I can start the answer and, Sherien, please free free to add on.
The REMC came together as a group of working filmmakers and producers who, frankly, felt that the lip service we were getting from the industry around racial equity was not matching up with our lived experience as creators and not matching up with the lived experience of our communities.
We really felt that the only way to bridge that disconnect was through the use of data in order to really get a sense of where we stand as an industry when it comes to the production of BIPOC-owned content, and also the hiring and labour of BIPOC crew members.
A lot of our projects and a lot of our focus really is on using data to fill in these gaps, to identify where those gaps are and to suggest policy changes, because we're really not in a position to make those changes ourselves but need to work with the industry in order to fill in those holes. One of our first projects, for example, is a road map on what the collection of data in the industry looks like right now.
I should say that currently data is collected. It's just collected in a, frankly, very haphazard and sloppy way. It's collected in a very oftentimes dangerous way in that producers are often signing on as to whether their crew members and whether their hires are under-represented or not. People are not self-identifying. These are major issues.
As creators, what happens is I, for example, as a director am constantly self-identifying as a racialized person on every production I work on for broadcasters, but I don't know where that data goes and I don't know how it's used at the end of the year to really help me and help my community grow.
As I said, our primary objective right now is to really get a scope of data collection, figure out what the problems are and then help the industry create a unified method of tracking race-based data when it comes to funding. Our position is really simple. As Canadians, we have just as much of a right to access this funding as any other community. Unless we know which communities are truly falling behind, we can't create specific programs to support those specific communities.