Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is unfinished business from the 16th Legislative
Assembly. It’s work that we can complete I believe in six months. It has been said in this House it’s not necessarily an issue of a lot of new money. It’s an issue of coming out with a plan that links all the different parts of government that have a role to play with poverty; the health, education, housing, MACA, those type of connections. We need to lay that out. Six months is when I think we can have this done.
What I also think we should do from the Anti- Poverty Strategy and those other issues that cross departmental boundaries is we should set up a committee of Cabinet that is going to reflect the structure of the Social Programs committee so that when we sit collectively at the table, we can talk about the same issues and not have to say you can’t talk to me about that because that’s a housing issue and I’m the Health Minister, or I can’t talk about that because I’m not the Education Minister. We have to set up our systems to allow us to be
efficient, and we can do that, and I believe we can do that in six months.