Status of Women committee  I apologize.

Status of Women committee  For us, definitely. As I mentioned, our sellers are 82% women, and that's largely who we deal with in the market we're working with. In Canada, the weight of home responsibilities overwhelmingly falls on women. They have all these other things that need to happen during the day, whether that's home teaching, household chores, or other jobs they're doing.

Status of Women committee  Okay.

Status of Women committee  It's basically their business. If they can't access the Internet, then their businesses decline significantly because that is how they do their business. I want to point out that our member companies themselves do a lot of this training with their consultants. When someone signs up as a direct selling consultant, it's a very low investment for them, but the company still wants them to succeed, so they do a lot of digital training that's very specific to direct selling.

Status of Women committee  I'm happy to go first, if that's okay. Historically, the direct selling industry was people either going door to door selling things or selling things via home parties, those sorts of things. Over the last 10 to 20 years it's definitely evolved into more of a digital business.

Status of Women committee  Thank you to the chair and the committee for giving me this opportunity to speak today. My name is Peter Maddox and I'm the president of the Direct Sellers Association of Canada. The DSA is a national association which was founded in 1954. We have over 70 company and supplier members across Canada.