Mr. Speaker, I am very pleased to respond to this question. Some of my colleagues will remember that it was a former Tory chair of the committee on employment and immigration that tried to redefine poverty and pretend that poverty went away.
Let me tell the member opposite about the people in my community, the children who start school behind the eight ball because they are identified as poor the minute they walk into the school. They are not as well fed. They do not have the bright and shiny hair. They do not have the nice clothes. Their education is immediately crippled from the day they walk into school.
If we pretend that poverty in this country is not really a problem we will not solve that problem. The victims of not solving that problem are our children. Poor children are much more likely to be involved in serious accidents, to fall seriously ill, to commit suicide, to die, to drop out of school and to end up in jail. What more information do we need to solve the problem of our poor?