I agree with you simply because the peer-reviewed research is very clear on this. Professor Milligan of UBC has published extensively about the disincentives to returning to work. So has Professor Mintz at the University of Calgary. So has my colleague just down the road, at the University of Ottawa, Professor Ross Finnie. He has published on this extensively. We have been debating this and discussing this in public policy literally since I was in graduate school in the early 1980s. There is no question that there are barriers in the way we claw back income assistance when people return to work. But I just really want to go beyond your question, if you will, because this is my pet—
All of the discussions and the excellent suggestions by my colleagues here are great, but they are all symptoms. They are not the disease, and the disease to me is—and of course, I'm a convert, as I'm sure you know, as someone who dropped out of school and went back to school—that poverty is unbelievably correlated to low levels of education. I know I've said this to anti-poverty researchers, and they get very angry. I have the data showing the incredible correlation. I present it every September and every January to every one of my students in the first class.
By the way, the data sets are from two places. One is called the United States Census Bureau and the other is called Statistics Canada. They are showing that people with low incomes, in poverty, overwhelmingly have low levels of education. I didn't say it's perfect. It's not one for one. But the correlation is astonishing to anybody. Ross Finnie, who is certainly considered by many to be a progressive researcher, has come to a very similar conclusion. So we should be focusing on targeting hard-core unemployed people, or people with skill sets that are not needed anymore, for retraining.
The people supporting Trump are there because they can't make it in the economy, and so we have to retrain the people who can't make it. We should be talking about retraining, retraining, retraining, retraining for those people. Poverty is unbelievably correlated to low levels of education, and I'm exhibit A. I certainly wouldn't be a professor if I were still a grade 12 dropout, and I think that's very clear to everybody in this room.