I would say that for BPW Canada, the only money we get comes from our members. We have always seen a very important role for Status of Women Canada. For example, we access that research in preparing briefs like this. We depend on that research a lot. That was done by Status of Women Canada. We also work with groups across the country, and I'll give you a couple of examples of the impact of the change in the mandate to the Status of Women in New Brunswick.
We have a pay equity coalition that's been going on for a few years. We have an urban support core group that has worked with poor people in Saint John. We have a child care advocacy group that has been working towards getting quality, affordable, accessible child care in this country, which does not exist. And all of those groups are finished. They're ended. Yes, they're all finished. The funding for the pay equity coalition will continue, they've been told, until September 2008. The child care coalition finishes in June. As for the urban core support group, which has done amazing work with poor people in Saint John, they're not sure, but it pretty well looks as though they're finished because Status of Women does not fund advocacy anymore.
The position that we as an organization take is that direct services are very important, obviously--food banks and all those kinds of direct services, educational programs. There are a lot of problems, and I'll use the food bank as an example. You can feed people from now until eternity, and you'll still be feeding them unless you do something that deals with why people need food banks in the first place, with why people are poor. When we talk about that, we're talking about systemic changes to the society we live in. There are no easy solutions, but there need to be those kinds of changes.
BPW Canada has always been an advocacy group. That's what we do. We are an advocacy group. Unless those groups have a voice...and a lot of them were supported by the Status of Women. They will no longer have a voice; those groups are all finished.
So now we go back to food banks and we keep feeding people for another 100 years.