begin by responding to the question about what poverty is, the lead-off question, and I'm going to refer to Bill C-245, which provides a pretty useful definition, from our perspective, in the preamble:
poverty is the condition of a human being who does not have the resources, means, choices and power necessary to acquire and maintain economic self-reliance and to facilitate their integration into and participation in society;
I think you can't separate the economic and the social and the spiritual. They are all bound up together, and we need to be addressing it holistically as well.