To reply to that question with regard to child care, a national subsidized child care program is something that we've been fighting for over 45 years, and it would be huge. It's the last bastion for women's equality and to improve the status of Canadian families and children. It's long overdue. It's time. As I said in my presentation, it has been costed out several times, and the cost of a child care program is well worth what it would bring in terms of the improvement in and stimulation of our economy.
With regard to gender assessment tools, our Canadian government does use some. They're not very robust and they're not used across everything, but they are an economic tool that is used. There are several frameworks. Many people have put them forward and costed them out, from Oxfam, to the World Bank, to the World Health Organization, and they aim to mitigate women's current socio-economic status, which is much lower.
As a country, we really need to be very upset and very concerned about the fact that we have a huge wage gap that is growing. It's not improving. Even though women's participation in education and in some parts of the workplace is growing, we have a monumental 72% wage gap. Women are only making 72 cents on the dollar relative to men. This can't be accepted in Canada any longer. As I said, of the minimum-wage workers, 59% are women. We need to put some economic tools in place right from the beginning in order to help mitigate some of that damage for women, so that they can be stronger contributors to the economy.
In terms of gender assessment tools, there are many of them out there, and they need to be part of the structure when we build economic policy. There are critical analyses that simply look at the financial impact on women, as opposed to men, if we generate a policy such as EI, health care, or income supports. What we find is that many governments have them, but they're kind of on side of the table, and the policy office at Status of Women Canada has to look that over before it actually becomes.... What we want to see are very robust gender analysis tools used when any economic policy is generated, and they need to have a human rights lens. Globally, the status of women in our country is falling, and we need to stop that trend immediately and make it fairer for both genders.