Madam Speaker, I guess we can each look at our statistics and challenge one another. I am looking at child poverty rates in Canada between 1973 and 2001. The source is the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto and data taken from StatsCanada, Income Trends in Canada 2001.
Let me just reference 1989 because that was the year that Mr. Broadbent's resolution received unanimous support of the House. According to this graph, the child poverty rate was exactly 15%. Then it went up in the next four years to reach a high point of about 20.3% in 1993. Then there was some slight reduction, but not nearly as dramatic as the parliamentary secretary would suggest. There was a gradual reduction until 2001, where it sits miraculously as 15.2%.
In other words, over the 12 years, between 1989 and 2001, it went up 0.2%, which is hardly anything to get very excited about. Obviously it got worse, not better.