Madam Speaker, we are not here to debate the issues that the member raises. We are here to talk about poverty.
Let me use my one minute to make reference to the Golden report on the homeless in Toronto. It was a very good report.
It was found that half the homeless in Toronto actually had no roots in Toronto. They had migrated from other places across the country. It reminds me of the Field of Dreams statement if you build it, they will come. Toronto's experiences found that yes, they built it and they did come.
Golden tries to suggest that somehow we have preventative strategies to deal with homelessness and with poverty. In fact, their idea of addressing poverty was to mask it. It was to deal with making poverty invisible. It had nothing to do with dealing with the root causes.
The root causes are more fundamental than a tax break because as I said at the beginning of my speech, the poor in Canada do not pay taxes because they do not have income. Tax credits as proposed by the Conservative Party are really an inappropriate approach to dealing with poverty. It is going to take the collective will of all three levels of government as well as the Canadian people to understand that we are the cause of this problem collectively and we collectively must be the solution.