Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On the heels of the statement by my colleague, Mr. Bell, I would also like to talk about the poverty game that we staged here in the Great Hall yesterday. Along with other members of the Standing Committee on Social Programs and the Ministers of Finance and Education, Culture and Employment, I took up the invitation of the Social Planning Coalition to engage in this. My persona, Mr. Speaker, was a woman named Barbara who lives in Fort Good Hope. She is a 36-year old woman with four children; twin boys, age 14, a daughter, 10, and a son, 8. As Barbara, here is my financial situation, Mr. Speaker.
I receive $851 in salary, plus some federal child benefit, which was clawed back, by the way, by this government. I received another $1,045 in food and $125 in clothing from the Income Support Program. My monthly income was $1,665 with a family of five in a community where the cost of food is almost double that of Yellowknife.
What initially struck me -- and something that I learned through this game, Mr. Speaker -- was the complexity of filling out the paperwork. There were 18 pages that clients have to go through. It is really hard if you have lower literacy skills just getting all of these papers together.
It again forces me to taking a look at real life choices through Barbara's point of view. Whether to buy my daughter new boots for 20 bucks or used ones for ten. Whether to declare the $300 that I got from a boyfriend and thus cheat the system or try to borrow $20 for milk at the end of the month only to find out that my friend was just as broke as I was.
Individuals at all levels are facing more and more difficult choices, Mr. Speaker, as life becomes increasingly complex. It is particularly true if you are living on income support and on the edge of poverty. An increasingly complex set of choices and decisions have to be made everyday and it again reinforced the message for me for government to provide every opportunity for a sound education, and for each individual to take the responsibility to stay in school and take advantage of it.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker, and thanks to the people from the social coalition for bringing this game to us.
-- Applause