Madam Speaker, I thank my colleague, whom I know really well, as he was my former parliamentary secretary. He is a very hard worker, not only for his constituents but also in the broad mandate of making our society more inclusive and reducing poverty.
As he said, we had the privilege last July to introduce the most innovative social policy in a generation. It is reducing child poverty by 40%, taking 300,000 children out of severe poverty and, equally importantly, taking 200,000 parents out of poverty. Seventy per cent of these parents are women. Why is that? Unfortunately, many of our parents currently living in poverty are women, in part because many of our families living in poverty are headed by a single mother.
This is very good news for children and child poverty, very good news for lower-income parents, and certainly very good news for women. This is in the context, as my colleague rightly said, of reducing poverty over the long term.