I'll turn to John to talk about that, perhaps, because he's in the process of writing an aboriginal report for the council.
On that one, it's just so hard. Trying to understand the trends, from some of the limited data we have, is tricky too. It's important to recognize that comparing the aboriginal population to the non-aboriginal population with any of the measures we have is a bit limited. If aboriginal people are on reserve, they're subject to a different tax regime. If you're looking at pre-tax or post-tax LICOs, you get different numbers.
The other thing that's really critical to understand is that the aboriginal age structure and family arrangements are so different from the non-aboriginal population that it does take a lot of analysis and putting together a lot of different bits of data. I'll let John talk to that a little bit more, if he wants.
I just wanted to talk a bit about the no official poverty line and how we analyze things. You'll notice, for example, we gave you a chart that shows a number of different poverty measures. Some of those apply better to some situations than others. Actually having those different measures gives you a good basis for analysis. People say that the LICOs are just a relative measure, they're too high, and it doesn't really make sense; we want to see what poverty really looks like, and that's just a fake relative measure, complicated for people to understand.
The market basket measure--unfortunately, we have only one year for that now, although I understand two more years are in the works--was created as an attempt to show that, in some senses, those lines were too high, that for people to live and meet the basic necessities, you need less income. It turned out that when they looked at what it actually cost to buy things, that wasn't the case at all.
So the market basket measure, or something like it, could be used as a good target to start looking toward if you want to increase welfare rates. That's something for the provinces to look at.
In our publications--we've left copies for you--Poverty Profile on a regular basis looks at a whole range of things. A lot of the information here, Cathy has derived from the work that she's done on Poverty Profile. It does look at depth. It looks at persistence. There is also data available from Statistics Canada that allows you a certain longitudinal look.
So we have lots of data, lots of information beyond just those poverty lines, that are useful in analyzing the situation, but until there's an agreed understanding amongst governments and the population that we have a certain set of indicators that describe what we mean by poverty, and that those are the levels and have to bring them down.... It doesn't matter what they are or how you measure them, you have to start bringing them down. That's the important part.
Did you want to add anything...?