Human Resources committee  I don't think you need to choose one. I think the market basket measure measures one thing and the low-income cut-off measures another. It is important to measure income inequality. I think it is important because income inequality is an indicator of social exclusion. My answer i

Human Resources committee  Absolutely. I'll give you an example of how we deal with this day to day. We get very strong feedback from our members that they don't want to ask people what ethnic group they're from or what language they speak. They don't want to stigmatize certain people. They don't want to p

Human Resources committee  That's a difficult question to answer. We did discuss this. We did discuss the fact that.... There aren't really South Asian food banks, and there aren't really Chinese food banks directed at particular ethnic groups. You see the same sorts of things with other social services.

Human Resources committee  You definitely have to look at it, yes.

Human Resources committee  One thing that we haven't talked about today is something called the nutritious food basket. It is, I would think, an absolute measure of poverty in terms of healthy eating. It's not very widespread in Canada. There have been nutritious food baskets created for Toronto, for Edmon

Human Resources committee  I'll start. I'll make a fool of myself, and then you guys can look better. Looking back, what sticks out for me, as far as the federal government addressing poverty is concerned, is the big things that the federal government has done, such as the Canada Pension Plan, old age sec

Human Resources committee  Social exclusion is obviously difficult to measure, but as an overriding framework, I think it's incredibly valuable. I think working towards social inclusion, however that gets defined, is a good way to go; it's a dignified way to go. I would agree that we do need to set speci

Human Resources committee  Certainly there is a network of large, well-developed food banks that are able to collect that information, because they can put the manpower into it. The trick would be getting similar information in rural areas, small towns, where food banks don't have the same kind of manpower

Human Resources committee  I'll start. I'm Shawn Pegg, from Canadian Association of Food Banks. Today I'll give you an overview of--

Human Resources committee  Okay. Merci. I'm going to start by giving the who, what, and why of the food banks. It's our experience that not a lot of folks know the realities of the food bank world and who use food banks. The Canadian Association of Food Banks was founded in 1986. We're a national organiz