Mr. Speaker, despite the fact that the member tried to talk about the bill, he did spend an awful lot of time explaining how if the bill were a really good bill we would be able to deal with issues like child poverty. I would refer him to a book called The Child Poverty Solution , written by someone I know very well. Me, actually.
It tells the story about what happened in 1989. The member should know the facts. In 1989, the member for Ottawa Centre was retiring. It was a Friday. On the Thursday night there was a negotiation with Brian Mulroney and Jean Charest, in his office, about “how can we leave this guy some sort of a legacy without committing Parliament?” They came up with this wording change, “to seek to achieve the elimination”; that is, “to seek to achieve”, not “to eliminate”. The member should get the facts straight.
What I really want to do is let the member know that if he were to look at the statistics with regard to child poverty, he would find out that lone parent families, which account for 15% of all families in Canada, generate 54% of all children living in poverty.
So if we were ever to pass a motion in any Parliament to eliminate child poverty, we would actually have to deal with the issue of the breakdown of the Canadian family. That is something that we cannot legislate. We cannot legislate behaviour. It is a fact.
Child poverty is a LICO measure. The member must know something about LICO. It is a relative measure. If we were to give everybody in Canada $10,000 a year in their pockets today, we would still have the same number of poor because it is measured basically as who is at the bottom of the totem pole. We need an absolute measure.
I would ask the member if he is familiar with LICO versus a market basket measure. I would ask him whether he thinks that in terms of measuring poverty in Canada what we really have to do is establish a true poverty line so that we can measure it and respond to it, rather than having a relative measure like LICO, for which no matter what we do we will always have people at the bottom of the list.