Mr. Speaker, I thank the hon. member for his very serious question. To have a fair definition is something advocates and anti-poverty activists would agree with. The UN report, in addressing its comment to Canada on its performance under the UN covenant on social, economic and cultural rights, actually raised this question and challenged the government to work with anti-poverty organizations to ensure there is an accepted and fair definition around poverty measures in Canada.
It is true that the LICO has been used by Stats Canada as an unofficial poverty measure in Canada for decades. The danger here is that there is a very high level of cynicism in the population that the purpose of this exercise is not to help people who are living in poverty. It is to simply politically recast the question, redefine what we mean by poverty so we can attempt to somehow eliminate what is a growing political problem.
I work with anti-poverty activists in my own community and across Canada. There is great fear and skepticism that is what this exercise is about. The exercise is being led by the Fraser Institute, which wants to move us to a kind of criterion and measure that would see a huge drop in how we would define the number of people living below the poverty line. It is called the absolute poverty measure.
The reality is there are people paying 40% to 60% of their incomes in rent. No matter how we define it, they are living in poverty. They are living in a homeless kind of environment. Single parents making minimum wage, parents trying to survive on EI payments or parents whose EI payments have run out are living in poverty.
At some point it gets to be a very academic exercise. To be optimistic, if there were a genuine effort by the government to work with people who know what poverty is about and to have an inclusionary process then there would be some discussion. There is so much skepticism and fear about what the government is attempting to do through this exercise that we will see a lot of people resisting any attempts to change the LICO.