No, no. It was your family.
What I'm saying is that some families have the capacity to do that. Others do not. Our question, then, is whether, as our collective responsibility, we're going to let the kids of the families that do not have that capacity repeat that intergenerational cycle. Or are we going to step in and say that we think it's good for kids to have a place to go after school, so we're going to make sure that the schools are open and that there's supervision there so they can go and participate in after school programming?
We actually think that there's a good economic argument for providing those opportunities for kids. Otherwise, what happens is that the cycle repeats itself, and the kids end up in the care of the state one way or another. It's really building on that.
You're absolutely right. It's about more than money, although I must say that there is a certain base level below which you cannot survive in our society. You have to have enough money to buy food and to pay the rent and to pay for some of the extras, such as transportation or a telephone, even. You're right about that.
Do we really know whether we're raising kids out of poverty? Yes, we do. We have good statistics that will tell us. We spent too much time, probably, trying to figure out what measure of poverty to use. We landed on one that is used internationally: the low-income measure. We also added a depth-of-poverty measure so that we can track how deeply in poverty people are. I think that's important. As I said, we're also developing the deprivation index so that we'll understand the sort of quality of poverty.
There's a component in our strategy that I'm pretty excited about. It's the establishment of what we're calling for now, a social policy institute. We need to move to much better evidence to guide our funding decisions. For example, some of the pilot projects.... We have to know whether an investment here pays off there. When it comes to social services, I would say that we're pretty early, especially compared to health care, in evidence-based practice. We're pretty young when it comes to looking at the evidence and at what makes a difference.
That takes us to Pathways to Education, a program for kids in neighbourhoods where the dropout rate.... You're going to hear more about this. It's extraordinary what that range of interventions has done for the graduation rates of kids who typically had very high dropout rates.
For me, it's all about a return on investment. If we make investments up front so that kids do better and graduate more, become taxpayers, are able to provide for their own children, that's a really good investment. We can have conversations about ideology, but for me, it's about getting the job done.
If we can make investments that will change the opportunities for children, we are all better off for it. It's not just about the kids who benefit. We are all better off in a very tangible way. We will pay less down the road if we get there early. As we move forward, we really have to look it at from that standpoint as well.
As for the concern that if we increase the standard of living for kids, others will take advantage, I think—