Status of Women committee  I certainly agree with you that language can be extremely helpful and extremely divisive. In our position as government, at Status of Women we try not to pick a language that will exclude groups. We try to be as generic and boring sometimes as necessary to allow the groups to co

Status of Women committee  You're correct that the pickup around this event has been extraordinary for a day that's been in existence for barely two years. It's quite amazing how popular it has become. We get some indications of interest through, for instance, the pickup of our educators' kits that are on

Status of Women committee  I wasn't in attendance but I was getting messages from my colleagues throughout the day, because we were in lockdown here in Ottawa. The extraordinary diversity of these girls speaks to how universally this issue touches girls across Canada and across the world.

Status of Women committee  I should frame my answer in the context that we typically see three categories of interventions with respect to engaging men and boys. We have the true engaging men and boys projects, where we focus on young men acquiring the confidence to speak out against violence. We're not

Status of Women committee  My goodness, when you're trying to tackle an issue of that size, the ultimate indicators are slow in moving, so what we would like to see is more discussion, maybe before we even get to a point of more reporting. Those are the types of measurements by which we can see how many sc

Status of Women committee  For us it has been an extremely interesting call for proposals. We've really enjoyed working with the groups that have examined the issue of the safety of young women on campuses. It will become even more exciting in the next few months, because as the very last months of these p

Status of Women committee  My answer will be very concrete. We have funded 22 projects at the country's universities and colleges. That started a little less than three years ago and all the projects are about to wrap up. In the last few weeks, actually, I met a group that had conducted a project here in

Status of Women committee  We're lucky in Canada that this is an emerging field and it's a very innovative field, so there are a lot of people trying all kinds of things with various age groups. You can engage men and boys through those breakfasts with the boys that are popular out west. You have those pro

Status of Women committee  First, let us address the first point you raised. In my opinion, the rate of violence against women in Canada is unacceptable. That said, if we compare ourselves to the other countries of the OECD, the rate is more or less the same, unfortunately. So this a problem that affects d

Status of Women committee  As you are probably aware, in terms of grants and contributions funding, we spend about $19 million per year. Year over year if you look at our average, 50% of our budget typically goes to violence-related projects. We are nearly exclusively at the prevention end of the spectrum.

Status of Women committee  I will have to get back to you with those figures as well. I was about to mention that we fund the statistical publication “Women in Canada”. We commission issue briefs. I will get that data to give you some sense of our investments on that side.

Status of Women committee  In terms of that, our intervention point tends to be when they're just slightly older. For instance, we have some very interesting projects happening right now where their target populations are tweens. I don't know if there's a French expression for that. A group in Montreal i

Status of Women committee  Part of our mandate is certainly to continuously monitor what's happening in that field. We are aware of the various action plans that exist internationally and in various provinces, and we are responsive to our government's direction on this. At this point, as you know, our indi

Status of Women committee  As you all know, the Native Women's Association of Canada is very much an expert in the field of violence against aboriginal women. At Status of Women Canada we've had a consistent funding relationship with them. Since 2005 we have funded this organization every single year. Not

Status of Women committee  I liked a number of them, and I'm a bit reluctant to toss one out there, because these projects are still under way. They're fairly new, in fact, because even if they were selected about a year ago—