Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Mr. Speaker, I would like to stress the comments, many of the comments of my colleague Ms. Bisaro. She’s laid it out quite thoroughly there.

Basically we are at the point where we need to define in order to measure and then go out and measure poverty. I think somebody said at one of our get-togethers that if we don’t measure something, we don’t care about it. I am afraid that encapsulates some of the aspects of the issue we

are dealing with through this to get an Anti-Poverty Strategy in the books.

The historical patterns and the development of poverty, of course, are familiar to many. It involves colonization, cultural upheaval, residential schools and so on. We know that many of our communities have suppressed economies. We need healthy, vigorous economies. That’s one of the aspects of dealing with poverty.

Some of these events have been portrayed in the last couple of days and can lead to a downward spiral into poverty unless we have a comprehensive strategy in place to catch those things when they happen. This government, I believe, is developing a lot of experience in that itself.

The boom/bust development scenarios that we have experienced and seem to persist on seeking often creates the devise of those that have and those that don’t. That tends to exacerbate poverty in our communities. Those in poverty face many barriers: access to child care, which we’ve heard much about recently; housing; fuel and food costs; addictions and mental health issues and the linkages that work between those. Income security, we have a lot of good things in place, but they are not linked together in ways which capture things, so there are big gaps in between. Income security does not keep pace, for example, with rising costs. We do adjust it from time to time, but it’s not very sensitive and we know there is an extremely high cost of living today.

Developing a poverty eradication plan must be based on a foundation that ensures a more equitable distribution of benefits through the vision of socially, environmentally and economically sustainable development. We are also talking a lot about that these days.

So I see the opportunities here, Mr. Speaker, as huge. I don’t see this being a huge budget item because I think we are spending a lot, but because we don’t have a comprehensive and integrated approach, we have gaps, a lot of our folks are falling through that. If we start measuring the incidents of poverty, so we actually know how we are doing and evaluating the work that we’re doing and thus learning and using an adaptive management approach to this, we can do a lot of catch up.

So, Mr. Speaker, I obviously will be supporting this motion and I urge all Members to do so. Mahsi