Mr. Myles, Josephine Grey talked about the Canada assistance plan, since 1995, being eliminated, and going into block funding, with cuts. You know the sorry history of that. For us to go back to setting national standards, whether it is through the open method you talked about or through CPP negotiations, the social union method, or the Canada health plan--there is any number of methods--are you suggesting that we should do it through poverty reduction targets, audits, or evaluation, or are you saying that we should do it through a Canada housing plan, a Canada child care plan, etc., with a different segment moving ahead or all wrapped into one?
Now, there's a danger with wrapping it all into one. The middle class, even though they are living in poverty, don't think of themselves as being in poverty, and it's much harder to advance it politically even though we Canadians are supposed to care. In the last 20 years, though, my faith in that has been slightly eroded, as you can understand.
What do you think would be a way to move ahead in terms of focusing? Is it to set the targets on poverty, such as 25% in five years and that kind of percentage? We must bear in mind that the majority of the people living in poverty are lone mothers, and that in Canada we are confused about whether lone mothers are really mothers or workers, so as a result they are neither mothers nor workers. They get the worst of both worlds and they have very little political clout as a result.
Where do you think we should move forward on that? That was a long preamble to my question.