Madam Speaker, I agree with a number of the comments made by our colleague.
I would, however, invite him to understand that, when it comes to analyzing the phenomenon of poverty, it must be realized that there is a kind of fault line that dates back to the early 1990s.
A link must be made to poverty—and the hon. member is right to point out that this is a phenomenon in the major cities for the most part—and particularly the poverty created by certain measures. If he hon. member wants to raise this issue, he might make an extremely useful contribution to the debate, first of all by asking his government to amend not only the Canadian Human Rights Act, but the Employment Insurance Act as well.
The hon. member must be aware that, because of his government's employment insurance legislation, 200,000 people across Canada have had to make use of last resort solutions. This might be termed social poverty, the last resort solutions provided by income security programs, because his government has raised the qualification criteria so high for those who pay into the employment insurance program, that they end up on social security, and this keeps them poor.
There are, of course, many causes of poverty. There is the matter of housing, the matter of outdated skills. People who have been skilled workers in the clothing, the textile or the petrochemical industries, which have been in decline internationally since the early 1980s and the 1990s, find themselves out of the workforce, and it is hard to get back in.
I would remind our colleague that it was his government that abolished the older workers adjustment program, known as POWA. I invite him therefore to give some more thought to the poverty created by governments, the one he belongs to in particular.