Madam Speaker, I thank the member for his comments. I would agree that the issue of child poverty is really a political term that has been created. I have to say, though, that it has come mostly from his own party which has chosen to characterize poverty as a children's issue. The Liberal Party has campaigned on the child tax benefit.
I would agree that when we look at poor children we have to look at poor families and the fact that most of those families are unemployed.
Families are under attack, but if we look at what has happened over the past few decades, families are under attack because of public policies that have undermined the ability of families to cope in our society. We see rising unemployment, shrinking EI benefits, the lack of housing, the lack of social programs and even welfare rates that have been attacked by many provincial governments because of the shrinking health and social transfers. Those have all been public policy decisions which have attacked the family.
It all depends on how one wants to look at this. If lone parent families live in poverty they will have a lot of difficulties, but that does not necessarily mean that family breakdown has to do with economic and social conditions or the lack of housing and decent paying jobs for women.
Maybe the member and I have different perspectives on how we look at this issue, but I would agree that when we talk about poverty we should talk about the whole family. We should also talk about single people. Some Canadians who are feeling the worst effects of poverty are single people. However, we do not like to talk about single people because it is unpopular to do so.