Thank you, Chair, and thank you distinguished members. It's really a pleasure to be here.
My team is leading the development of two key initiatives that will really support the economic security of women. One is a poverty reduction strategy and the other is an early learning and child care framework.
As we heard this morning, poverty and women and gender is a large issue. Andrew and Justine, my colleagues, talked about some key areas of concern—lone parents and unattached seniors—and poverty is a complex issue. It's for this reason that the Government of Canada has committed to developing a poverty reduction strategy that will set targets and timelines. This is being led by Minister Jean-Yves Duclos. As a first step, a discussion paper towards a poverty reduction strategy was tabled at the human resources committee on October 4, and that paper frames the issue of poverty. It raises some of the multi-dimensional aspects of the challenge, and I would encourage members to have a read if they have not. It's at canada.ca.
As I said, we had a very good discussion about some of the key challenges this morning, when we heard from Andrew from Statistics Canada and Justine from Status of Women Canada.
As a next step in that process, Minister Duclos will be announcing a very comprehensive engagement strategy to hear from a variety of stakeholders and Canadians about the real challenges of poverty and how the government can best address them.
Another key element that has tremendous implications for the economic security of women is, of course, child care. I was happy to hear the discussion this morning about the importance of child care in terms of labour market participation. We use the same studies, which look at Quebec. That's where most of the research has been done, and it really shows that affordable child care is a key element in promoting labour force attachment.
The return on investment on child care is also very high. We have studies from the TD Bank that show that for every dollar invested, you can get as much as three dollars in return.
We've had a good discussion about affordability. When we do our work with provinces and territories, our work in developing a framework is very much guided by the mandate letter commitments, which talk about affordable, high-quality, inclusive child care.
Finally, we touched on some really interesting and compelling issues around indigenous women, and I'm happy to say that there will be an indigenous early learning and child care framework. This will be a very co-developed framework with extensive engagement and consultation to address the very compelling issues on that front.
In conclusion, I would like to thank the committee very much for inviting me here, and I am happy to address any questions.