Thank you.
It's very interesting that you raise that question. As I mentioned, we just finished a four-day council meeting in Quebec City, and that was one of the things that was talked about in those discussions, the idea of having some sort of guaranteed annual income or guaranteed living income; I've heard it described in different ways. There are people looking more and more at that kind of concept.
For a while it was an issue that one couldn't talk about at all, and now it's back on the table. As I said, with the Toronto-Dominion Bank and some of the other corporate players interested in looking at how to resolve these issues, their particular focus was working-age adults. That's where a large part of the problem is, and I think both presentations have highlighted that. You have to address poverty where it starts, and continues, for women.
One of the interesting things that might do, just based on a few other things that I know about.... There was a really interesting study, briefly referred to in The Cost of Poverty, by a woman at McMaster University. It was a big consortium project, but they were looking at lone parents and they were looking at different things, at what helps. One of the things they found that surprised them--and maybe shouldn't have--was that there were hugely high rates of depression among lone parents. In our system, the way things work now, because of the way things are paid and the way our income security system works and because we have such a good universal health care system, logically those people would then be sent to psychologists and psychiatrists to deal with the depression.
What worked? Two hours' worth of recreation for their kids every week. They were depressed for a reason; they couldn't get a break.