Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for coming here this morning.
My frustration isn't what I hear this morning, and I've said this in other meetings; this isn't new to me. I'm from Toronto, and I've done community work in the city for many years before running federally, so some of this stuff seems like déjà vu to some degree, in that we've been fighting it for some time. And that actually is more tragic than even the fact that it exists.
I simply wanted to say that.
I also want to say to Ms. Kere that you're absolutely right. One of the things the Standing Committee on the Status of Women identified when we looked at gender-based analysis was that within that, whenever we do studies on poverty or what have you, we need to have a gender component but also a racial-ethnic component, because the two are extremely important.
Sadly, we all know that while we pretend that racism doesn't exist in this country, it really does. And it exists in a way that may not be as overt, but is insidious in the sense that it's systemic and denies a lot of children and families the right to participate. I know that from personal experience because I came here from Italy in the 1950s. My entire community went through three generations in Canada before we were able to start going to university full time, because of the streaming in the schools. It was assumed we'd all be construction workers and that was where everybody belonged, or in factories. I know it's not the same thing and I can't compare with that. I only wanted to say that I understand to some degree what that means. And I know that today it's even worse, with respect to visible minorities in our country.
We need to be aggressive, so I accept and I agree with all you have said.
I want to go back to put a couple of questions. Mr. David, you were talking about social enterprise. We actually had a parliamentary secretary responsible for the social economy file at one time in the government, but we don't have that now. However, I think that's what you were referring to, if I may clarify. Obviously, it is your particular organization that you talked about, but I think across the board we're talking about social economy, meaning that we can look at social and economic projects. If we were looking at housing, we could attach some economic components around it, whether it is training, employment, opening up a store, or opening up skills development or what have you, in the community setting. So you're talking about integrating a community social development/economic development framework. Am I right?