First off, Mr. Cross addressed the terrible problems with increasing the minimum wage. The majority of minimum wage workers are women. The majority of part-time workers are women. Child care, which is one of the things the royal commission recommended back in the early seventies, is a huge barrier to women in the workplace. The evidence from the introduction of low-cost child care in Quebec is definitive in terms of increasing women's labour force attachment, increasing GDP, increasing women's incomes and reducing the number of single mothers on social assistance by more than 50%, all in the first 12 years, I think.
There are clear remedies and we are speaking to some of them today. Pay equity is a clear remedy to this situation. When we talk about the areas that women work in being paid less, partially there's a devaluation of work that happens when women go into it. For example, the incomes of doctors have decreased as women have become more dominant in that field. Also, there's a balance of work and life that women pursue, so the differences are partially due to all of these barriers we're talking about.
There are clearly huge structural problems here. I will reiterate what I said earlier: Women are more educated than men across the population. It's a problem for Canada if women can't have the same kind of labour force attachment as men.