In the last government, the government, in cooperation with NGOs, Aboriginal governments, community governments, and other stakeholders, put together an anti-poverty framework. One of the things that has frustrated me about that important work, and it was important work and I appreciate all the work the stakeholders have put in, but it is something we hear time and time again. Number one, there is no evaluation criteria established for any of the work being done on addressing poverty in the Northwest Territories. Number two, there was no real agreed-upon definition of what poverty is.
These are things that came up at the last anti-poverty round table again. It's my belief, and we need to work together as an Assembly to figure out how to move forward on this, that we do need a definition of poverty in the Northwest Territories so that we have something that we can actually measure ourselves against. Also, we had discussions; we haven't established things that we need to evaluate that do need to be based on something, and a definition would go a long way to making that happen.
The bottom line is we aren't evaluating our programs against poverty, and I have no information to provide about success. I could tell you how many programs we have run. I could tell you from an education point of view how many people are on income support, but I cannot tell you the success rate in reducing poverty that our programs have. We have to continue to work with our stakeholders to identify and develop that criteria. Then we need to start tracking it so over the years we will be able to provide that information to tailor our programs to meet those outcomes.